Travel Missteps: The Little White Lie

Random Cute Bunny

When I was 4 I remember going to a county fair. It seemed huge and circus like. And I remember having the knowledge that it was not my first county fair. So I made a beeline to the tent that would have the rabbits for sale. I fell in love with a white rabbit with red eyes and a little black around the ears. I don’t remember how much whining and bargaining I did but somehow we came home with a rabbit, cage, and food.

I was so excited for my first real pet! (I briefly had goldfish…but they had all died quickly, and were quite frankly pretty boring.) I named the rabbit Snow, since it was mostly white. I was aware of the responsibility that I was being tested with. I diligently fed it and made sure it had water. I wasn’t allowed to let Snow roam and so instead pet him through the cage. But I avoided and instead begged my father to clean the cage for me.

Fast forward a little bit and I go downstairs one day…and Snow is gone. I run back upstairs crying and my mother held up a handwritten note (on the back of a business card, its strange what your memory remembers). “Its from Snow”. I couldn’t read and so my mother read it to me. The note said that although Snow had a lot of fun with me, he missed his family so much, and had ran away to be with them. I cried and demanded to know where Snow and his family was. “Disney World” was the answer. I knew Disneyland was the land of enchantment, of dreams and fun things. I had never been to Disney World but assumed it was just as wonderful. Placated that he was in a better place, I eventually forgot all about Snow.

That is…until for my 5th birthday we took a family vacation to…you guessed it Disney World!

One day as we were walking through Toontown I spied a large cage…filled with white rabbits with red eyes, and black tipped ears. I remembered Snow and eagerly ran towards it shouting “My Bunny!” over and over. My shell shocked parents hadn’t ever considered that Disney would actually have a petting zoo area with rabbits (It was in conjunction with Fort Wilderness area of Disney World) and so were ill prepared for what was happening.

I ran to the cage and spied one that looked exactly like Snow. I started getting upset that Mickey Mouse had caged my poor Snow. And so I started to demand that we take Snow and his family home. When my parents told me no, that Snow needed to stay I started screaming “NOOOOO! MICKEY…. STOLE….MY……BUUUUNNNNYYYY!!!!” over and over with each word getting louder and more shrill.

People started staring, and after a few minutes my parents snapped out of it and said that we would go meet with Mickey and talk it over with him. I agreed that was a sensible plan…and then they distracted me by buying me toys every time I mentioned my bunny for the rest of the trip.

Their tactic worked. I completely forgot all about Snow and that incident at Disney World. That is until I was in 6th grade and we had an assignment to do a personal timeline. One thing our teacher suggested to add was the pets we had growing up. I put on my timeline, Got Snow the Bunny, Snow the Bunny Ran Away, and Found Snow at Disney World on my timeline. My teacher looking it over gave me strange look and asked me to explain. I told her the story. She got very quiet and was like “Uh…I think you should talk to your parents about this.”

So I went home and brought it up…and as I was talking it suddenly dawned on me. “Snow died didn’t he?” And that is when I learned that since I hadn’t cleaned the rabbits cage it started to smell, so my parents put it (and the rabbit) outside for a few days…forgot about it, and found out that rabbits cannot survive cold Michigan nights. So they panicked and told me a little white lie. They said that when they saw me running to the rabbit cage at Disney World their hearts just leapt in their throats and they were dumbfounded. And that they specifically distracted me with toys to continue to avoid having the death conversation with me.

And that is the family story of how a little white lie about a little white bunny turned into a massive meltdown in Disney World. It is also the reason why I never had another pet after Snow until I was in high school and my parents would be sure none of us could accidentally kill our pets. I’m happy to say that pet, a Cocker Spaniel, is now almost 12 years old!

Travel Missteps