The other day in a fit of parenting I decided to take the kids to the park. I was loafing around the house on a Sunday afternoon. I was coming down the steps and noticed the kids sitting on a couch playing a game on the iPad while, in the same slit second I noticed through the window that it was sunny and beautiful outside. I was overwhelmed with disdain for technology. “Why don’t you kids get off that electronic thingy and go play outside?” There are moments when I notice that I’m becoming my parents. This was one of them. “You’re rotting your brain!” These kids are lazy and spoiled. Someone should really do something about it. Sigh. Might as well be their parents. “Come on, go play outside!” Adi’s ear twitched slightly in response. The trail of drool coming from Elliot’s mouth grew a little longer. It looked like snail crawled down his chin. I hate it when my kids are non-responsive and drooling. I sighed. This called for drastic measures, like leading by example. I hate it when parenting requires setting a good example. “Fine! I guess I could take you kids to the park and we could chase butterflies or something.” Our backyard is the size of a rich man’s Oriental rug, and worth less. I could see why the prospect of playing in it didn’t exactly elicit a joyful response. We really need a patch of woods full of poison ivy, ticks, sticks, and a little crick. That’s the American dream I guess. The mention of going to the park snapped them out of their coma. Elliot breathed in sharply, like people do when they come out of a coma, and wiped his chin. Adi blinked several times until the glaze came off her eyes. “Yay! The park!” They jumped off the couch and ran towards the door. What can I say, sometimes I’m a martyr. As I was loading various knick knacks in the van, I noticed Hop Hop’s harness lying on the floor. We had tried to take the previous Hop Hop for a walk (before he was outgunned by an outlaw dog) and the $7 bunny harness and leash more than paid for itself with the entertainment that provided. It was time to see if Hop Hop 2 would give satisfactory results.

I grabbed Hop Hop and threw her in the back of the van. I hear people out there gasping, “Won’t she poop and pee in the van?” Bunnies like to poop and pee in particular spots. They are actually litter box trainable but I’m not willing to do that. Teaching an Elliot to poop in the potty is enough excitement for one family, we don’t need to have a bunny pooping in the house as well. What I’m trying to say in a long, indirect manner is that bunnies like doing their business in a spot they’re used to and comfortable with. So when you take them away from that spot, they tend to hold it until they can get back to that spot, just like humans. (How often have you held it until you got home?) So when you bring them into the house or put them in the van you buy yourself several hours before the bunny needs to go regardless of where it is. The discomfort level of not pooping eventually outweighs the discomfort level of pooping at a new place, just like those times when you resign yourself to using a dirty gas station restroom. Nature calls and you must answer. We’re not so different, bunnies and humans. Anyway, the park is not far away so the bunny can, and most likely will, hold it until we got back.

We got to the park and I opened the back of the van. I climbed halfway into the van so I could discreetly wrestle a bunny into a harness away from the prying eyes of other families wandering around the park, walking their dogs like normal people. Bunnies look all cute and fuzzy but they don’t particularly like being fitted with a harness. It reminds me of the killer bunny in the movie called “Monty Python and the Quest for the Holy Grail,” not that I ever watched that dumb movie, of course. It has the teeth! And the claws! and GAA! RUN!” Finally after ricocheting around the van and calmly executing several reverse handsprings (which are difficult to do discreetly inside a van), and teaching my children how it looks like to be graceful under pressure, I got Hop Hop fitted with his stylish restraining device. We carried him over to the grass and set him down.

I gave the leash to Adi, “Here walk your bunny.” She eagerly grabbed the leash but all Hop Hop did was sit there like he was unsure of what to do next. Bunnies don’t instinctively lope along in a straight line out in the open. I guess when you’re on the bottom of the food chain, you dart in zigzag paths through the underbrush. You get all twitchy and suspicious of everything, and you spend a large portion of your time scanning your surroundings for things that will eat you. Adi seemed a little disappointed that her pet just sat there and blinked its eyes. We might as well have been walking a goldfish. Being the proactive parent that I am, I wanted to help my child so I gave the bunny a helpful shove. It was slapping a cheetah on the rump. Hop Hop leapt to her feet and darted across the lawn. Then it stopped again and sat there, motionless. I guess she was trying to see if any predators noticed her momentary lapse of judgment. Seeing the coast was clear, she shot off at 15 mph in a different direction, then stopped faster than a mosquito hitting a dump truck windshield. Adi soon got tired of this. “Here daddy, you hold it.” She gave me the leash as if to say, “This was your dumb idea. I want a puppy.”

