I've been thinking a lot about rabbits lately...mind you, if I put my mind to it, I could find more important things to think about, but rabbits are easy and gentle, so I indulged myself long enough to be astonished at the number of times that rabbits have meant something in my life.

To begin with, I was born in the "year of the rabbit" according to a paper placemat legend I picked up in a Chinese restaurant one February day during the Chinese New Year celebrations. (If I remember correctly, my husband was born in the year of the rat...how prophetic!)

But of course, while I was growing up in El Paso, I didn't have any idea that I was associated at birth with rabbits.

I do recall one memorable Easter Sunday when I was about eight years old. Mother and Dad had given Toots and me a pretty little white rabbit as an Easter gift, along with hidden baskets of eggs, both hen and chocolate. We loved that bunny and allowed him to run loose in the house because he was so cute.

On that particular Sunday, we came home from a solemn pontifical high mass at St. Patrick's, dressed in our Easter finery. Two friends of the family were joining us for the traditional Easter dinner of baked ham and all the trimmings. Bernal Dunham and "Swede" Swenson worked with my father and were frequent guests in our home. They were both bachelors and enjoyed being part of a family on special occasions.

Swede was tall, blond, massively built, and rather quiet. He towered over Bernal who was quite short, a bit chubby, and a gregarious soul. Bernal was beginning to lose his hair, so always wore a soft cap, something like the ones golfers sometimes wear. Of course, he took it off in the house. Unfortunately, he was not very careful where he put it that Easter Sunday, and when dinner was over and they were getting to leave, Bernal picked up his cap only to find that the Easter bunny had peed in it. His reaction was predictably vocal, but the rest of us laughed so hard that he quickly regained his good humor. The event lived on in the Jones family chronicles as "the day the Easter bunny peed in Bernal Dunham's cap".

Fast-forwarding through my life, the next encounter with rabbits was in high school. And I had forgotten this until recent revisiting of my yearbook reminded me that the athletic teams at Long Beach Polytechnic High School were known as the Poly High Jackrabbits!

By this time in my recollections, I was beginning to feel a bit paranoid about rabbits, crying "Eeek!" one morning when I turned on my bedroom TV to see Bugs Bunny on the screen, beating up on poor Elmer Fudd yet again. But I was determined to pursue this reminiscence until the bitter end, so I soon was thinking about rabbits again.

And then I remembered the "hasenpfeffer caper". My first husband, Don, was of German descent, with a firm grasp on the principle of defending the castle against all invaders. We had been in our first home in Panorama City almost a year, and he had worked very hard to plant a beautiful lawn and flower beds inside the chain link fence we had installed.

One Saturday morning I was tidying up the kitchen after breakfast when I heard an anguished cry from the back yard. Quickly running to the window I looked out to see Don staring in horror at our bed of carnations, which had all been eaten down to the nub by a white rabbit, which was sitting comfortably, chewing contentedly alongside the flowerbed, his long ears relaxed and his pink nose twitching.

I kept silent, wondering what would happen next. It was a matter of moments before I found out. Don came in, got his twenty-two caliber rifle from the top closet shelf and returned to the backyard, where he shot the offending bunny. I cried out, too late, when I saw what he had done.

A short time later, my husband came in from the garage, with the skinned and dressed rabbit in his hands. I asked him what we were going to do with it, and when he replied "Hasenpfeffer", I automatically responded with "Gesundheit", which turned out to be inappropriate.

Don explained with great patience that he wanted me to look in my cookbooks for a recipe for making hasenpfeffer, and to this day, I have not forgotten the smell of the vinegary mixture that the poor little bunny had to marinate in for three days, in a large glass bowl, covered with a towel and placed on the shelf of the hall closet.

But, you know what? I have absolutely no recollection of what the meat tasted like when we finally cooked it. I don't even really remember cooking it, but I know we did.

At this point in my meditations on rabbits, I decided that I had had enough, and ordered my mind to drop the subject, which it gratefully did.