Winifred Dannhauser and the Demise of the Rabbit-Time is a Thief-The Unbearable Lightness of Loving

July 2, 2025 by outthedoorandontheroad, posted in Uncategorized

The phone rings and I sneer..and swear, truth told. Albuquerque? For God’s sake, a robo-call…We are in bed…reading. I answer.

“Mary?”

“Yes…”(lovely timbre, confidant, clearly an empath)

“It’s a voice from your past. I used to date Jeannine Kruse.”

Sixty-One years melts away into this rainy evening.

“Jimmy Schumaker?

Jeannine was my closest friend from Grade 6 through 12…we were fairly inseparable between cheering, Thespians, escapades in Brand Park, softball, Latin class, hearing Robert Kennedy at Valley State, performing at UCLA…a life from another century which is very quickly fading into oblivion along with the other children of that age, those of us whose fathers served on every major battle front during WWII, and all of us who together incurred the wrath of the National Guard as we marched for Civil Rights and buried our leaders…soon, all this will not longer be primary source material. It will be a point of view or a remembrance or perception of someone who did not live it.

Jeannine was the center of that world for me. Jimmy Schumaker was the love of her life, a Romeo and Juliet story, so intense and passionate and so young that it was doomed not to last. Jim went on to have a stunning career in the restaurant business, became a philanthropist and community leader.

Jeannine passed away from complications caused by a galloping, life long drug addiction, developed in her Freshman year of college when she started to drop acid with boy who became her dealer. The smartest, sweetest, kindest girl in school moved weightless across a sea of unhappy relationships, marked by a lifetime of bad decisions. There is no rhyme or reason to it. There is more, but that is enough. It is a grief buried so deeply, in such a dark crevice of my heart, that I could barely breathe when we spoke of her. Jim was dear. We remembered. I sent photos. We’ll speak again. But the shades come at night in techno-color and other memories layer in the darkness.

Out of that wee crack in my heart, stepped long legs connected to the faces of my childhood, names recalled, incidents in full vignette, ready to be relived. I could hear the laughter and the whispered confidences. My brother was a child again, and the story of his friend Walter played out as surely as though I had stepped into another dimension of time.

Walter Dannhauser was like the character in the Robert McCloskey children’s book, Lentil.

He was gangily and befreckled from a family of Befreckled Gangily Siblings. I think there were 6 of them. He liked my brother. My brother liked him sometimes. He talked a lot and loved to come over because he could be heard over the din of too many children and a mother that was frazzled. He was hungry all the time in that Ectomorphic way of Ectomorphs, who run at high speed and must eat every two hours or become unfocused and faint and in later life, just plain mean. But he was ten that summer, sweet and a pain in the neck. My mother felt badly for Mrs. Dannhauser, Winifred Dannhauser. She as thin as paper, red headed and wrinkly, a woman in her early forties, who seemed to wander about from home to market and market to home as if she had walked into the wrong story. She roamed the Safeway from aisle to aisle, without a list, just roamin’ through the freezer section, seeking the the cool.

Many years later, my mother said she thought that Mrs. Dannhauser was looking for the exit sign. Was she looking for a door she could walk through and escape the hungry children, the pets, the yard work, the regime, the emotionally absent husband and routine of the 1960’s Los Angeles suburbs. Her consolation in life was her beloved German Shepherd, Warrior. He was “her” dog, a devoted, gentle animal, not a warrior at all but a good listener and a companion who followed her from the minute she returned from 6 o’clock Mass until Johnny Carson at 11. Warrior loved the children, worshiped his mistress and served his purpose. He listened to Mrs. Dannhauser, became her confidant and did not extol a price, ie. did not get her in the family way every time she turned around. The Easter that looms large in my mind was 1964 or 5. Mr. D bought the 6 hungry children a large rabbit pronouncing that he had grown up on a farm and his children should have farm animals…in suburban Burbank, California. What a rabbit has to do with a farm escapes me but if an adult says a rabbit was farm animal, who were they to doubt him. Bugs was formally named and Christened and they were off to the races, besotted with his presence and giving Bugs their fully attention. He wasn’t a bunny in a basket. He was a field rabbit and rather wild. Come summer, Bugs had grown to his full height and weight. He fit right in. He was the size of small Beagle. In fact, he moved in and developed a passion for dog food as it was easy pickings. Walter would sneak him into his room for at night and soon Bugs would not sleep outside. I know what you are thinking…that Warrior tried to get rid of Bugs…but no, Bugs terrorized the dog. He would back him into a corner and nip at him with these enormous front teeth. They had to be separated. This job fell to Mrs. D. The mild mannered German Shepherd just wanted to go to the Safeway and go through the exit door with her. He was becoming her alter ego, a version of her angst and nervous quivering. All this drama delighted my brother who was suddenly more interested in Walter than he had been for ages. The Bug’s escapades became legion. There was talk of Warrior going to the Vet for tranquilizers which I am sure he would have shared with Mrs. Dannhauzer. Looking back, I wonder if she considered a sanitarium but this was before you could bring your dog anywhere and everywhere so probably, no. This went on for months until in late summer, when things came to a head. Even my brother had lost interest because the whole scenario had become normalized. Something had to give. In a nutshell, one warm autumn afternoon, in the Indian summer of last gap heat, Bugs lay napping on the driveway, a rather terrifying sight, stretched out like…well, road kill. Detached and distracted, Mrs. D slid into the aqua and cream ’58 Chevy, started the car and looked in the rear view mirror. She told her children that day that she did not see the rabbit and they believed her through their tears because Mrs. D was noted to be two sandwiches short of a good picnic. A year or so later she confided to my mother that she had been forced to make a choice, it was going to be Warrior or Bugs and Bugs wasn’t a good listener or a good anything else. He was just a bully, an outlier, a tyrant. She pushed in the clutch, lined up the gear shift to R and….yes, I needn’t write it. She pulled out into the street and sailed off to the market without a list and Warrior riding shotgun. She left the murder scene for the children to discover when they returned from school.