The leash on the bunny harness is stretchy elastic and I was always curious why. I found out why. Your reflexes are incapable of walking a rabbit. The sunlight has to travel from the sun, reflect off the bunny, enter your eye, and then your brain has to process that the bunny is moving. That process takes longer than it does for the bunny to dash eight feet in front of you. So you engage full afterburner only to find that, by the time your legs have reached maximum inertia, the bunny has already stopped. You end up tripping over it, causing the bunny to freak out and accelerate in a different direction. It makes you look rather foolish, actually, running in frantic zig zags with a bunny pulling so hard on its leash that its running on its hind legs. Bunnies don’t make great walking companions, in case you ever wondered. They also prefer walking under pine trees, logs, thorn bushes, and parked cars which are all very hard places to walk.

Eventually I convinced Elliot to walk the bunny and of course, during a pause in the bunny’s frantic flights of fancy, Elliot managed to put the leash handle over his head and around his neck. I found myself wrestling with a moral dilemma: Should I stop this inevitable catastrophe or should I just eagerly anticipate it? It’s not like he’s tied to a horse. I heard Jordan Peterson, a famous psychologist, say that you should let your kids do dangerous things carefully. My dad, who isn’t as famous of a psychologist, always said that, “Sometimes you have to learn the hard way.” As I was wrestling with this moral dilemma, time ran out to make a decision and Elliot found himself tangled up with a bunny who thought his life was about to end. Elliot, too, was getting concerned about the longevity of his. Regrettably, of course, I may have found it somewhat entertaining. Also I’m pretty sure Elliot didn’t learn anything from it. Shows what these psychologists know.

As we’re preparing to move to Papua New Guinea to serve with Samaritan Aviation, we’re starting to get rid of stuff, planning to get rid of stuff, or trying not to buy new stuff in the first place. One of the things we aren’t planning on taking along is Hop Hop. I already had someone lined up who wanted her so when we were found ourselves preparing to travel to Pennsylvania and couldn’t find anyone to take care of her for the week, I decided that it was time to present Hop Hop to her new owner. The kids weren’t that emotional about it, mostly because they don’t know yet that it’s a permanent move. It’s one of the reasons we got a bunny instead of a dog. We knew we would be saying goodbye to it again and bunnies aren’t quite as aware that you abandoned them as dogs seem to be. I think bunnies wake up every day surprised they’re still alive, and that kind of puts other smaller things like being transferred to a new living arrangement less hard to swallow. Plus, it’s better than getting rid of your pet by outright killing it, which is what I inadvertently did to a family pet when I was a child. The dog’s name was Hector II and I killed it with a baseball.

Hector II, as you could tell by the name, was the second dog we had named Hector. Hector 1, simply called Hector at that time, was a nice dog of dubious origins with an unusually low IQ. One day it fell asleep under the van tire and, well, you can guess what happened. Then we upgraded to a dog with known origins. It was a Yorkshire terrier/Silkie cross that had a delightful personality and was adorably cute, small, and non-shedding. We should have known it wasn’t going to last long. In retrospect, naming a second dog Hector is like naming a second boat the Titanic. On that fateful day I decided to go practice my baseball skills, hoping to bring them up from non-existent to don’t-get-laughed-at-when-we-play-baseball-at-school. I found a bat and ball and began throwing the ball up and then hitting it with the bat. That was the idea, anyway. I mostly missed but occasionally I would send the baseball at odd angles into various parts of the yard. Hector found great fun in trying to retrieve the ball and I found great fun in watching a dog trying to pick up a ball that was as big as her head. Then, as my luck seems to do, my luck struck at the wrong time in the wrong way. I managed to connect solidly with the ball and really put some juice on it. It was a line drive right into poor Hectors head. She yelped, flipped over, and began drooling from her mouth. I ran over and picked her up and carried her into the house. “Mom,” I said as I opened the door, “I think I killed Hector.” 

“What!?” Mom wasn’t expecting the news even though with a dog named Hector she should have been. We laid the little dog on some newspaper and waited to see if maybe she’d snap out of it. All she did was get stiffer and stiffer. She wasn’t coming back. Ever since baseball has made me nervous. It’s probably the only reason I’m not playing in the big leagues now.

So at least the bunny didn’t die in an unusual way. It’s also one of several reasons we didn’t name our son Hector. And also, now that we have a baby, having another pet is kind of redundant. Babies make great pets. I don’t think we’ll actually miss Hop Hop (now officially renamed iHop) much.