MindSpinner

Dark-haired daughter has an appointment for a haircut today.

She always goes in with a picture in hand, and she always comes out of the salon unhappy, almost to the point of tears. Her hair does not look like the hair in the picture.

It’s actually lovely hair, a river of dark silk when she brushes it, which isn’t often enough because she likes a “mussed up” style. And she always looks model-pretty after a trip to the salon (indeed much too pretty to be related to me). But she does not look exactly, precisely like the picture.

The appointment is at one o’clock, so she’s antsy an hour beforehand to access the MySpace of the girl whose hair she wants to emulate. She wants to print out a picture, a picture that will doom the poor hair stylist to failure because dark-haired daughter’s head is a different head than belongs to the girl in the picture, and her hair is different hair. I suggest, “Why don’t you just explain what you want? You’re always disappointed because your hair doesn’t come out looking like some other girl’s hair. Why not skip the picture this time and just see how it comes out? Your head. Your hair. Not compared to anybody else’s.”

Dark-haired daughter snaps back, a quintessential sixteen, “Mom (this is a word and a groan at once and requires expansion to two syllables the better to contain all her exasperation), don’t ruin this for me. Let me ruin it for myself!”

No doubt this is good advice, and I’m taking it.

I am being assisted today in all my activities, including typing, by a marmalade kitten who could be yours. I heard small and plaintive meows this morning, thought I’d better check outside, and found the source instead in the guest room, eyeing me from the top of a bookshelf. A brief interrogation of the usual suspects turned up the facts. Catapult Kid and Dark-Haired Daughter found her on the side of the road last night; Dark-Haired Daughter kept her in her room most of the night but finally put her out in order to go to sleep.

After an hour of strenuously expressing her undying devotion, the marmalade kitten has relaxed enough to curl up next to my right hip to go to sleep. Before her green eyes close, she watches me with trust, even faith. She knows I’ve given her one dish of food and been here for an hour beside her, and on that basis, she is willing to believe that everything is better for now and for always. She has no clue that it takes money I don’t have to get her shots, to have her spayed and to buy twice the cat food and litter.

Yes, she could still be yours, but you’d better hurry up and claim her, or I’ll be asking for donations to the marmalade cat maintenance fund instead. More realistically speaking, I’d better get her to the animal shelter within the hour .

I consider this week an unusual accomplishment for a complete nobody, especially a nobody of good intent. Though I have not succeeded in helping to save the world, I have managed to get myself accused of being a shill in the employ of the government, a mouthpiece for Julie Geberding of the CDC based on the shocking discovery that we have indeed used some of the very same words in the English language (though to say different things - but that’s beside the point), a front for a nefarious plot to seize a nonexistent throne, the Siamese twin of somebody I’ve never actually met in person who lives about 400 miles from here, and the perpetrator of a cover-up plot reminiscent of Watergate. Just how many nefarious people have you gotten to be this week?

An explanation would be too easy and spoil all the fun. I’ll leave you to puzzle this one out.

Meanwhile Catapult Kid has announced his intent to go active duty after his training instead of going to college first and has requested that his MOS be changed from Intelligence Analyst to Counter-Intelligence Agent - i.e., from “more likely to live” to “most likely to die.” I keep thinking about all the difference a few hanging chads can make and how nice it would be if we had one person one vote instead of an electoral college and what a difference it would make if we would stop teaching impressionable boys the same stupid set of age-old notions about what it is to be a man.

Two small lionhead bunnies joined our household this year in the usual way, and the usual way is this: Offspring desire a new pet and are indulged because I have a weak spot for both offspring and pets. Offspring lose interest in new pet, for the most part, after a month or two or three, but I fall head over heels for pet, and so pet stays. In the matter of the bunnies, just multiply by two, and you have the story.

Pet, however, is the wrong word, for it implies a lesser position and human ownership besides. If you watch who waits on whom around here, you would logically conclude that the fur folk collectively own me, carefully train me and negotiate procedures only under duress, if then. (No amount of duress, for example, has convinced the cat that the couch is not a scratching post and the dogs that the Christmas tree doesn’t need christening.)

