I saw a rabbit in the yard this morning. Tiny creature ... not big enough to be travelling alone.
"Who are you going to be someday?" I asked.
He hopped away without answering. His mama had warned him about old ladies speaking nonsense.
More than seventy years ago, my daddy was talking to a neighbor in our front yard. Two men, laughing about something that had happened in the days of their youth.
Not willing to be left out of the story, I tugged hard at my daddy's shirttail, "Where was I, Daddy? Where was I when that happened?"
"Oh, well, now ..." looking down into my anxious face, "Oh, well, now ... you want to know where you were back then? Let's see now, okay, hmmm ... what's your name?"
"Daddy! You know my name! I'm Jonelle!"
"That's right," serious head nodding going on ... "I remember now. You're Jonelle. You sure are. And how old are you?"
"Daddy! I'm five!"
"Okay. And what was it, now, you wanted to know?" The man was trying hard to avoid a "you hadn't been born yet" answer, because I'd have immediately wanted to know what born meant, and my father had no intention of going down that road. A "birds and bees" discussion would never take place between this man and his curious children. Never.
"Daddy! Tell me! Where was I?"
Suddenly, he had a plan. Looking me straight in the eye, he announced, "You were a little rabbit hopping down the side of the road."
Okay.
That worked.
Many years later, I told my teen-age children about this early sex education moment. They laughed with delight, and from that time forward, the first kid to spy a rabbit, caught in our car's headlights, hopping down the side of the road on a dark night, would yell, "Look! Look! I wonder who that's gonna be ..."
It makes me smile to think my grandchildren may someday pass the story down to Brett Anthony, Aubrey Rose, Emma Violet, Victoria Nix, Drake Cooper, Emma Kate, Joshua Allen, Dylan Danielle and Noah Edward ...
My father lives on ....
email: MelindaGerner@Yahoo.com
