`Living Toys'

In the week before Easter 1971, I was a college freshman living in a dormitory with hundreds of other drunken, drug-addled louts. Life was less a cabaret than a low-rent bacchanal, fueled by cheap beer, sweet wine, plentiful pot and testosterone, grudgingly interrupted by visits to the classroom or library. Late one night someone announced we ought to come to the community room at the end of the hall, a space usually reserved for family visits and roommates sequestered for reasons of dubious hygiene.

There, on the coffee table, was a large, ribboned Easter basket crammed with green plastic grass, jelly beans, chocolate eggs and, on top of the mound of sweets, a very real, very dead rabbit. It was fuzzy and white, the size of a tabby, and neatly arranged. I reacted with mingled horror and hilarity. Hours before, this creature had been alive. Now it was motionless and stiffening, its nose still pink. The dead bunny, without hope of resurrection, spoofed the secular, sentimental devolution of Easter. When I think of the dead rabbit, 36 years later, it still makes me laugh and cringe.

Are people still giving chicks and bunnies, some of them grotesquely dyed, to children for Easter? Here’s Philip Larkin’s “Take One Home for the Kiddies”:

“On shallow straw, in shadeless glass,
Huddled by empty bowls, they sleep:
No dark, no dam, no earth, no grass –
Mam, get us one of them to keep.

“Living toys are something novel,
But it soon wears off somehow.
Fetch the shoebox, fetch the shovel –
Mam, we’re playing funeral now.”