TOPAZ HORIZON

Last Monday, I got a new rabbit. In the bunch, she was the one most full of life. Then I touched her and she curled herself around my hand and licked my finger. I fell in love.



Vince isn't very fond of animals but when Alice came home, he also fell for her. First, she had the most startling blue-gray eyes. When she looked at you, she looked like she could understand you. She was charming and bold and happy and smart. In a second, she figured out how to escape her huge cage by jumping up on her gold play box and sprinting out truimphantly.

Galadriel, an old rabbit, is used to being alone now. Usually, too, rabbits don't get along very well if they didn't grow up together. But when the new stranger scampered about her, neither Galady could resist Alice's infectious joy.

So for four glorious days, laughter and delight filled our home. Affectionate, gentle, perky, friendly, and very clever - that's Alice and more. She warmed our hearts with just a look from her bright blue eyes, a cuddle with her soft white furry body, and a little binky of joy.

Today, at 5 AM, Alice left our world. She had stopped eating on Thursday. Yesterday, she hardly drank. We worried about her but she skipped and jumped and played with us. She seemed okay. At 2:30 AM, as I was writing an article, Alice kept me company, delightful as always. She seemed not to want us to worry. But finally, at 4 AM, her little heart gave all she could give and she lay still, hardly breathing. We rushed her to a vet but in less than 5 minutes of IV injections and even after massaging her beautiful little heart, Alice passed on.

We wrapped her up in her soft baby towel and nudged her gently into her favorite gold box. Later, we will bury her in my mother's lovely garden where she will rest, surrounded by bright flowers and green grass.

Kitten and kitten (yes, a baby rabbit is also called a kitten) at play. Watch how the little bunny dominates the kitty in 00:45. It looks obscene but it's not--it's just how a rabbit establishes dominance.

I am in this mood because Kristine had mentioned that in college, some of her classmates from Manila Science High (my high school) had wondered why she was friends with me. Kristine is very smart and funny and ambitious and bossy and morally upright and all the good things a person can be. Pinky's the same way, too. And so am I (though I am less bossy than Kristine, and less funny than Pinky!). So I assume her classmates could not understand why someone like her could be friends with someone like me. 

In high school, for some reason, I had gained quite a terrible reputation. My friends told me that behind my back, people whispered that I was a cheap slut, I slept around, I was stupid but got good grades through shady ways... and other nasty things like that. I never understood how I got this rep. A few of my friends guessed the rumors probably came from envious girls. But why? Why that degree of evil from fellow children like myself? 

I was 13 when I started hearing these things. At that age, and straight out of a convent, I didn't even know how babies were made! Back then and until I left my parents' house six years ago, I had a 6 PM curfew, which I obeyed to the second. I knew better than to go home at 6:01. I may be headstrong but I never broke any of my grandparents' rules. I enjoyed going to church and reading my Bible. I may not have had the highest grades in school but that's because I didn't like studying--yet when college exams rolled around (and I didn't review for those!), I still easily passed, unlike the other snooty kids from the star sections who religiously went to review classes and still failed miserably (there is a God!). Sure, I had friends, in school and in church. Yet sometimes I know they wonder about me. They spent a lot of time with me to know that I can't possibly be the terrible person I was rumored to be. And yet I knew, and I know till now, they wonder about me. I also know that my family, my own parents and sister and brothers, they wonder about me. 

Which brings me back to Kristine who was telling me at dinner, "I knew who you were in grade school so though they asked me how I could be friends with you, I knew you possibly can't be who they say you were. I know you." I am overwhelmed at that complete trust. 

I have always felt that the truth is more important. I know who I am. I am not the girl described by those people who claimed to have known me. I am a good person. That is all I need to know. My God is my only judge, and He is the only one I need answer to. I am strong in my firm belief that my heart, my mind, my conscience, and my body are clean and pure and holy. Yet when I hear a few kind words thrown my way, I weep, my defensive walls swept away by the force of so much love and faith. The real me is real to somebody else after all.

S U R P R I S E !

In loving memory
Gandalf Rabbit
April 18, 2002 - February 16, 2007
We will always remember your snorts, your licks,
and your beautiful Spanish eyes.
May you forever hop in peace on the rolling pastures of Heaven.

Mommy, Daddy and Galady miss you.

This little story by Michael Gartner really moved me.

Michael Gartner has been editor of newspapers large and small and president of NBC News. In 1997, he won the Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing.

Photo by Ilya Mazurkevich from Stocksnap.io.

"My father never drove a car."

Well, that's not quite right.

I should say I never saw him drive a car. He quit driving in 1927, when he was 25 years old, and the last car he drove was a 1926 Whippet.

"In those days," he told me when he was in his 90s, "to drive a car you had to do things with your hands, and do things with your feet, and look every which way, and I decided you could walk through life and enjoy it or drive through life and miss it."

At which point my mother, a sometimes salty Irishwoman, chimed in: "Oh, bull----!" she said. "He hit a horse."

"Well," my father said, "there was that, too."

So my brother and I grew up in a household without a car. The neighbors all had cars—the Kollingses next door had a green 1941 Dodge, the VanLaninghams across the street a gray 1936 Plymouth, the Hopsons two doors down a black 1941 Ford—but we had none.

My father, a newspaperman in Des Moines, would take the streetcar to work and, often as not, walk the three miles home. If he took the streetcar home, my mother and brother and I would walk the three blocks to the streetcar stop, meet him and walk home together.

