Through the Mist

My daughter has for about 15 years known a stuffed purple rabbit, insouciantly named ‘Rabbito’.

She’s quite a handful. The rabbit, I mean, tho come to mention it …

Anyway.

I provide the voice. Rabbito tends to suffix ‘-ito’ to words — I am Papito, for instance — an ‘l’ in most any location is likely to render as a ‘w’ — wocation, let’s say — and Rabbito forever retains her youth [even as my daughter, oddly, grows], hence her child’s view of, well, the world, with, therefore, limits and ignorance on the one paw aside wonder and uncertainty on the other.

She doesn’t always hear things ‘as they are but that’s no reason to stop talking.

Maybe a bit wike Emily Litella, age 9.

[Emilito Witewa, Rabbito might say.]

At one time predating this cartoon, then, Rabbito remarked on Jesus’ kindness in ‘heawing da weopards’, and which we eventually got sorted out, with the little purple one noting that Jesus prolly wd heal the leopards as well and perhaps even had.

[There’s also a decent-sized backstory to Rabbito, a family history. Her roots are Cajun, well back into the history of our country, to a leoporine family named Rabbiteaux that spoke a Lapine dialect and moved west with America, and to avoid water moccasins, only to find a land of rattlesnakes. Domestication has been bery good for dem.]

+

It’s a thing we might do raising our young: voice stuffed purple rabbits.

In a hundred or two thousand years this will be hard to explain exactly.

Until readers-researchers-reviewers remember: ah yes, they’re people.

+

These are my favorite parts of most anything, the deeply human bits. I like it in biographies which, having aged [and hopefully begun to elder] apace with my daughter I’ve begun to read more of. It’s wondrous in live, personal relationships [are we yet surprised by how non-human our bits can be? that is hope, my friends, and we shd be more afraid when we stop being shocked] as well. It’s awesome in scripture.

  • The man born blind snarking on the Pharisees, while his poor folks fret their rep, in John 9
    [don’t judge harshly; they prolly had a mortgage … and that son of theirs, always a burden.]
  • Elijah ass-whyppin’ the prophets of Baal, then wussing over Jezebel one page later, 1 Kings
    [and he’s a bit snarky on them too — maybe your god is taking a leak? Oh the humanity … ]
  • Abe telling the king she’s his sister, then shocked-just-shocked the plan goes south, Gen 20
    [there is some talk that Sarah was both wife and sister. My but people do gossip, won’t we?]

As someone once said of Flannery’s work, “Well, them stories just gone and shown you how some folks would do.”

Meaning the best way to read such is as real people doing real things. Deal with the miracles — blindness cured; prophets consumed; untouched comeliness — at some point but first, just read, baby. Stop talking and make sure we heard that right.

As with poems, which we get in a lather about trying to get, when the first task is simply just what is going on here?

+

Works for Jesus, too.

Sometimes we make it, him, so complicated.

What was he writing in the dirt? Personally, I think he was doodling. Wasn’t writin’ nuthin’. Drawing small, innocuous pictures. This is how irrelevant these bozos were. And of course he also doesn’t skimp on the admonition at the end.

Real life.

Of late it occurred that several times when Jesus escapes a crowd seeking either to crown or to kill him, and eventually they did both, it is given that he escaped almost ethereally or with a Star Trek transporter or something. The text often reads something like, ‘he passed through the midst of them.’

Truth is, he prolly just Walked. Right. Out. He’s sauntering and they’re looking at each other —

Erm … whattya we do?
I dunno, whatya you wanna do?
He’s getting away — shd we grab him?
Seems like someone oughta, I mean … he’s right there.
OK, you first, get aholt of his … if we can just … OK … maybe if we …

They’re very humanly hemming and hawing and he … passes through the midst of them.

Or as Rabbito wd say, da mist … which also works.

She’s usually right.

Just ask her.

Leave a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Recent

Coyotes and Christians

I am not saying Christians are like coyotes. [For that, some could cut caustically to coyotes are like Christians — tricksters, roaming in the dark, feeding on the dead … ] Simply noticed — somewhat in passing, as it’s said, having attained, apparently … achieved? … some kind of state where nearly anything I hear,

Read More »

And Did Dostoevsky Say ‘Beauty Will Save’

Short answer: he did not. Neither did Prince Myshkin, that we know of. Likely both believed it. Beauty — in the person of Christ — will do so. And clearly D wrote of M in The Idiot to explore art and beauty and ugliness and salvation. But did he say it, and did he believe that

Read More »

What I Recalled Watching Netflix

[Television is educational.]   One Saying the same stuff over and over looks like you have different things to say. Two If you’re ever in a below-average film or streaming series, and you beat the tar out of a guy, in a house, and you gaze down in both some shock as also a certain

Read More »

Seeking the King

A line everywhere misattributed to Chesterton reads thus: The young man who rings the bell at the brothel is unconsciously looking for God. This line is not from the great [several senses of the word] man who recently celebrated his 150th birthday, but the mid-century most unmodern novelist Bruce Marshall. The words — which do

Read More »

Random

Columbo: Why It Matters

This is part two of a two-part post on why, some 45 years later, Columbo still matters. Part one is here. This essay is excerpted from The Columbo Case Files: Season One, found here. Thank you. * I now have the entire collection, all 35 years, nearly 70 episodes in all, and I’ve seen each

Read More »

It’s Alright, I Am A Jerk

Don’t drive angry. And don’t drive ignorant. That’s the lesson of the Bill Murray movie, eponymous to the name of yesterday’s Punxsutawney festivities. The movie is now 20 years old, and still has an 8.1 ranking at IMDB from nearly a quarter million users. Watching the movie is a ritual now, like “Elf” or “A Christmas

Read More »

Shock And Ow

I’ve had many exchanges over the years where my statement about something was taken as surprise at the event rather than what it was — which is anger over human inaction facing it. Having worked 1.75 teenage males through the household over the last dozen years this has often been a thing one or the other has

Read More »

Lyric Lent

Mostly I gave up meat for Lent. Or to put it another way, I gave up meat (mostly) for Lent. And this is how Lent often goes and the difference I think isn’t usually that it doesn’t go that way but that it’s OK when it does. Not that it’s OK to give our word

Read More »

Related

Didn’t Graduate

Hadda a girl once, this was during college. Darkest, longest hair, biggest brownest eyes … Not that kind of story, whatever kind you thought. Being stupid (I said this was during college, yes?) I’d no idea … none. Not what it was nor what it cd be and thus not that one though it set

Read More »

Christ on a Postage Stamp

Got to thinking on postage stamps today bec hadda mail a book to a friend and when you go in you hafta say to the guy, no matter what your actual business is that day, and of course you’re already saying it if you went in for this purpose — ‘What first class stamps d’ya have?’ It’s

Read More »

Kim Possible

All the while watching Mad Men seemed to me the question was ‘Would Don Draper be redeemed?’ Breaking Bad was running roughly concurrently and the same question with an otherly alliteration was being posed: ‘Would Walter White be damned?’ The answer to the first was quintessentially postmodern, exquisitely childish, and thereby perfect — neither. Or, as an actual

Read More »

Take Up Do

In my mid-20s — half an age (mine) and still nearly nil on maturity ago — I noticed a thing that at the time was massive but in retrospect, as such immensities often are after the time, obviously is something millions of others have noticed through all their times. At least one hopes. I noticed

Read More »