The rabbit in the back yard

I don't care how cute and furry they are, I hate rabbits.

They eat the garden. They're stupid, prone to dying needlessly under the wheels of cars because they freeze in terror, spreading guts and brains and blood and fur all over the road for the crows to clean up. They shit everywhere at will, leaving perfect and delicious Rabbit Trix for my Corgi (a big, manly Cardigan Corgi, by the way, not a small, overweight, sissy Pembroke Corgi) to hoover up endlessly, which is even more disgusting than rabbit bodies in the road. And rabbits breed like rabbits, producing adorable bunny treats for Alice the cat. Alice eats the whole baby, leaving only the skull for me to clean up and the scream of the dying innocent echoing in my ears.

So it was with dismay that I discovered we've acquired a resident rabbit who lives under our front porch. He was in our back yard every night this winter, eating like a king from our compost heap, where he can choose from the leavings of pears, apples, bananas, pineapples, kiwis, carrots, turnips, rutabagas, parsnips, cabbages both green and red, brussels sprouts, lettuces of all nations, cucumbers, tulips, lilies, and whatever else, all of it flash-frozen to preserve the flavor and nutrition, and decorated with a tasteful dusting of ridiculously expensive coffee grounds from Dunn Bros. With the exception of the root vegetables, it's a small lesson in the evils of the carbon-based economy: burn fossil fuels to transport food, instead of eating locally, and your rabbits will come home to roost.

Even worse, I've come to like him. I'm proud that he's bigger than any other rabbits I see in the alley. The whole family cuts those weird little black berries from the chokeberry bush for him to eat, then applauds when they're gone in the morning. And now that he spends a lot of time in our neighbors' yard, I worry that he's ok.

It can't end well. Spring is here, and he'll start to eat the garden, starting with the alpine strawberry plants that just yesterday appeared from under the ice. Or he'll cross the road looking for a mate and die and I'll have to watch his body decay while the crows carry away the juiciest pieces. Or he will turn out to have been she all along, and she'll have babies, and Alice will eat them, and I'll have to worry that she's sad.

Yeah, I know rabbits don't get sad. But this is my rabbit.

Christmas trees and pigs

I once knew a woman who, when I mentioned my Christmas tree, said, "oh, it's like having a dead body in your house." I understood right away, pondered why I'd never seen it her way before, and haven't been able to stop thinking about it her way ever since.

It hasn't, of course, stopped me from having Christmas trees. But every year at Thanksgiving I wonder what it would be like to have a house with an atrium where our live Christmas tree grew, decorated in late November and undecorated in early January, a member of the family, growing tall with our kids.

This year, for the second or third year in a row, our discarded Christmas tree is propped perfectly vertical in a backyard snow bank. It adds architecture to the yard, relieves the monotony of white, and, as whatever broadside that gave us the idea promised, it gives shelter to the birds. It looks perfectly alive, green and healthy, and it will until the snow melts. Then it will fall over, and all the needles will come off at once, and it will be a skeleton instead of a body, lying on its side in the middle of the spring rebirth.

In perfect non sequitur it will remind me of another friend, a man I knew when I was a vegetarian. "You know," I told him one day, "pigs are really smart animals, you shouldn't eat them." To which he replied, "that's exactly the animals I want to be eating, the really smart ones."

Alfredo, Caesar, and God

Two years ago, when he was 10, #2 son looked up from his banana bread one morning during a discussion of chapel attendance at his Episcopal private school and said, with a directness no one else in the family seems able to muster, "This god stuff is just stupid, there is no god." I didn't argue, since that's my opinion too, but neither did I rush out to buy him a Richard Dawkins book. If he joined his older brother in the kind of atheism that just wants to sleep in on Sunday morning, that was fine with me.

But then his older brother brought up Alfredo and Caesar.

He wanted to know why we didn't have Alfredo sauce in jars so that at a moment's notice he could have Alfredo chicken just the way they serve it in the school cafeteria. He wanted to know why we didn't have Caesar dressing in bottles so that at the drop of a hat he could have a chicken caesar just like the ones he eats in the school cafeteria.

"Because there is no such thing as Alfredo sauce," I said. "There's a famous dish called Fettuccine Alfredo, which is cream and butter and parmesan with a hint of freshly ground nutmeg tossed with fresh pasta. There's no such thing as Caesar dressing either. The famous dish called caesar salad is made with salt, garlic, Tabasco, dry mustard, oil, vinegar, a one-minute egg, anchovies, pepper, and parmesan tossed with romaine."

"If they don't exist, how come everyone else gets to have them?" he asked.

Buying a hat

Fedex has it now. It's on a truck somewhere north of Houston. There's no turning back. I've gone and bought a hat.

Not like my beloved Peruvian wool knit hat from the Linden Hills Coop that's incredibly warm and silly looking. Or like the real French beret made in the Pyrenees (not some hideous Australian knockoff) that I bought for my wife at Saks. She never wears it so she gave it to me, and I never wear it because I look exactly right in it, which makes me feel as if I've stepped out of central casting and I'm waiting for my baguette and bicycle from the prop girl.

Not even a New York Times logo baseball cap, bought at The New York Times itself, bought twice even so each son would get one and then inherited twice when neither wore it more than once.

No, I'm talking about the kind of hat that friends and strangers alike will see, and think, "another silly fart trying to look like Don Draper." Hah, a lot they know.

