Honey, I Shrunk My World

Bunny's on the road again and I've spent the better part of four hours running up the twisted spine of Vermont wondering what they're displaying at the "Air Museum" outside of Hartford. Bottles, vials, entire dioramas of clear, colorless oxygen and trace bits of nitrogen? Say, that's something to take the kids to and don't be surprised if they're chewing your ankles in fifteen minutes or so begging to be taken downtown to the Twain display. There, couched amidst manuscripts, paddle wheel steamer relics that never came within a thousand miles of the state capital and old cigar stubs, you can, like Clemens did, stand on the oversized porch and imagine yourself on the great river while in the near distance your car gets lifted within thirty seconds or less.

That got me to the border where I was allowed into a foreign nation despite having 750 milliliters too much wine for personal consumption. Two bottle limit?? I'm starting to understand why Canada is developing an emigration problem. If they abutted Mexico, they'd be pouring across the Rio Grande and Vicente Fox would be welding fences to keep the great white northerners out of the strategic tequila reserves.

I'm visiting my sister, who's not really my sister but we share that close a relationship and anyone who dares disparage it will in short order have their nose chewed into an origami carrot shape. Fair warning. She's one of two people in this world who have read all of what's on the bunny and is still talking to me. The other one is preparing an incoming launch of blueberries.

So sis thought it would be funny, even though I purport to hold a monopoly on mirth, but she thought it amusing to drag me around my old home town. This is the setting of the fields of fire, the mad dash into traffic and a dozen other misdirected exploits that I've yet to tell you. There was the Main Street sprint that a friend of mine and I did. The point was to get to the end of main as quickly as possible without being seen. We reasoned that we could hide behind parking meters and that quick dashes of twenty five feet from shelter of meter to meter would be the ideal sight gag. What it actually got us was publicly accused of stealing change in broad daylight an a police issued admonishment to "walk quietly like normal" from an officer who's charge of the English language was akin to an East Texas greased pig catching contest. And here I am walking among these same parking meters but not hiding because there's nothing to hide and I'd rather be recognized anyway but that's not going to happen because writers don't do good pr. Sis thinks it would be a great idea to tour my old elementary school and before I can say that I was last there when I had bladder control issues and don't intend to return until the cycle is complete I've got the Principal of the place showing us around like we're real estate investors or worse, from the board of ed.

I must have grown or everything has shrunk because the vast expanses of classroom, gym and hallway now seem like miniature villages and I'm bumping into everything. I can remember how long it took to get to French class when you were late because you were "aw shucks" talking to a girl by her locker and now had to get to the land of conjugating future anterior without running in the hallway. Let me tell you bub, that was a distance that put fear in the hearts of marathoners. Not now, the entire place is like a submarine in it's compact quality and what's more there are midgets running all over the halls. We were never that short, were we? Well we were but we never wore uniforms which would have been preferable to the chemical dump wardrobe my mother used to wrap me up in. I'm not saying she had an aversion to natural fabrics, I'm just convinced that there was a law in the seventies that forbade shirts not entirely derived from petroleum based products.

Everything is smaller, not just the school or my sinus passages. The whole town seems like a miniature version of what's been lodged in my memory in the twenty six years since I last saw it. I turn the corner from my old house and, boom, I'm at my old school. Trip over a few cracks in the sidewalk and, bam you're downtown. Now I'm starting to wonder why we had cars since everything is golf cart-accessible. More than that, I'm wondering how we fit cars into this town since back then the old man used to drive Chryslers the size of Utah. You must have had to run out to the airport to execute a three point turn. Of course the old man didn't have the driving skill to do that and we regularly rode out to the American border just to get pointed back in the right direction.

And that's exactly where I'll be heading tomorrow when my hop down memory lane here is over and I've annoyed Sis to the point of her poisoning my wine and my drinking it. It's been a blast and there's a couple more blogs just for starters but I have to get back home. There's not even time for an air museum tour or testing my strength on the vandalometer. It's time for me to have one of those "what are we doing together for the rest of our lives" discussions with a bunny babe and I for one, can't wait.

Life is good. Bunny on.