When Winifred confessed to my mother, months later, my mother hit the drawer by the phone where she hid her cigarettes…(the emergency cigarettes that only surfaced in crisis during the years she was attempting to quit).. She offered Winifred a victory smoke and put a little something in her coffee to fortify her. I walked into the kitchen to ask for the car keys only to see the two of them drinking coffee corretto and having a cig at 4PM in the afternoon. When adults looked like this in the ancient times of my childhood, I knew enough to turn around and go back to whatever I was doing-no asking or interrupting, no verbal intercourse, just back out quietly-One learned how to read the lift of an eye brow in those days and a silent stare from two tired mothers, who kept damp laundry in the frig until they could get to the ironing. I have not thought of this brutal, domestic tragedy at the Dannhauser house for 6 decades…but then, there is that crack like the light that escapes from the opening of the exit door and the voice of Jimmy Schumacher and all and more rushed in.

Poor harried Winifred Dannhauser becomes the hero, or heroine if I need to be gender specific, of her own story. She dealt with a bully on her turf and exercised what little rights she had left and the peace of mind of her champion, Warrior, who listened.

It is a summer of loss for us in Camden not just a summer of remembering, we have a day of double funerals coming up, our back neighbor, a lovely fellow and also a much loved book club member, who passed on in mid-June on a breezy, perfect Maine day with the scent of lilac wafting into her room. A wisp of a woman, very strong in her beliefs, generous, patient. She had survived great sorrow in her life, raised a loving family, created a delightful life, endured, measured and managed. She was more than ready to experience the other side, ready for whatever comes next. She was a great believer and a dear gal, who will be missed.

The umbrella of parents, of aunts and uncles, is gone now for my tribe, my circle of family and friends, an era coming to completion. The stories get repressed, like a stack of old magazines, only leaking through the crack in my heart when I can not hold it together with my bare hands, a lifetime of experiences, packed away because I can’t really do both, live in the shadows and address the future. I can only bring the wisdom with me unless the light gets too bright and the crack opens too wide and the characters slip out.

Now, as the world erupts in war and natural disaster, a dear friend is leaving us, a man of principle and moral reflection, a sailor, a teacher, a mentor, a reader and the loyalist of friends. I’ll believe he is gone when I must, accept it when there is no other choice. It is the going that is so full of sadness.

When I think of another dear man in Hospice care, I will remember how brave he was, the rock of his family, no task too great to serve them, his siblings, or his friends. He and his beloved wife taught summer school in the deep South to young black children. It was the 1960’s It was not safe. He was stalwart, an old-fashioned word associated with knights of old. He told wonderful, funny stories of his childhood. He loved to talk about the age and nature of rocks and had a mighty collection. He started a business in his 40s and created a great gift for his home state, protected his Latino workers, (the only people who would do this back breaking, sometimes, dangerous work) got them green cards and bought them places to live, aa well as securing a future for their children. He and his wife, also a very dear friend, traveled all over the world with a special emphasis on his much-loved Vienna, Austria. He is, in every sense of the word, a mensch. He has the funniest expressions, so that even now, when all of us are saddened that he is leaving, I am laughing…at his similes:

Taller than a Georgia pine

Hotter than a June bride in a feather bed

Tighten than Dick’s hat band

Happier than a pig in shit

He has a million of them, and no matter how many times he used these wonderful expressions, they were funny. He would have loved the Bugs story, right down his street. Our tears do not know the difference. We laugh till we cry, and then we cry for all that is lost and gained.

God bless you, Terry. Sail on into the light. Exit stage left. Safe journey, fellow Wayfarer and thanks for the memories.

The photos are mine. The gardens are lovely this summer, amazing what can happen on a small patch of land. Even more amazing is that nature continues to renew herself in her own way. We are merely bystanders when it comes to her majesty. Forgive the imperfections of my writing and the long absence. Dave and I are stymied by outer world, appalled but also cherishing every second of our much loved life in Camden and hoping that we make a difference in the smallest of ways, a little kindness here and there in a greater world that is so cruel.