Rabbits throughout the neighborhood cower in fear when this formidable pair steps outside on their latest expedition.  They know that the crafty Penny has devised a diabolical plan to snare any unwary hare.  They know that it is only a matter of time before the finely honed tracking instincts of the hunters locate any nearby rabbit and then fix the bunny with a penetrating stare that seemingly can last for hours.  After the creature is hopelessly mesmerized, the pair employ their patented lunge technique, hurling themselves at the cowering cottontail with murderous intent until they strain at the end of their leashes.  Although the lunge breaks the spell and allows the reprieved rabbit to scamper away, the sight of the advancing dogs sends provokes an unmistakable bolt of fear that leaves the lucky lapin vowing to never again enter the hunters’ domain.

Even when the hunters are inside, their terrifying indoor woofing causes any hare that might stray into view to bolt, without risking even a nibble at the tender shoots of a tasty zinnia.

Yes, there’s a reason why the bunnies of New Albany are even more timid than your normal rabbit.

When something like that happens to a person you know, it shakes you.  You think about your own family medical history and wonder how many of those health problems were due to lifestyle and how many to awesome genetic forces lurking deep within our cells, like tiny time bombs that could explode with devastating consequences at any moment, irrespective of how much lettuce you eat?  Did my father, uncle, and grandfather die of cancer because they were heavy smokers, or because of some squamous anomaly in their mitochondria that was triggered by strands of DNA without regard to intake of tar and nicotine?

And, probing even deeper into the levels of introspection, what would you prefer the answers to these questions to be?  Are you a fatalist who is more comfortable thinking you’ve already been dealt all the cards and just have to play the hand as well as you can?  If you could take a test and determine, conclusively, that the raging fires of cancer were going to consume your body no matter what you did, would you want to know so you could adjust your lifestyle accordingly and move down the spectrum to enjoy the delightful but unhealthy things you’ve avoided?  Or would you rather hope that your good behavior and healthy lifestyle could win you a reprieve from the otherwise inevitable genetic snare?

I’m in the latter category.  I’d like to think that my decisions make a difference to the equation and might have an impact on whether I keel over in the near future.  My friend’s situation makes me think, however:  “Am I just kidding myself?”

“Robert” didn’t even sound good when actors on last season’s Game of Thrones talked to or about King Robert Baratheon.  You know your name isn’t a thing of beauty if, even when it is spoken by actors with British accents, it still sounds like a word for a failed engine part.

Fortunately, no one but the IRS and my bank refer to me as “Robert.”  But what nickname to choose?  For the first 12 years of my life, everyone called me Bobby.  I liked Bobby, but as I hit the teenage years I realized almost no one used the diminutive form of nickname anymore.  Now the only adult males I know who go by “Bobby” hail from south of the Mason-Dixon line, boast about SEC football dominance, comfortably wear white loafers without socks, and drink bourbon in the evenings.  The name fits them, but not me.

“Rob” never really worked, and “Robby” even less so.  It’s not just because “Rob” is a word for an act of theft, either.  Mostly, “Rob” seems prissy and highfalutin, a sort of halfway attempt to hang on to the old English roots of Robert.

That leaves Bob.  I settled on Bob more than 40 years ago, and I still like it.  It’s rarely mispronounced and almost never misspelled.  It’s short and solid and simple.  I think it suits me.  After all, as we swim through the sea of life, everybody needs to bob now and then.

There are people who can “lay down a base” without getting burned and gradually get darker and darker, without telltale peeling, as the summer progresses.  It’s as if they have special tanning knowledge, passed down from generation to generation like the Rites of Ephesus.

I’m not one of those people.  I go directly from winter white to a blazing brick red that quickly peels off in great, sweeping curtains of skin the size of dish towels that you can roll up and toss in the waste basket.  After that distasteful condition passes, I’m set for the summer with a permanent ruddy red face.

This happens no matter what I try.  Today, for example, I smeared heaping handfuls of Coppertone on head, ears, face and neck in hopes of avoiding the burn.  After a few moments in the sun playing golf, however, my sweat glands kicked into high gear and the resulting cascade of sunscreen runoff left me partially blinded and milky eyed.  After swabbing the perspiration off with a towel, I may as well have not applied any suntan lotion in the first place.

