When you are thinking of a name for a new club, it is probably not such a good idea to use bunny and club in the same title, let alone in the same sentence. It tends to bring out the naysayers and activists. My four-year-old grandson likes to call these groups “binger-bongers” and the rest of the family has yet to understand exactly what that means.
I like joining activities, organizations, and coupon applications that have a bare minimum of requirements, so I was happy to recently join a group of people who loosely call themselves a club. We are keeping our club simple, and it’ll have very few stipulations.
When I was a kid and joined a club, I received a sticker and a hat in the mail and sometimes a jingle that made me feel like I was an animal of some kind, or perhaps an alien. To get even those few things, I had to fill out a long questionnaire that asked questions like “Do you eat Captain Terrific Cereal every day?” or “Have you learned all the words to The Ballad of Davy Crockett?” In all honesty, I was often afraid of the overwhelming responsibilities I would be obligated to uphold by joining such a club and would seek my older brother’s counsel which included a short retreat to the backyard to play two hours of basketball or to poke sticks down ant holes for that same amount of time. This was my way of talking myself off the ledge of commitment.
In addition to the application, joining a club also meant I had to sign a special pledge of loyalty that read something like this:
“I, ____, promise to have good manners and uphold the rules and regulations of the Buzzing ‘Round Jupiter with George Club. I will, to the best of my ability, promise to be active in taking care of Mother Earth, and to only use my Jupiter Jetpac in emergency situations.”
There were several difficult parts about learning this new pledge. Part of the difficulty rested in the accompanying secret handshake, which was impossible unless you were a contortionist. One problem was that after I memorized the new pledge and repeated it into a taped recorded 800 number when I was ready to join, I mistakenly said the same pledge at school in place of the Pledge of Allegiance at school every day. Heard and seen as slightly rebellious, my club pledge, mixed with the national pledge, did not fare very well with my second-grade teacher, Mrs. Heart, who embodied kindness and magnanimity with her every living breath.
The other problem with memorizing my new club pledge was that I had both pledges fighting for space in my brain, which caused me to randomly substitute words here and there as I stood there looking loyal to our American Flag. As other kids heard me, they in turn began to stumble over their words, particularly the difficult ones like “indivisible” and “republic.” After a few days of this, a whole row of kids, hand on heart, were fearlessly taking an oath to Jupiter instead of the United States of America.
My new club, the Bunny Bunny Rabbit Rabbit Club has, at least so far, nothing to do with bunnies or rabbits. In fact, as near as I can tell it does not have any parameters, boundaries, or obligations of any kind. However, it does have a couple of rules, which are very loose, and have already been broken without any penalty or even a mild scolding. What I like even more, is that our Bunny Bunny Rabbit Rabbit Club cannot be found on the back of a cereal or cookie box, and I’m not going to get anything in the mail that tries to sell me something. Ever.
At the risk of losing potential members, here are the two rules you need to follow to join our club. First, this club meets the first of every month, which by definition, is the very essence of Bunny Bunny Rabbit Rabbit. (As a sidebar here, let me state for the record that I am already tired of typing the title of our club, as it seems intuitively and grammatically incorrect to repeat a word just typed. However, it drives spell check crazy, so I guess, being that I don’t having a loving relationship with computers anyway, makes that complaint a wash).
For some people, myself included, meeting the first of every month in a club becomes immediately fraught with problems. First, I generally have little clue what day of the week it is, and even less information about the day of the month. I have found it nerve wracking to expect myself to be a human calendar, and equally annoying to try to understand the Chinese directions that allow me to set the date on my $19 watch, so I just stumble along through the week hoping my wife tells me where I am supposed to be at any given moment. Time can be a fickle thing, always changing, and given that I am retired now, and don’t like to be reminded that three fourths of my life is in the past, I let time do its thing, and I do mine. This does not mean I do not have goals, or a bucket list. I do believe in having a bucket list but belonging to the Bucket Bucket List List Club doesn’t even sound right.
Still, if you want to be in our club, you have to be there.
If this bothers some of you, you may find some solace in an experience I had several years ago regarding the issue of being on time. I actually circumvented any responsibility for my schedule several years ago when I was teaching, being blessed with a student genius in one of my classes who had a beautiful gift associated with his autistic spectrum. And I sincerely do mean I was blessed to have him in my class. If you’ll excuse me going down this rabbit hole, my student, Richard I will call him, could tell you the license plate numbers of every faculty car in the parking lot. He could also give all of the students their passwords in his class, which took an enormous amount of pressure off all of us. With hormones circulating in their middle school bloodstream at a furious rate, secret passwords to log on to a computer should be outlawed if not taken off kid’s plates completely.
I cannot fully express the gratitude I have for my former student Richard. While he did not tacitly carry any of my teaching duties per se, he was an enormous help in my personal life. Because of his incredible ability to remember numbers of any kind, all I had to do is give him my weekly appointment and meeting schedule and he would come into class and remind me that day where I was supposed to be and when. He would in a few words also say things like, “Bring your iPad,” or “They are going to rotate your tires,” which was just enough to make me look prepared when I arrived at said appointment. Needless to say, the beauty of Richard was that for two years, I never missed a dentist appointment, a haircut, a doubles match, or a date night with my wife. That last one had some big pay offs, and things around our house were never better than when Richard was in charge of my time. (full disclosure to naysayers and activists: I had many a conference with Richard’s parents who were glad to see his skills being utilized).
