The Runaway Bunny

My column has been running in this paper for more than four years. In that time, I have railed against teachers who assign hours of needless homework — and the parents who are pleased to see their children slave away for four hours each night. I’ve written nearly a dozen columns about savvy ways to financially educate our children. And I’ve tried to explain the recent rise in teenage suicide and casual sexual behavior, among other thorny issues.Few of these meaty subjects have elicited as much reaction from readers as the saga of my daughter’s class rabbit, Ahava. “People love animal stories,” an editor at The New York Sun told me when I expressed my disbelief at the overwhelming response.In light of this information, here is my final update regarding Ahava, that fluffy female fiend who I learned was quite the lady’s man when I brought home a couple female rabbits to keep “her” company. Ahava was happy to have the company, all right.But apparently Ahava doesn’t like too much company, because he and his new lady friends ate — yes, you read that right: ate — their first litter. Try explaining that to enthusiastic little girls.As if that didn’t cause enough commotion, I came home last week and found Ahava missing. Missing, as in no longer inside the secure playpen that I had set up for the rabbits. We are in Westchester for part of the summer, and the rabbits have been living in a dog run that I bought at Petco a few weeks ago. During the day, they are free to run around the pen or lie in the shade that I have lovingly created by laying pine tree branches across part of it. Or they can just relax in the cage where I put them each night, so that they aren’t eaten by a feral cat or fox.But last Monday morning, I looked out my window and noticed that one of the female rabbits was frantically hopping around the dog run. I went outside, caught her (which wasn’t easy), and noticed that Ahava was gone.It was hard enough to explain to my daughters why the rabbits had eaten their babies. How was I going to tell Kira that her rabbit was now gone?Maybe Ahava would return before Kira finished camp at 4 p.m. Meanwhile, I was obsessed with trying to figure out how the darn rabbit had escaped in the first place. As far as I could tell, there were two choices: Instead of using the “rabbit box” that I had put in their pen as a small hideaway, maybe Ahava had used this box as a one large step toward freedom? Could Ahava have jumped from the top of the box over the fence? It was possible, especially because I had foolishly placed the box near the edge of the pen.Or, I feared, had Ahava been eaten? As I stood there inside the pen wondering, I noticed flies circling a pile of feces. That was not a good sign.Needless to say, Ahava did not return. And Kira took the news like a trooper. A few tears, yes, but it wasn’t difficult to convince her that Ahava was probably happy to be free, frolicking around the woods. And if he began to miss his friends or free food, I explained, he could always come home.“Ahava’s dead,” my oldest son said gaily, threatening to tell Kira this juicy bit of speculation.“How do you know?” I said. “Maybe he’ll come back.”But he didn’t come back. Not on Tuesday or Wednesday or Thursday. And I didn’t want to admit it to the girls, but each time I drove into the driveway, I looked to see if the coffee-colored rabbit had returned.“Get a grip,” I told myself, more than once. Shouldn’t I be hoping that the other two rabbits are smart enough to figure out how to escape? If Kira wasn’t worrying about Ahava, why was I?As the days passed, it became clear that Ahava wasn’t coming back. And just when I had stopped thinking about him, nearly a week later, I looked up and saw my neighbor, who I had only met once before, walking up my driveway.“Is anyone missing a rabbit?” he asked in a thick German accent.My jaw dropped open and, for once in my life, I couldn’t get the words out of my mouth.I threw my arms around my poor neighbor and learned that, on Monday, his son had discovered Ahava in their garage.“I heard a blood-curdling scream and thought something terrible had happened to my son,” my neighbor told me. “But he just got a fright when the rabbit jumped out of the garage. We caught him and have been feeding him ever since,” he added.No wonder Ahava didn’t come back.Ahava was joyfully returned to Kira and Talia, as well as to his girlfriends, Lily and Sasha, whom he greeted with gusto. My girls got a second display of Ahava’s physical prowess — another confirmation of the rabbit’s gender, as if we needed it.Order and harmony had been restored to our menagerie. It won’t last long, but I’ll take it.sarasberman@aol.com

The Runaway Bunny

The Runaway Bunny

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