Month: August 2020

The bunny that couldn’t run away

/ startraylor / Leave a comment

I decided to take a walk on a boring Sunday afternoon, but I hadn’t made it half a block when I noticed something in the street. It was either a squirrel or a rabbit, and it was moving, but not in a normal way. When I walked over to take a closer look, I saw that it was a small wild rabbit. Our neighborhood is full of them. She’d been wounded, probably hit by a car. The skin was torn completely off of her right leg.

The rabbit stared at her wounded leg in shock, not moving. The accident must have just happened. If she didn’t move out of the road soon, she would be a roadkill for sure.

Not sure what to do, I turned and hurried back to the house, thinking I would call a wildlife rescue center about 25 minutes from where we live.

“What happened?” my husband asked when I returned from my walk prematurely.

“Injured rabbit,” I replied breathlessly. “Have to call the wildlife rescue.”

Would they be open at 4 p.m. on a Sunday?

It turned out they were … until 5.

I knew I would probably need help getting the bloody animal into a box because I am not accustomed to dealing with bloody, injured animals, so I was relieved after I called the wildlife rescue center to see that my husband had taken off walking down the street with leather gloves and an empty trash can. I grabbed a cardboard box from the recycling bin and followed him.

The neighbors were working on a car outside their house, but they couldn’t help but notice this couple chasing a wild rabbit through the street. She’d started hopping again, which I figured was a good sign in case we couldn’t get her in the box. Maybe she would survive in the wild with her injured leg. Maybe it would heal.

Finally, she stopped on a corner of a neighbor’s lawn.

“Put the box down on top of her!” my husband yelled.

As soon as I put the box down on top of the rabbit, she started hopping up and down trying to escape, but luckily the box had a lid and he was able to secure it underneath to keep the rabbit inside.

At that point, one of the neighbors who had been working on his car came over and asked if we needed help.

“Nope,” my husband said. “If this doesn’t work, we’ll have dinner.”

“I’ve never eaten a rabbit,” the young man said.

“They’re good,” my husband replied. “But this is a rescue mission.”

My husband is a hunter. Many years ago he was talking in his sleep and asked for “a complete list of all jurisdictions where small game can be easily hunted.”

When it comes to hunting, he scrupulously follows all the laws of man and then some. Just that morning, when a commercial for a sporting goods store showed a man teaching his children to lure in deer with corn, he scoffed.

“That’s real great,” he said, “teaching a kid to bait-in a deer.”

Hunting is not allowed in our neighborhood, though as far as I know, there are no rules about what to do with injured animals unlikely to survive without human intervention.

No one in my family hunts, but they do hoard animals. They accuse me of being cold-hearted because I don’t condone feeding stray cats as they proliferate wildly. They have free-range guinea pigs and store-bought rabbits with homemade fencing who dig their way out and find freedom in the wild where they’re at the mercy of nature.

And I think it’s all kind of crazy.

Just call me Cruella, I tell them, go ahead. But I can only feed so many mouths and clean up so much animal crap.

Just let it be, I tell myself. I can’t control everything. I can’t control animal hoarders. And yet, as I raced down the highway with my gas light on (that hasn’t happened to me since I was a teenager) trying to get to the wildlife rescue center before it closed at 5 p.m., I understood why they do it. By feeding and caring for the strays, they are trying to exert some influence in a world that is even more cruel to animals than humans. Nature is merciless. Nature is predator and prey.

Having never been much of a predator, I have my doubts that I could have gotten the wounded rabbit securely into the box without my husband’s help. The look in her eyes when she stared helplessly at her wound before we started chasing her was devastating, but the look of her skinned leg made me nauseous.

This is why the military recruiter told me “A lot of people have died for you to feel that way,” when I said I was a pacifist. Was I a pacifist or just a coward? Was it my privilege that meant I could go to college to study writing instead of enlisting for tuition money?

