TELL ME ABOUT THE BUNNY MUSEUM

In November, Rocco and I visited the Bunny Museum in Altadena. I had driven past it on my way back from a lunch meeting and made a mental note to return with my tween bunny enthusiast. Rocco has always loved cute and cuddly things; his bed is a jumble of plush animals and sometimes he heads off to middle school with one stuffed down the front of his shirt for emotional support, plastic eyes peering over the neckline. “He’s going to get his ass kicked,” Marcello says, but I think he won’t because Rocco has a way of making unusual things seem matter-of-fact and unremarkable. Just this week he started wearing a white straw fedora to school like Tom Wolfe; I don’t think anyone commented.

I carried around a beloved stuffed bunny (Bunny) my entire childhood. I have a distinct memory of bringing him to the exercise class my mom taught at the local park district. My mom did not have any training or certification in aerobics, but she had memorized the entirety of Jane Fonda’s Workout. I remembered one of the ladies in the class commenting on my toy, and my mom replied, “Oh, Bunny goes everywhere with us. To the grocery store, the doctor’s office, you name it.” He did. And the shabbier he got, the more I loved and clung to him. He originally held a nosegay of felt flowers that must have fallen off on some errand. We were always on the move, Mom and I, trekking through parking lot puddles, snow banks, butcher’s sawdust.

When Rocco and I decided to go to the Bunny Museum, I realized I hadn’t taken Bunny on an outing in decades. So I brought him along. The proprietors of the museum didn’t bat an eye; they totally got it. Which is understandable, because these people had devoted their lives to collecting bunnies— over 40,000, in 7,000 square feet.

There was even a room called “The Chamber of Hop Horrors” dedicated entirely to creepy bunny memorabilia. I obviously knew the Bunny Museum would have a lot of bunnies, but it had a lot of bunnies. It was art imitating life, bunnies spawning bunnies in what felt like an eternal and sustainable cycle. Why shouldn’t this always be here, this daffy-yet-deeply-serious temple to Leporidae?

Six weeks after we visited the Museum, it burned to the ground along with most of Altadena. Rocco and I marveled at how lucky we were to get to see it when we did. I don’t know why I didn’t write about it then. I guess because the tragedy was so fresh, and I probably would have felt silly writing about a lost (enormous) bunny collection when multiple lives and thousands of homes had been lost. But these are the things that nick deepest, to me, the loss of art and folly and things that have been loved until their fur came off. I spent the last three years developing a project that was meaningful to me (the Bunny curators spent 40) and now I, too, am raking through ashes. That’s the risk we take when we love things enough to build monuments to them. It’s worth it.