And now I sit, with that fine, bright burning feeling on my skin, waiting for the peeling to begin.  Summer has arrived.

How it got into our house is anybody’s guess.  I’d guess it was a green tree frog — about the size of a half dollar, with long webbed toes and excellent adhesive abilities.  Kasey noticed him, too, and was starting to pay the little guy an uncomfortable amount of attention.  I got a dish towel, draped it over him, gently picked him up, and took him outside and dropped him onto the grass.  He quickly hopped under some nearby bushes and was gone, probably on his way back to the tree at the corner of our house.

This is the first frog in our house that I can remember, but it’s not uncommon for us to find that moths, bees, spiders, and even birds have gotten into the house somehow.  Whenever that happens I always try to do whatever I can to get them back outside, safely and without injury, and when I do so I feel a bit better about myself.  After I set Mr. Frog on the path to freedom this morning, I walked around the Yantis Loop with an extra hop in my step.

I don’t know how often Kasey had slept in a crate before she arrived at our house, but I do know that she spent some time in a crate because she came into the family from the Erie County Humane Society.  At first, when she slept with Penny, Kasey was quiet at night.  Then she began to get restless, and we decided to get a separate crate.  She figured out how to escape from the crate, and we would find her in the morning in some odd location.  When we then returned her to the crate, the night-time barking began.

Kasey’s bark is not loud, and it is pitched at a sound register that is just barely distinguishable from the sounds you might hear through an open window.  But it’s like the beginning cries of a newborn who you are trying to train to sleep through the night.  Once you hear it, your brain focuses on the sound, and you can’t ignore it.  It works on your consciousness like steel claws scraping against a blackboard.  You toss and turn, exhausted yet wide awake, eyes dried out, fretting about the fact that you’ve got to get up in five hours — all against the backdrop of that incessant, nerve-jangling barking.  It’s infuriating, and being furious at your dog is not a good thing.

We’ve tried knocking the crate with a baseball bat and giving a stern admonition, which worked with Penny when she had a nightly barking period long ago.  We’ve tried waiting for Kasey to give up on the barking, but she is a stubborn cuss.  We’ve tried returning her to the crate with Penny.  None of those efforts has worked — because, I think, Kasey just doesn’t want to be in a crate.

Now Kish has decreed that we put Kasey in the crate that she can escape, in a nod to Penny’s finely honed sense of crating fairness, recognizing that Kasey will escape and then roam the house (with most upstairs doors closed) until she finds a place to sleep.  That strategy is fraught with peril when it involves a dog that obviously is still getting adjusted and has the ability to leap up onto tables and jump from table to countertop — but last night it seemed to work.  The other option is technological:  we have a device that is supposed to emit a high-pitched sound that only dogs can hear whenever barking begins.  If the current strategy stops working, the dog whistle will be deployed.

Polley held 18 U.S. patents, but his crown jewel was the wireless TV remote controller.  In 1955 he invented the Flash-Matic, a gun-shaped, battery-powered device that changed the channel and turned the TV on and off through use of light signals — and the infernal “clicker” was born.  The Flash-Matic was eventually replaced by sonic, infrared, and radio frequency devices, but Polley’s device set the nation firmly on the road to a land where Americans planted their ever-expanding keisters on their sofas and watched TV for hours where their only exercise was the twitch of the thumb muscle needed to change the channel.  He even won an Emmy for his impact on television.

Consider the social consequences of the wireless TV remote controller.  Not only has it served as a crucial enabling device for an increasingly overweight and lethargic population, it has also been the cause of countless family squabbles.  How many wives have been brought to the boiling point by thoughtless husbands who annoyingly change channels repeatedly during commercial breaks — never spending more than a millisecond on the latest showing of  The Shawshank Redemption, which for some reason is always being aired, or any other program as they zip through the dozens of channels offered by modern cable television services?  How many brothers and sisters have fought over control of the clicker, and therefore whether the family watched Glee or Jackass?  And how has the remote controller affected the brains, and shrinking, gnat-like attention spans, of children who have grown up with their thumb on the remote?

Few people can claim to have had such a profound impact on the social conditions of the world around them.  Eugene Polley, R.I.P.