I don’t think I would describe myself as a pacifist anymore. Not exactly. But clearly I am also not ready to say live and let die.

They talk about the economy and the layoffs that are coming for so many people. What if we, two school teachers, get laid-off? I could get a job at Wal-Mart or I could learn to hunt and fish. Based on my experience with the wounded rabbit, I’d say Wal-Mart is a better choice for me.

Two other people were dropping off wounded wild animals when I arrived at the rescue center. I filled out a form, made a donation, and left as quickly as possible. I didn’t inquire about whether they thought they could save the rabbit. I have to believe that after all of that, she’s going to make it.

The dream

/ startraylor / Leave a comment

Last night I dreamed it was the first day of school. We waited until the very last minute to put on our shoes and masks, thinking it might be canceled because of Coronavirus.

But it wasn’t canceled. So we went to school.

Nothing really bad happened at school. It was a little less chaotic than usual, actually, but there was an undercurrent of sadness and apprehension. I had to take a girl to the bathroom and once we got there, I looked around nervously, thinking the bathroom was kind of dirty, but I had seen worse.

Then I woke up.

Normally, my back-to-school dreams are about not being prepared, not being able to find my classroom, etc. This was a special Coronavirus edition of the back-to-school dream, which was probably inspired by what I read on the school district’s website about how teachers will clean our classrooms between classes.

It hasn’t been that long since I cleaned my classroom. I was there just a week or so ago, rearranging some things, and I noticed a huge hairball that someone thought to place inside a dollhouse I have on a bookshelf.

That is something a 9th-grader would do. I try not to take it personally, but it’s hard, because that is MY wooden dollhouse. My mother bought it a thrift store and gave it to me before I became a teacher, but I always knew what I would do with it – put it on display in my classroom when I finally had one. The dollhouse is home to a few toys, including a small plastic Edgar Allan Poe figurine that goes missing every once in a while, but always seems to turn back up.

I decorate my classroom with a dollhouse, posters, toys, and student artwork to make it a comfortable, nostalgic place.

I look mean, like a witch, and I am as serious as a heart attack, but I guess a witch who is five-foot-three and wears New Balance sneakers is just not that scary. Or maybe I am. Maybe the reason someone put the hairball in my dollhouse is because I was being mean. Maybe it was because their friend was watching and it seemed like a funny joke. I’ll never know.

In any case, this is the year I will not be able to baby people. Your ninth-grade teachers always tell you it’s time to grow up because you are in high school now, blah, blah, blah.

I remember someone stole a bumper sticker from my ninth-grade English teacher’s bulletin board. It had a peace sign on it and it said, “Foot print of the American chicken.”

I didn’t like the bumper sticker, but I did not steal it or even realize it was gone until she stood at the front of the room and asked whoever took it to return it, which, remarkably, someone did.

My ninth-grade English teacher was as serious as a heart attack, too, and she did not baby us. She told us we would have to work really hard for a B. She didn’t like giving As. She graded on a curve, which this one girl named Anne said she didn’t like.

“You should get the grade you earn,” Anne announced.

I thought Anne was pretentious. I could tell her parents were probably rich and I was thinking she had better watch out because I was likely to get a better grade than her and then she’d be really mad.

Usually though, her grade was higher than mine. I knew this because that teacher let us choose our seats based on grades.

It’s funny when I think about the things teachers did back then because a lot of it wouldn’t fly now.

And the stuff you see in movies, where the teacher uses the Socratic method and basically humiliates people – so unrealistic.

No, the reality is that teachers are encouraged to use positive reinforcement, and if you watch a video about how to do it, it looks like a tribal dance in which the teacher flutters around the room handing out supplies and saying “thank you” over and over again for things like having a pencil and paper out.

So this year, I will flutter with the cleaning supplies and masks and say “thank you” and be grateful to be alive and to have a job.

The learning objective will be on the board, hopefully, but the goal will be survival. In that way, it will be the same as it ever was.