What's Up, Doc?

Cycling begets rabbits.

Once again, I have proof.

I lived for more than 40 years before I got "serious" about biking. Throughout all of those years, I never owned a rabbit.

Now that I am into biking and racing, I own a bunny.

Penny (center): With integrated shit levers.

It isn't mere happenstance, like when you're driving down the street at night and a street light goes black just as you pass it, or when Dave S. wins a prime at Westlake. No, in this case, there is a direct cause-effect relationship between biking and bunnying. So consider this a warning.

Here's the story:

I knocked a rim out of true in a wreckful race last spring, and it sat around for three months. Each time I went to Bike Authority, I'd forget it, and with no plans (no money) to go there anytime soon, I decided to have a friend true it for me. So on Saturday, I loaded my kids in the car and headed out to finally cross off that chore.

Little did I know how that alignment would cause things to align.

My girls had been pestering us for a hamster, guinea pig, rabbit -- some kind of rodent -- for months. But we've managed to put them off and stall, despite whining and begging that rivaled fund-drive week on PBS. We didn't have the money to drop $20 on a bunny and another $60 or $80 on cage and accessories.

Maybe God will send us one someday, I think I told them, lamely.

Alas, just after leaving the wheel guy's place, while the girls chattered at each other like squirrels, I saw a sign.

It was a piece of cardboard tied to a phone pole in front of a house, with the words "Bunny -- Free to a Good Home" inscripted. "Comes with cage, food and more."

The car stopped. I told the squirrels to sit tight. I walked up to the house.

Five minutes later, I hopped out carrying a cage, some Timothy hay and some rabbit chow. And a rabbit the size of a cat.

Now my side porch is covered with rabbit pellets. Our arms -- mine and my kids' -- look like Amy Winehouse's, but it's only rabbit clawings. My dog, who is an ace with two (wild) rabbit kills and four squirrels to her credit, is completely apoplectic, not knowing whether to kill the thing for fun or out of jealous hatred.

If I had no bikes, I wouldn't have had a wheel that needed truing. If I had no wheel in need of truing, I wouldn't have been in Willoughby. If I hadn't been in Willoughby, I wouldn't have seen the sign.

And I wouldn't have a rabbit.

I hope biking doesn't lead to anything else, like lemurs, saigas or star-nosed moles.

We're running out of room.

- JN