Jim Bunny Rogers Rabbits www.sunlive.co.nz

With Sun Media farewelling Brian Rogers – aka Rogers Rabbits – recently, his old mate Jim Bunny has come out of the woodworks to offer his observations and experiences with the late columnist and director of SunMedia Ltd.

I wish I'd had the gumption to go see him, share 'the moment”, chew or in this case nibble it over, hear him chuckle one last time. Chuckle through those perfect pearly white teeth. Brian cleaned those teeth obsessively – 'cos my mum was a dental nurse” he explained one day through a shower of Colgate spittle. But I didn't go see him, and it was too late. Now Rogers Rabbits is gone, whisked away to the dales and downs, the leafy winding lanes and tree lines of God's own Watership. I hope that in the afterlife there's a special place like that for rabbits, and for people like Brian, who rabbit on.

Tales

'The moment”, a very personal one, came to me as I sat in the auditorium of the Holy Trinity Cathedral one Saturday afternoon recently. A special place that Holy Trinity – you don't have to be a rampant New Testament-thumping Christian to feel the spirituality. I was there listening to Brian songs and Brian stories along with a couple of hundred other people impacted by a life cut short. Tales like Brian creating a drum kit to fit into just one suitcase … or was it a special suitcase to hold an entire drum kit. Either way, the sweet little old lady in the pews next to me tittered at the idea. 'Silly Brian” I sensed her thinking.

Local troubadour Derek ‘Kokomo' Jacombs, rabbited on about the drumkit in a touching tribute to a man who made blathering on about the trivial and inconsequential compulsory reading on page two of The Weekend Sun each week.

But even Jacombs saw the futility of the one suitcase drum kit. He laughed and loved and was probably also thinking 'silly Brian”. And really….can anyone imagine Ginger Baker, Keith Moon or Taylor Hawkins going to a gig with just one suitcase?

It spoke more to the resource of Brian ‘rabbiting' Rogers. Anything was doable, and remember this was a man who cocked-a-snook at the nation's media barons by setting up his own little newspaper empire. And while he tinkered with the drum kit, or suitcase, he quietly and unashamedly crusaded to elevate Crocs from fashion abominations to semi-formal footwear. He would strut into Number One The Strand in a business shirt, dress pants and Crocs. Outrageous!! And he'd have the audacity to call my shoes 'wanky Auckland”.

Outrageous

But as RR acolyte Simon Bridges pointed out, that was Brian's style…funny and cutting and I will throw in outrageous. He loved a reaction and generally got one. But not in RR's column today – no outrageous funning cutting stuff. Just some serious reflection on the wordsmith that was Rogers Rabbits.

About that 'moment” – the pretext under which I commandeer RR this week. First, did you know a moment is technically 90 seconds? It might be an unfixed short amount of time these days, but it's actually a medieval time span of 90 seconds. That would have had RR's nose twitching – he would have stashed it away down the warren somewhere and dusted it off when he was rabbiting one day.

The moment

'The moment” – right, yes!! Brian, crocs and all, would sidle up to my desk and ask about the story you were working on. Often they would be social issues and I would vent passionately on the oppressed, the deprived and the disadvantaged. He would just listen – he could be pauciloquent, a man of few, if any, words. I sensed he thought silence was the best option sometimes – no need to clutter the void with ill-considered thoughts and words.

Then he would wander off. If his response, or lack thereof, was a deliberate ploy to have me re-examine my thoughts and attitudes and direction, then it worked a treat. Reminded me that silence can be more eloquent and constructive than words, and, as some sage uttered, is often the sanctuary of wisdom.

Perhaps it was because we were at different places on the political spectrum – he would host National Party election night bashes and I would have a cup of tea with Jan Tinetti. We banged heads over macrons, Maori wards and homelessness. But we did it respectfully and it all balanced out. But it was the power of Brian's silence, the polite considered silence, that registered and I now carry it with me.

Kayaking

Then one day he coerced me into going kayaking. I am ambivalent about boats. Brian was at home on or in the water and I was at home out of it or over it. Isn't that why God gave us aeroplanes?

I made it clear that I would rather do anything else…like jam my head in a door. 'Let's do it,” he said, so we did it. He shoe-horned me into one of his 13 kayaks, which I thought was an excessive number, and off I wobbled, as novices do in kayaks, up the estuary off the bottom of Snodgrass Rd in Te Puna.

Just the lapping of the water against hull, the rhythmical dunking of paddles and oyster catchers protesting our intrusion. Embrace the quiet, drink up the silence and solitude as some wag suggested. It's powerful stuff for someone who'd lived 17 floors above Auckland's CBD with all the traffic, sirens and bottles and music of late night bars.

He just chuckled when the tentacles of the mangrove swamp threatened to consume me, he chuckled again when I backed the rudder of my, his, expensive kayak into the mudbank on an outgoing tide, and he chuckled yet again when we hove to beneath a rail bridge as one hundred tonnes of locomotive and 60 shipping containers roared and shook just centimetres overhead. Again, nothing needed to be said. So we didn't say it.

Serendipitous moment

Then the truly serendipitous moment. We ambled back down the estuary towards home when Brian pulls in paddle and reclines. He leans behind, unscrews a hatch and pulls out a couple of cans of ice cold bourbon and coke. Not really my poison – Brian's neither it seems. But there's a story. And as it was told, Brian heard about a damaged pallet of these RTDs and put in a successful bid. We were now sucking on the proceeds of that entrepreneurship. Cheers RR!!

And by adding to that cocktail equal measures of silence and solitude, the sun, the lapping, mullet broaching, the seabirds flitting overhead and there is magic. 'See,” says Brian. I wasn't sure specifically what I should be 'seeing” but I suspect it was the entirety of the situation, of where we were, who we were with and that palpable silence. He was in his space and he had kindly invited me in there too. He had taught me to absorb silence, soak up the nothingness, tickle the senses, its enriching and liberating.

Recent studies have shown that silence and solitude calm the brain even more than relaxing music, it can rejuvenate the brain cells and stimulate creativity. And Brian would tell me that he would draw inspiration for his columns when he was out kayaking or fishing, when he was alone with his thoughts.

So I just sat there wallowing around in a kayak and, believe it or not, thinking of Desmond Tutu, the moral conscience of South Africa. Now there was a man who knew his silence and solitude – he would disappear into a vacuum of silence for three or four days at a time for some introspection, some self-analysis. And then just recently a football crowd of perhaps a hundred thousand people fell absolutely silent out of respect to the Queen. That's real energy, a powerful thing.

Staunch to the end

In the Holy Trinity Cathedral I pondered the finality of death and gazed down on a simple pine casket. I suspect Brian would have hated all this palaver – given the opportunity he would have broken out and pottered off to finesse the one suitcase drum kit. However I had quietly shared my story with the man himself – just Brian and I – as a funeral, a celebration, went on around us.

In one scene from Watership Down, Captain Holly, the rabbit commander of the guard that protected the warrens said: 'We all have to meet our match sometime or another”. Brian met his five years ago with a diagnosis for bowel cancer – an insidious blight that claims 1200 lives each year. There was a sad inevitability about Brian's case, but it seems no-one told him that. Staunch to the end.