It's Not Tundra

I have to tell you that it's not paradise here. We have morons here, too. It's just that there aren't as many of them but those that we have are trying harder to be more annoying. There's also, I suppose, a certain freedom in knowing that you are blazing a new trail of douchebaggery, going where no asshat has gone before. I'm riding my bike home from the gym and I turn down a quiet street so that I can ride though the park. The school on the street, a church school, is letting out for the end of the year. If you look back at the stuff I've written, I should have learned by now that people can be especially dopey around schools. It should be no surprise. But every time I've gone by there and it was any kind of school event, it's a madhouse. 1/4 the madhouse as in Tarzana, but there are fewer folks around. So I'm tooling down the road on my bike. And here comes a woman holding hands with her son. Awwwww. Walking down the middle of the street. And by ...

IN HONOR OF THE FIRST BIG SNOW IN THE 367 DAYS WE'VE LIVED HERE... THE DRIVEWAY!!!!!! [1] “Oh, how can you handle shoveling all that snow!” people would say. The cold was the first thing people commented on, the snow was the second. And it’s true. You did have to move it out of the driveway and the sidewalk. God knows that I was yelled at often enough to get off my ass and go shovel the driveway. My father would get pissed off occasionally at my lack of concern for snow removal and would bestir himself to do it. My mother would then go into something resembling a religious fervor [2] and scream: “Your father’s going to have a heart attack! Your father’s going to have a heart attack!” And the implication certainly was “Because of you”. And I would drag myself outside. Begrudgingly. [3] We had a large collection of snow-removing implements in my childhood. My father, far from a handy man and who I don’t think I ever saw swing a hammer, seemed incapable of parting with ...

For a creature that naturally gets by in the wild, everything you read on rabbit pet blogs (and yes, there are a ton of them) point out what a fragile creature a bunny is. They can’t stand direct sunlight, they can’t stand extreme variances in temperature, and a sudden shock can kill them. It was like keeping my grandmother as a pet. [1] So you had to be careful, especially with stories flying around of prize-winning super-champion dogs dying in cargo holds because they froze to death or someone didn’t get them water or they got their rhinestone collar mysteriously magnetized to the propeller or something. So you have to choose carefully. You have to ask them what experience they have in transporting rabbits – no matter how embarrassing it is. [2] I finally settled on the company that said they had just transported a rabbit to Germany from Los Angeles for a family where the father had been transferred by the army. Well, not only did they fly rabbits, but they flew them for t...

Gravy was a part of the family. A fat lazy part of the family who would cuddle up next to you, would assassinate me if it meant more time with my wife and was a total whore for a piece of banana, but a part of the family [1] . After re-reading that description, he actually sounds like my brother. And you can’t leave a part of the family behind. No matter what Connor thought. “If we give Gravy away,” he said, “We could get another bunny. Or a dog. If we got a bunny and it was young, it might let us hold it.” “YEAH!” Lauren said. I confess, that I started this in a playful manner saying, “You know, if we gave Gravy away…” never dreaming that they’d bite. See, the BIG problem with Gravy was the holding, lap-sitting issue. He’d come up next to you. He’d snuggle himself up close. He’d nudge you. But he did not like to be picked up and he didn’t like to sit on anyone’s lap. To be sure, part of this is God’s fault, because he made rabbits prey and therefore chances are when ...

Lauren was in Seventh Grade when we moved. Middle school starts in sixth grade in Los Angeles. So Fifth grade was her last year in elementary last year at the Magnet School she’d started in second grade and it was the year she met her first true love. His name was Gravy [1] . Gravy was a bunny. The fifth grade classes all had pets. Lauren’s class pet was a little bunny named Gravy because he was gray over white. It was a color thing. Gravy had a brother who was brown over white and he was called Caramel. He had another brother named Harvey that had nothing to do with color, but was, of course, the character in the Marcy Chase play and movie adapted from it. [2] Each weekend and on holidays, one of the children in the class would get to tote Gravy, cage and all, home. The rest of the time he stayed in the classroom, in the cage and, I guess, learned fractions. Early on, we were plagued with requests to let Gravy come home on the weekends and holidays. We acquiesced, though ...

The kids finished school in June, Connor finishing Third Grade and Lauren finishing Fifth. It was a pretty good year. Lauren was finishing elementary in the L.A. school system and would be gong into middle school the next September. We didn’t think we’d be there in September, but we filled out the paperwork anyway, just in case. Being in the magnet program meant that if we hadn’t filled it out, she would have to go to the home school, which was just down the block and we didn’t like that. We didn’t like the kids we saw coming out of that school. Maybe the kids around the corner WERE just kids. Maybe kids are just kids and I’ve read enough to know that kids in the 30’s, 40s and 50s, 60s and so one really weren’t THAT different than kids are today. Perhaps the language was coarser, perhaps not. One has to think that kids who grew up in an agrarian world were better informed on sex and that kids who were a few years away from the draft probably either knew cuss words they’d learned fr...