Our 1950 Chevy

My brother, David, was born in 1935, and I was born in 1938, and sometimes, at dinner, we'd ask how come all the neighbors had cars but we had none. "No one in the family drives," my mother would explain, and that was that. But, sometimes, my father would say, "But as soon as one of you boys turns 16, we'll get one." It was as if he wasn't sure which one of us would turn 16 first.

But, sure enough, my brother turned 16 before I did, so in 1951 my parents bought a used 1950 Chevrolet from a friend who ran the parts department at a Chevy dealership downtown. It was a four- door, white model, stick shift, fender skirts, loaded with everything, and, since my parents didn't drive, it more or less became my brother's car.

Having a car but not being able to drive didn't bother my father, but it didn't make sense to my mother. So in 1952, when she was 43 years old, she asked a friend to teach her to drive. She learned in a nearby cemetery, the place where I learned to drive the following year and where, a generation later, I took my two sons to practice driving. The cemetery probably was my father's idea. "Who can your mother hurt in the cemetery?" I remember him saying once.

For the next 45 years or so, until she was 90, my mother was the driver in the family. Neither she nor my father had any sense of direction, but he loaded up on maps—though they seldom left the city limits—and appointed himself navigator. It seemed to work.

The ritual walk to church

Still, they both continued to walk a lot. My mother was a devout Catholic, and my father an equally devout agnostic, an arrangement that didn't seem to bother either of them through their 75 years of marriage. (Yes, 75 years, and they were deeply in love the entire time.) He retired when he was 70, and nearly every morning for the next 20 years or so, he would walk with her the mile to St. Augustin's Church. She would walk down and sit in the front pew, and he would wait in the back until he saw which of the parish's two priests was on duty that morning.

If it was the pastor, my father then would go out and take a two-mile walk, meeting my mother at the end of the service and walking her home. If it was the assistant pastor, he'd take just a one-mile walk and then head back to the church. He called the priests "Father Fast" and "Father Slow."

After he retired, my father almost always accompanied my mother whenever she drove anywhere, even if he had no reason to go along. If she were going to the beauty parlor, he'd sit in the car and read, or go take a stroll or, if it was summer, have her keep the engine running so he could listen to the Cubs game on the radio. In the evening, then, when I'd stop by, he'd explain: "The Cubs lost again. The millionaire on second base made a bad throw to the millionaire on first base, so the multimillionaire on third base scored.") If she were going to the grocery store, he would go along to carry the bags out—and to make sure she loaded up on ice cream.

As I said, he was always the navigator, and once, when he was 95 and she was 88 and still driving, he said to me, "Do you want to know the secret of a long life?" "I guess so," I said, knowing it probably would be something bizarre.

"No left turns," he said. "What?" I asked.

"No left turns," he repeated. "Several years ago, your mother and I read an article that said most accidents that old people are in happen when they turn left in front of oncoming traffic. As you get older, your eyesight worsens, and you can lose your depth perception, it said. So your mother and I decided never again to make a left turn."

"What?" I said again. "No left turns," he said. "Think about it. Three rights are the same as a left, and that's a lot safer. So we always make three rights."

"You're kidding!" I said, and I turned to my mother for support. "No," she said, "your father is right. We make three rights. It works." But then she added: "Except when your father loses count." I was driving at the time, and I almost drove off the road as I started laughing. "Loses count?" I asked. "Yes," my father admitted, "that sometimes happens. But it's not a problem. You just make seven rights, and you're okay again."

I couldn't resist. "Do you ever go for 11?" I asked.

"No," he said. "If we miss it at seven, we just come home and call it a bad day. Besides, nothing in life is so important it can't be put off another day or another week."

My mother was never in an accident, but one evening she handed me her car keys and said she had decided to quit driving. That was in 1999, when she was 90. She lived four more years, until 2003. My father died the next year, at 102. They both died in the bungalow they had moved into in 1937 and bought a few years later for $3,000. (Sixty years later, my brother and I paid $8,000 to have a shower put in the tiny bathroom—the house had never had one. My father would have died then and there if he knew the shower cost nearly three times what he paid for the house.) He continued to walk daily—he had me get him a treadmill when he was 101 because he was afraid he'd fall on the icy sidewalks but wanted to keep exercising—and he was of sound mind and sound body until the moment he died.

A happy life

One September afternoon in 2004, he and my son went with me when I had to give a talk in a neighboring town, and it was clear to all three of us that he was wearing out, though we had the usual wide-ranging conversation about politics and newspapers and things in the news. A few weeks earlier, he had told my son, "You know, Mike, the first hundred years are a lot easier than the second hundred." At one point in our drive that Saturday, he said, "You know, I'm probably not going to live much longer."

"You're probably right," I said.

"Why would you say that?" He countered, somewhat irritated. "Because you're 102 years old," I said. "Yes," he said, "you're right." He stayed in bed all the next day.

That night, I suggested to my son and daughter that we sit up with him through the night. He appreciated it, he said, though at one point, apparently seeing us look gloomy, he said: "I would like to make an announcement. No one in this room is dead yet."

An hour or so later, he spoke his last words: "I want you to know," he said, clearly and lucidly, "that I am in no pain. I am very comfortable. And I have had as happy a life as anyone on this earth could ever have." A short time later, he died.

I miss him a lot, and I think about him a lot. I've wondered now and then how it was that my family and I were so lucky that he lived so long. I can't figure out if it was because he walked through life.

Or because he quit taking left turns.