I think most people would like to go out like my grandfather did.  He lived to be 99, kept his mental and physical health until the end, then had a stroke while eating breakfast and died later that day.  No institutionalization.  No dementia.  No months or years of a twilight existence, apparently unaware of his surroundings, experiencing bedsores and diaper changes and incomprehension.

Of course, we don’t get to make stark choices between the ideal and the awful.  Instead, families deal with impossible judgment calls.  Should the frail 84-year-old woman with the bad hip endure the pain, or have an implant operation that could give her a pain-free existence — or produce a shock to the system that causes her to slide into an irreversible downward spiral?  If an elderly relative decides not to undertake life-extending treatment, should the grief-stricken children try to argue him out of his decision?  How should a family deal with an institutionalized Alzheimer’s victim in the bewildered, angry, unrecognizing end stages of mental decline and the guilt that comes from not wanting to see their relative in that terrible condition?

The author of the New York article yearns for a “death panel” — he calls it a “deliverance panel” — where family members could appeal for a relative’s death.  There’s a reason why the concept of such panels provoked such opposition during the recent debate on health care reform, however.  What modern Solomons would staff such panels?  The doctors who want to sharpen their skills at an aggressive life-extending procedure and get paid for their efforts?  The bureaucrat who sees his health care budget exploding and wants to rein in costs?  The hospital administrator who thinks the room the patient occupies could be better used by someone receiving more care and treatment?  The children who are heartsick about the potential loss, hoping for a miracle, guilt-ridden, exhausted, overwhelmed, and concerned about their inheritances, all at once?

There are no easy answers to these terrible issues.  I think the appropriate first step is for everyone to make their own decisions about their own care, when they are still healthy and capable of doing so, and memorialize those decisions in some kind of binding way so that their surviving relatives aren’t saddled with impossible choices.  Is the prospect of long-term institutional care and constant pain a source of unimaginable horror, or would you be willing to put up with it in order to meet your great-grandchildren?  Only the individual can know how much of a deviation from the ideal end-of-days scenario they are willing to endure.

In fact, I’d like to try a kind of experiment with Andrew’s suggestion that we really haven’t done before — at least, not intentionally.  Anyone who reads our blog knows that the Webner House posters approach issues from very different parts of the political spectrum.  We frequently disagree on things, but try to do so reasonably and respectfully.  Therefore, I’d like to invite Richard, Russell, UJ, and Uncle Mack to post their own views on the David Brooks column, and then see what Andrew’s thoughts are in response.

As we move closer to the election, there undoubtedly will be other issues where we might want to take the temperature of our contributors, just to see how the far-flung branches of the Webner clan are reacting.  I think everyone, regardless of their political inclination, believes that this election will be a very important one.  Our little discussions can be like family talks at the kitchen table after dinner — except that our table will be the Webner House blog, accessible to anyone who is interested.  I’ll post my thoughts on the David Brooks column later tonight.

There are beds to be stripped, clothes to be washed and dried and hung, clean towels to be folded, and sheets and blankets to be tossed in the air as beds are remade.  There are dishes to be gathered and brought to the kitchen, scrubbed, and put into the dishwasher racks.  There are bottles and cans to be collected and put in the recycling bin, counters to wipe clean of bread crumbs, and napkins and wrappers and stray debris to pitch into the trash (always thinking, as the hurled item lands in the trash can, “two points!”).  When I got up this morning, I began moving from room to room, straightening up and leaving one room clean before moving on to the next.

It is good to hear the clang of the washing machine lid as clothes get placed inside, the hum of the clothes dryer, the swish and swirl of the dishwasher.  These are the happy sounds of a house being cleaned and restored to a semblance of order, and Saturday morning is a good time to accomplish that chore.

Now I sit, drinking my coffee and feeling a sense of satisfaction, and I think:  what flowers should we get to put in our flower beds this year?  The feeling of accomplishment from my early morning clean-up exercise gives me the incentive to tackle a little gardening this afternoon.

We keep Penny and Kasey in crates overnight because I’m not keen on sleeping with dogs.  Kasey, however, has figured out how to get out of one of the crates.  This morning when I came down to take the dogs for our walk she was gone.  We did a full house search and found her upstairs, under the covers on Russell’s bed, sawing logs.

