KGB In The Alley

He was my best friend growing up...we spent a lot of time together playing, or he just wanted to be where I was...if I was laying down, he’d lay down by my bed, if I went in the basement to listen to music, he’d come down the stairs and lay on a rug...that dog chased me around the brown shingle house we had again and again for years, and wherever I hid from him, he still found me...he had boundless energy...I’d hide behind the evergreens, beneath the big evergreens we had in the front of our house...there was just enough space to crawl between them when I was a kid...sometimes I’d lay there when I was smaller and pretend I was with the KGB and had people walking on the sidewalk, or maybe a neighbor across the street who was working in their front yard under surveillance, but they never did anything illegal or exciting...if they did, they would have been picked up by a black sedan and taken away forever...it was a great spot...you couldn’t be seen...so I’d hide there too, but he’d find me anyway...I’d hide behind the neighbors white fence that was supposed to be part of their garden, but they never planted anything, unless they planted weeds or seeds of weeds because that’s all that there ever was in it...the bitter old lady who lived next door would yell out of the window at me sometimes to get off of the grass...I decided that when I owned a house, I wouldn’t be one of those kind of neighbors...I used to hide behind the old brown and rusty trash barrel in the alley my dad used sometimes to burn leaves, it used to be an old oil barrel I think that he brought home from work...behind the large crabapple tree we had or maybe even up in the tree, behind the pair of pear trees that our neighbor across the alley had, maple trees that screamed gold and red during autumn, behind big bushes we used to separate our back yard from the grass alley that ran behind our property...the alley wasn’t like a city alley that was full of rocks and where people drove to get in their garage...it was always kind of spooky to see a car driving slowly down the alley because almost no one ever did...it had to be a stranger in the neighborhood...what were they driving down the alley for?...maybe they WERE with the KGB and they WERE looking for someone...I used to hide behind the garage, in the garage, mostly from my dog, but sometimes from the KGB...it didn’t matter if I did because my dog would always find me...I’m glad he wasn’t with the KGB...sometimes it took him a little while but he never gave up...then, he got older and it took him a little longer but he still found me...gradually, he couldn’t run much anymore and I didn’t want him straining himself, so we stopped playing hide and seek...I hated to give that up...then one day a few years later, it was my turn to find him, he wasn’t lying under the coffee table, he wasn’t up on the couch with his head laying on his favorite pillow...I finally found him...dead on the basement rug...death spares no one, not even noble dogs...he’s buried in a pet cemetery...some people might think that’s silly, but I don’t...he was a member of the family and I didn’t want him to be incinerated with bodies of unknown animals...I’ve even gone to visit his grave site even though I’ve moved a thousand miles away...it’s out in the country and there’s other dogs and cats, and even a horse buried there...they still keep it up after all these years...it looks better than a lot of human cemeteries...a dog adds so much to your life, and being home without a dog just seems so...empty...people grow old too, but dogs have a much shorter lifespan...that’s why I try to take the dogs I have now to the park, or at least play with them in the backyard I have now as much as I can...you can hide from a lot of things, but like the KGB, death always finds you.