Oh Gucci my dear pet dog!

So we leashed his tail to the seat hoping that when we got back from the Hospice where we would be visiting for an hour or so, the bear dog would still be in the same spot we left him. He had a big mouth arrayed with precarious sharp Posho-white teeth and a large red tongue that dripped with globules of saliva. We loved him for his courage, macho beauty and bushy tail. My daughter above all spent countless hours every week brushing and grooming his bushy tail and his brown bear face. So, we bickered over which of our three cars to drive while bear-dog watched noncommittally until I conceded to driving the little 650cc car we called Michelle-O.
Driving down the road to the Hospice, we made small talk, laughing occasionally while casting little furtive glances at each other. Diana was dressed in a mischievous , thigh-high black skirt that stuck snugly to her petite body like a pair of clinical gloves. Her prefect pair of legs escaped the confines of the gorgeous skirt in a way that only a goddess’ legs could. Her beauty illuminated the little car like the April Aurora usually does before one of those shinny mornings that usually preceded a mid-season down pour. She reluctantly shifted in her seat and laughed her signature queen-of-the-light laughter that never once failed to stir up my most visceral desires for her. I turned, looked at her and then with my left hand shifting from the grey gear lever jutting from the little space between my seat and hers, I let it rest on her immaculate thigh flesh. She smiled back and said, “bae, not yet c-bus time..” The C-bus in our own terms is….ah….well, I rather not disclose that right now.
We drove past scanty, half-dried vegetation, bare dry hill sides and two construction sites where we could see the men's backs glistening against the hot sun. The Murrum road underneath us was unrelenting against Michelle-O’s high-end Pirreri’s. The straight-three engine chanted while we wobbled and fish-tailed our way past a muddy, bumpy section of the road. I imagined the countless road networks in our corrupt and poverty stricken countryside and I worried about the future of our nation with the polls around the corner and a myriad of impoverished voters who would decide our fate for the next 5 years with just a bribe of Ugx. 2,000. The current state of affairs in my motherland ripped my weary heart off its hinges and bashed it back and forth against my rib cage with petrifying exertion. It Saddened me just as the state of my great grandmother at the hospice. She was almost 103 years old and most of her mental faculties had long resigned leaving her old and battered body to fend for its self with the least intellectual capabilities at her disposal. The Janitor who was an elderly man in his late 60’s was her only companion and he recounted that she spent most of her borrowed time in the evenings and mornings watching the clouds and birds fly by. They took turns at naming them and calling them by their nicknames whenever the Janitor was free.
We left the hospice with the next big white cloud that my great granny called Omnisee. We drove back home through James brown’s 1971 Revolution of the mind Album. The journey back took us forever since each of us seemed to have been taken aback by the aura of imminent death that lurked around my great grandmother. We barely had eyes for the poor commercialization and squalid respectability of Kireku as we drove through having taken the dirt road to elude the evening traffic through Bweyo’s. The unsuppressed spectacle of poverty and sheer tokenism could be seen through the sprawling junk of subhuman, diminutive mud and wattle shacks roofed with dead-brown decaying low-grade iron sheets . Once in a while you could see a beautiful white painted bungalow fenced with reinforced concrete amidst a sea of ugly improvised shacks that the residents called home. Urchins and bare-chested juveniles roamed the dirt roads with defiance and death in their eyes. The elderly wore yellow T-shirts with unclear campaign inscriptions. We drove by in silence and wondered if the old man in clean Persian linens, spick and span walls in state house ever thought about all these voters crawling at the rim of death and life. 300 meters ahead brought us out of the Kireku Nightmare. We felt like Aaron emerging out of the thicket after 56 days of slow death and torment in the hands of the Queen Elizabeth Wilderness.
At home bear dog wasn’t where we left him. His bushy tail had left scores of his black and brown hairs sprayed around the bits and pieces of his Ugx. 50.000 leash that had held him captive until he chewed his way out of leather, wood and iron.
He had to be somewhere around the compound. I had to find him and give him a quick bath before he was served dinner. C-bus was almost served….