We’re not quite sure how she does it.  Perhaps she can flatten herself to extreme narrowness and wriggle through the bars.  Or maybe she can momentarily turn herself into a puff of smoke and waft her way to freedom.  Most likely, she gets free when the crate is not securely shut, and she’s learned how to lift up the bottom of the door until it opens.  However she does it, it shows she’s a smart cookie.

Although Kasey has shown real escape artist abilities, she’s not quite at the level of The Cooler King, the Steve McQueen character in The Great Escape.  One of the crates can still keep her in for the night — for now.  Like The Cooler King, she’s probably lying there at night, carefully working out her next great escape.

I knew my mother first, of course.  If I could somehow probe the recesses of my brain and call up my first memory, it would no doubt be of Mom’s face.  She was the center of the universe for a brood of five kids.  She taught us how to behave and treat grown-ups with politeness and respect, to wash behind our ears and to “put some elbow grease” into our household chores.  She made sure we got to doctor’s appointments and had school supplies and clean clothes.  She encouraged us in our successes and comforted us in our failures — and, in fact, she still does.

So much responsibility!  I knew it was a tough job, because one of my most distinct childhood memories was when my mother, that paragon of positivity, burst into tears after our bad behavior had finally gotten on her last nerve.  She sat down on a stoop that connected our kitchen to our living room and sobbed.  The effect on the kids was like a loud thunderclap on an otherwise clear summer day.  My God!  What had we done?  We quieted down immediately and sat down beside her, telling her we were sorry and promised never to do it again — which turned out to not be true, of course.

I got a different perspective on how hard it is to be a mother when Kish and I decided to have children.  So much studying to do, with books from T. Berry Brazelton and Dr. Spock and others about infants and their development, when they should start walking and talking, and how best to provide a secure yet stimulating environment!  And research on things like the safest cribs, and how you should lay children down to sleep.  Kish’s copies of these books were dog-eared, underlined, and highlighted weeks before Richard arrived.  And once he and Russell did arrive, Kish’s feelings of pride and worry and joy and concern about every step they took along the way to adulthood surged forward and were displayed, transparently and unabashedly, for all to see, every day and every night.

Those feelings remain as strong as ever, even though the boys have left the house.  They’re obviously never far from her mind, and as much as she might enjoy the company of me and the dogs, only the appearance of the kids can bring that special, happy look to her face.  They are, and will always be, the light of her life.  I guess that’s what being one of the best mothers in the world is all about.

Tonight the two greatest mothers in the history of the world will be together, with their entire families, to munch on some pizza and celebrate Mother’s Day.  For them, that will be the greatest Mother’s Day gift of all.

The girl explained that they were members of a nearby church.  She said she was collecting money so she could go to a church camp this summer, which was her “dream.”  She said she would be participating in a 5K walk, held up a generic sign-in sheet, and asked if we would sponsor her.  We gave her $5.  All the time, her mother stood there, beaming.

This incident left a sour taste in my mouth.  The girl and her mother didn’t look impoverished; they appeared to be average, well-fed, middle-class Americans.  They weren’t trying to raise money for a charity or a school or group activity.  Instead, they were just going door-to-door, asking complete strangers for a hand-out so the girl could go to camp in a few months.

This used to be called “begging.”  The 5K and the sign-up sheet were just a fig leaf for a naked appeal for cash.

Perhaps I’m just not a very charitable person.  Perhaps I should focus on the fact that we and our neighbors gave hard-earned money to these strangers to help them out.  Perhaps the girl will now go through life believing that Americans are decent, generous people who lend a hand when you are in need.

However, I wonder, instead, whether we have really come to the point where parents not only allow their kids to solicit donations for personal items door-to-door, but also participate in the process?  Could this girl not get a job to pay for her dream, or hold a garage sale, or save for a few months to cover the cost of the camp?  Couldn’t the family make a few sacrifices to pay her way?

This young girl probably collected more money from our neighborhood than she would from 10 hours of work at a minimum wage job.  What kind of message is she getting?

The last step in the morning getting ready for work process involves rousing Kasey, removing her, remaking the bed, and closing the bedroom door behind us.