When I was six, one afternoon I was playing outside with my new jump rope, and all of a sudden I spotted a puppy; a cute little ball of light brown fur, wandering around, looking sad, and lost. I tied my jump rope around his neck. Dragged him inside. Told my mom he followed me home.
We kept him, of course, and every afternoon when I came home from school the first thing I did was play with Muffins. He was muffin-colored, so we named him Muffins, and when I was through playing with Muffins, I usually played outside with my friends. Hide and seek or freeze tag or one of those games that kids like to play.
Problem there was, you couldn’t play freeze tag or hide and seek if it got really cold, or if it was raining or something like that. So then we played board games, like Candyland. We played that a lot. Until Muffins ate the cards.
We played Feely Meely; Feely Meely was a box with a bunch of junk in it. There were cards with a picture of each piece of junk. You drew a card, put your hand in the box, and you felt around inside for the thing on your card.
Problem there was, after you played Feely Meely two or three times you pretty much knew what all the junk was. We had to stop playing it anyway, though. Cards were missing, and some of the junk. Muffins ate those too. And part of the box.
We played Monopoly. Played that a lot, too. Problem there was, we had short attention spans. Probably from all those Creepy Crawler fumes. Or the Super-Elastic-Bubble-Plastic. Remember that stuff? It came in a tube. My mom said ‘no more’ after Muffins ate two.
Monopoly got boring so we made our own rules. Five hundred, not two hundred, each time you passed Go. Stuff like that. We sort of had to after Muffins ate the bank. Not the cardboard part. The money. The cash. Mostly hundreds and twenties. Left the deed cards intact.
I wondered sometimes if he ate all that stuff to be part of the game, and part of our world. Like the way my Aunt Patti feeds her cat at the table. But I figure Muffins was probably just dumb. Sweet-natured, but dumb.
Still, it makes me sad. Kinda gives me a chill; the last game I played with that dog was Ker-plunk. I threw a stick, I said go get it, boy. Muffins ran through the yard, ears flapping in the breeze.
Problem there was, we lived on a hill.