Musings on the bunny

First, there was the dread. An invasion loomed on the horizon. We were absolutely disarmed, and went grimly to our fate. Or at least we figured it was our turn to keep the bunny.

In Adam’s class, there is a class pet, a bunny named Bonnie. Each weekend, it is the privilege of some volunteer to keep the little cuniculus domesticus, meaning find a place for its cage, feed it, let it hop out and cause whatever unimaginable chaos in our neat little apartment.

So Friday we were given our orders and paraphernalia: a bunny carrying case, a cage, and a bag with oats or roughage of some kind, snacks – pellets – and litter. And we set course bravely for home. The bunny was upon us. It was not for us to underrate the gravity of the task which lay before us or the temerity of the ordeal, to which we hoped not be found unequal.

Basically we hoped that we would not be the parents to kill the bunny.

We are not, much to Adam’s disappointment, a pet keeping household. It is not that I have any problem with pets, as long as they are the pets of others. I, in fact, just dogsat for a diabetic dog for two weeks, giving her shots, so I like to think I have some cred in the “keeping mammals” department. But the only pet rabbits I have known were fierce, huge things in hutches that ferociously gobbled up their carrots and stared at their guards with POW glares.

So, we got Bonnie home, and put her cage down in Adam’s room. I had previously laid down paper all over the room, and once the cage was down, we unleashed the beast.

Bonnie, it turned out, was smaller than the average cat, and softer then one, and more docile than one. It was a very respectful guest, not at all the menace we had imagined. She immediately captured Adam’s heart, even as, in classic bunny fashion, she hopped around the room, leaving a trail of rabbit pellets behind her.

The weekend passed quite pleasantly. I don’t know what Bonnie wrote about it on her Instagram – doesn’t everybody have an Instagram nowadays? And surely Bonnie is a bunny influencer. But from my end, the bunny neither darted out onto the terrace and jumped to her death – our crazy fear before we picked her up – nor did she bite us or gnaw some electric cord to bits or any of that. She liked carrots – I had laid in a stock – but Adam kept me from giving her too much, invoking the holy authority of the Internet, which said that carrots had mucho sugars which could cause a little five to ten pound critter problems in the long run. The long run, I said to Adam. She’s here for a weekend, I said. As Keynes once said, in the long run we are all dead.

Adam, however, is not a child to be bullied by Keynes.

This morning, we brought her back. The kids crowded round, and we had our moment of minor celebrity. The last I saw of Bonnies carrying case, it was being taken off Adam by an adult.