So, knowing that our Bunny Bunny Rabbit Rabbit Club was meeting on the first of every month did pose some challenges for me. Particularly without Richard. I began to think I would do some searching on the internet before I would commit to being somewhere every first of every month. I did not want to build up any undesirable resentments at having joined a club that might have some sinister or clandestine background or start receiving any teleprompts at dinnertime telling me I needed to call back or my IRA would be confiscated.
As it turned out, I found some really good news. Most of the references to repeating the word “rabbit” on Wikipedia turn out to be positive, and in general lead to some kind of luck if you say the word this way or that at the beginning of the month. It’s like a blessing, only without the religion, or any twelve-step program. I’m not generally in favor of relying on luck, so I began to wonder whether joining the club might cause me to pick up habits like throwing salt (or rabbits) over my shoulder or rubbing a Buddha statue’s tummy. I’ve tried both of those things for luck and got thrown out of restaurant for the first one, and out of a temple for the other.
What I learned was “NO” to luck, “YES” to blessings.
However, there are a couple of specific negative references to rabbits than concerned me on the Internet, as I continued my research. One has to do with an archaic 19th superstition fisherman had about saying it when they went out to sea. That one did not concern me, as lately I am spending little or no time fishing at sea. Even if I was, I’m sure my conversation would be centered around fish and not rabbits.
The other reference has to do with actually seeing a white rabbit near a dying person. I’m not even going to go there given the kind of year we have all had. Finally, there was one reference that suggested yelling the word “Rabbit!” up a chimney would alter your day in a good way. I opened the flume on our chimney and tried it once or twice for good luck, got an eyeful of soot and scared a roosting bat out of its wits, and almost into our living room. I decided then and there that I won’t be incorporating that in my repertoire of “Have a nice day!” routines.
Well, so much for over thinking things through research. I may make further references to the history of the title of our club, but I will try to keep it short. Most people only can stand so much folklore and historical minutia, given their time constraints, personal “lucky” habits, and relationships with bunnies.
So, back to the rules and regulations, our first club rule is that you must show up to the meeting on the first of the month. The second rule is that you must be willing to walk. Show up and walk. That is the club, the Bunny Bunny Rabbit Rabbit Club. It’s a walking club, and just to be clear, you do not have to hop because that would be just plain exhausting. I have seen Olympic athletes astound and thrill audiences all over the world with their feats of strength, agility, cunning and finesse, but there are few of them who take more than a few hops anywhere in any of these events, which should tell you how difficult it is. Even bunnies that do it only hop for a few hops, (known in the bunny biz as “hop-a-doodles”), before they tire of it, stop to stare you down while they gnaw on your newly sprouted, unspoiled daffodils. Some of you may take argument with the Olympic event, the hop/skip/jump, but again it is only one hop and then competitors immediately revert to something no bunny has ever been seen doing, and no one in our club better be seen doing, either. At our age, skipping sounds and looks a lot like its cousin, tripping, which would immediately get you tossed out of the group for obvious reasons.
There is a third requisite to the Bunny Bunny Rabbit Rabbit Club, but it is not mandatory. Members may need to talk as well as walk. Walk and talk. But talking is only voluntary. Since all of the members so far are retired teachers, we have no problems talking. In fact, at our first meeting, there was continuous chatter from the moment we arrived, with no one really listening to anyone else. Thankfully, listening is not one of the rules. No one said anything about listening. If talking isn’t required, then listening certainly isn’t necessary, and I suspect they’ll be darn little of it if our first meeting is any indication.
During our first meeting, since I provided most of the leadership in the not-listening department, I can tell you very little about specific things that were said as we walked continuously and interrupted each other on a regular basis. Teachers will be the first to tell you that they are great at interrupting. Just sit in on any faculty meeting and watch an administrator or principal try to get a word in edgewise. Even when a principal gets the conversations down to a dull roar, the teachers aren’t really listening. Upon close inspection, most of them are deftly texting each other without even looking down at their phones hidden under the table, while continuing to smile and nod at policies being reviewed for the thousandth time ad nauseum ad infinitum.
A few more key bullet points stood out to me in the cacophony of chatter as we walked, not hopped, over hill and dale. I might add here that none of these topics inspired me to be a better person in any way, and most of them were not informative, true or helpful or even necessary. However, all of it was kind and respectful, which is a quality in short supply in this world, and sorely needed in surplus quantities. While the subjects of insurance rates, taking care of elderly parents, raising grandkids, and orthotics did pop up, the “kindness” thread that was woven in our bunny squared rabbit squared (Rats! Spell check still after me!) group was a reminder that in spite of the disrespect we were sometimes subjected to while we were teaching, there were many shining moments that deserved a higher space than we had to time to give them during our teaching careers, or on one walk.
(Hmmmmmm…Next month we walk on April Fool’s day, and we’ll have both luck and the foolishness in the mix. Luck and Fools. Sounds like an old-fashioned baking soda).
So, while we may be just a walking club now, we teachers did not always just walk. In fact, we never walked at school. We hit the ground at a dead run before most people get out of bed, ready if not eager to see if the plan we made the night before, or in the middle of the night, or over the summer, or while on vacation, was going to work with our students at school. We used to say that the days were long, but the years were short. Many of the days were very, very long… and complicated. And DIFFICULT. Full of more than just a few hurdles and a couple of really big hops. It was more like a leap of faith that got us through, Bunny Bunny Rabbit Rabbit, and if we are lucky it’ll keep us new clubbers talking and walking.
(Next entry for the Bunny Bunny Rabbit Rabbit Club will be April something-or-other, 2021).