A large hare crossed my path late this afternoon, this day before Easter, and I’m thinking about the odd rabbits and hares who have crossed my life over the years. In grad school, we took a class on sleep and dreams and were expected to write or type up our dreams throughout each semester. Early on I had a dream with an image of a field of rabbits, many rabbits and nothing else. Some thirty years later, traveling by train in England with a friend, we slowed as we passed a football (soccer) field. There were no people there, but the grassy pitch was dotted with rabbits. We counted fifty of them before the train carried us past.
For some years in the 1970s, I made several plane trips a year with layovers in Dallas-Fort Worth, Texas. As the plane taxied on the runway, awaiting permission either to pull up to a gate, or to take off, there was little to see but the airport and the runways with the signs and light fixtures that marked them. There were strips of land between the runways, short-cut grass in the sun and nothing else, except… there was always several jack rabbits sitting motionless or calmly nibbling in the grass. I wondered about the jack rabbits’ hearing as they had no ear plugs to protect their sensitive ears! The huge noisy jet planes and the hares in the grass made for quite a visual contrast.
I’ve written before of the ancient, graying jack rabbit who sat among us on a rocky hilltop near Comfort, Texas as we roasted hot dogs on the night before Easter, 1987.
And of course there is Elwood P. Dowd’s dear friend, the invisible rabbit in the 1950 movie, ‘Harvey’:
Wilson: Who's Harvey?
Miss Kelly: A white rabbit, six feet tall.
Wilson: Six feet?
Elwood P. Dowd: Six feet three and a half inches. Now let's stick to the facts.
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