The hat adventure is an inevitable consequence of the winter coat adventure. I have a terrible electric blue down coat good for walking the dog in fifty below but I didn't have anything else. Brooks Brothers sells a double-breasted camel hair I wanted for $1300. They sell a wonderful cashmere chesterfield for $1200. (Last year their super-fancy label had a dark blue double-breasted number that was right out of a Gilbert and Sullivan production for twice those prices. I wanted it desperately, it became the beautiful girl I couldn't talk to, I gave up.)

So I went to eBay and bought a dark, dark grey, double-breasted, way-below-the-knee overcoat from Hart Schaffner & Marx, that famous Chicago brand. It was $106 plus shipping, it's in perfect condition, and even if the lapels say it's from the 1970s, I look great in it. What's more, Barack wears Hart Schaffner & Marx. But if winter in Minnesota isn't enough reason, the coat cries out for a hat.

A real hat, a fedora, the kind my father put on his head before he walked out the door with The New York Times tucked under his arm, smelling of coffee and Yardley's lavender, heading for the A train that took him to Wall Street. Fedoras are in right now, they're sprinkled liberally all over the web. You can buy one with silly little brims that makes you look like a 1950s hoodlum for $50; you can buy one with felt made of beaver fur that makes you look like a 1950s capitalist for $500.

I was paralyzed. I spent days not working, poring over the alternatives, learning the different shapes and creases and brims. I agonized over linings, sweat bands, silly little feathers, price, and, when I'd decided everything else, brand. Then I made myself buy a hat so I could return to living.

Anyway, Fedex has it, and they should be bringing it to me in a day or two. It's a real Borsalino, and if you laugh at it, I'm going to have Guido beat the crap out of you.

Stone dust

The workmen began the new patio for the house next door about a month ago. The first day or two they used the machine that makes the ground perfectly flat and very hard. It's the kind of machine you'd want to have if you were a little kid, a thumper, and so, even though it's noisy, it's hard to get mad at it. And it doesn't make a mess.

Then the men began sawing stone. No little kid would want the stone-sawing machine. It's like having a dozen giant, evil dentists drilling in your front yard, minus the screams of pain from the dozen victims. It also produces a cloud of white stone dust that floats merrily in whatever direction the wind wants. Most of the time, that's toward our house. The men did take a break for a day or two to saw brick, and that changed the dust cloud to a dried blood pinkish red. They've long since gone back to stone, but I know that, if they ever finish, there are 25 or 30 steps up from the street still to be covered in brick.

A month into the work, every window and every windowsill is coated with stone dust. We've long ago given up any thought of having a drink or eating on our front deck. The dog and cat leave stone dust footprints as they walk through the house. And when we close a screen door, the bang produces a little mushroom cloud of stone dust.

The most alarming part is that we've gotten used to it. We're like the people who live in the one-industry town who know that the exuviae from the giant factory is poisonous and ugly but who also know that complaining about it is futile. Would our lovely, polite, friendly neighbors understand if we told them how we feel? And would that stop the work? No and no.

I'm just glad I can't see our lungs.

Forget it, Jake

Jeez, will everyone stop talking to me if I defend Roman Polanski? Not that he needs defending by an obscure Minneapolis copywriter, what with legal talent I couldn't afford five minutes of, and a bunch of famous directors speaking up for him. And no, I don't have daughters, nor am I a victim of sexual abuse, so I can't possibly understand.

But really. Do those people in the L.A. District Attorney's office have any criminals more dangerous to chase? If they've got some spare time, they might go to the movies. Or is this one of those vote-getting adventures that's class-related, where the D.A. is picking up a lot of prole votes for prosecuting the small foreign pervert who makes films where things don't blow up.

And the Swiss. Since they have little interest in culture, but lots of interest in money, and they've done nothing about it for 30 years, someone must have paid them. Why now?

I don't think it's ok to have sex with 13 year olds, even if the Roman Catholic church does condone it. Nor am I saying Polanski should escape punishment because he's one of the greatest artists who worked in the 20th century's most important medium. I don't have a good answer, but I do know that the 13 year old in question, now in her forties, has asked that Polanski be left alone. Maybe she's seen Chinatown.

You lie and the Big Lie

Sometimes I think I'm the last old commie who really believes in free speech. So I was relieved, even excited, to see that Dennis Kucinich had voted "no" and Barney Frank "present" on the vote to censure Joe Wilson. Wilson's yelling "you lie" was inappropriate and rude. It was also part of a calculated Republican Party disinformation campaign, a campaign of lies itself, meant to derail healthcare reform, bought and paid for by the insurance industry.

And that's all irrelevant.

What is relevant is that we live in a country, and profess a political ideology, that believes in free speech. Not polite free speech or appropriate free speech, but just plain free speech, even for people like Joe Wilson who would take it away in a second from people whose politics he didn't like.

Never forget that we've just been through eight years of Orwellian rule based on the Big Lie. We all have the right to ask why every congressperson and senator who sat and listened to George Bush lie to joint sessions of Congress didn't stand up and call him on it. We all have the right to ask why every news organization that reported Dick Cheney's lies didn't follow with a sidebar reporting the truth.

Maybe the representatives who voted to censure Joe Wilson should instead have spent their energies documenting the money trail behind the real lies about death panels. Muzzling one sad stooge hurts freedom. And does nothing to pass legislation that millions of people desperately need.