The white bunny, one Thomasin, is a case in point. He’s the bunny you’d most like to hold; if he doesn’t like holding, he doesn’t let on.

The hunger strike began gradually. First he snubbed the rabbit pellets I bought at Kroger when the bag from the pet store ran out. I had to drive 60 miles roundtrip to buy more of the pet store brand to which he was accustomed. I bought four bags, along with the sweet-smelling timothy hay rabbits are supposed to have, too.

Thomasin’s companion is a charcoal-colored bunny named Shawntycleer. (Yes, I know how to spell Chaunticleer, but Dark-Haired Daughter did not.) Shawntycleer, when turned upside down, looks rather like a boy to us, but we’re really not sure. Thomasin emphatically disagrees and acts on his opinions; that’s where he gets his nickname, Rapist Rabbit. In any case, to spare Shawnty a life of incessant and generally unwelcome sex, we house Thomasin and Shawnty in two different cages when they are inside and two different pens when they are outside. The life of companionship we had envisioned for them amounts to their sitting next to each other on occasion and touching noses between bars. (Dating relationships between parents of teenagers can work a lot like this.)

Shawntycleer is to be distinguished from Thomasin not only by means of a stark contrast in color, but also in his/her comfort level at being carried or held. Cooperation can suddenly melt into a bid for freedom - a frantic roiling of fur, ears, and claws like blackberry thorns. Because she (or he) is so easily spooked, when I pick Shawnty up, I’m always crooning that song,”a spooky little girl like you.” Shawnty is probably eventually doomed to give up a literary if misspelled name in favor of becoming “Spooky” instead.

But at least Shawnty/Spooky can be depended upon to clean up that little bowl of rabbit pellets, morning and night. Thomasin, on the other hand, began eating fewer and fewer of his pet store rabbit pellets, day in and day out, until he was eating, earlier this week, none at all. Nothing in. Nothing out. He wiggled his nose, turned it up, and vowed a hunger strike to the death. Death can happen in fairly short order with rabbits, in such cases, as I understand it. There’s supposed to be stuff going in regularly and stuff coming out regularly, and any interruption of the process of turning elongated cylindrical pellets into little round pellets is to be viewed as a medical emergency.

So I began to ply him with a diet of treats. He’s always liked a tiny carrot or two. He ate those. He likes apple slices, it turns out. Indeed, he likes wheat berries and lentils, too, and is simply beside himself for red lettuce leaves and baby spinach. In fact, when I come to feed him next, he has eaten everything. It’s delicacies in, pellets out.

All he wants, you know, is real bunny food - gourmet salads morning and night. He smirks at me as if to say that, if I’d let him out in the garden, he could procure his own gourmet salads and save me the trouble, but he patiently suffers the fact that I am a prisoner of my fears - neighborhood dogs, hawks, owls, coyotes, garden destruction and the lure of freedom that might make him suddenly hard to catch.

All in all, he considers his hunger strike and my consequent retraining a complete success. To pass the time, he amuses himself with the ironic fact that adult human beings take classes, read books, and conduct experiments in order to learn more about behavioral modification theory and practice whereas the subject is so easily mastered by furry little bunnies and six-week-old infants.

Shortly after my children returned home from their Father’s Day celebrations with their dad, Dark-Haired Daughter called on the phone, all the way from the back yard. “We have a present for you. Come outside.”

When I stepped outside they were standing at the back of the yard near the trees, petting a wild deer as if it were the family dog and feeding it carrots. It was a thin deer, as thin as if it were winter out, and it was apparently unafraid. The weather’s been dry here for so long that the grass has turned to straw and crunches like the husks of insects under our feet. I water only the garden, the shrubs and the trees to keep them alive. Farmers have but half the usual hay and fear losing their crops. I guess that it is the drought that brought the deer to nibble carrots from human hands and nip the leaves from the top of a newly planted blueberry bush. Still we are enchanted by a wild thing. I know. Deer may eat my garden this year. Deer will likely eat my apples when there are apples to eat. But since I was small I have felt a pang of grief to know that wild things are afraid of me because I am human, and so when a deer comes to call and does not start and run, it is as if some awful fall from grace has been undone.