To conceal,as in bushes; to hide.
As a child I woke up screaming from dreams in which something, some unknown organism, was coming after me from behind some bushes. The bushes were along the sidewalk on Versailles Drive in Tampa, a street on which I (and others) had been chased by a large, fast-moving dog. That dog was famously allowed to roam the neighborhood unleashed and it frequently terrorized youngsters like myself. I was in the 2nd grade when this happened, and that dog populated my nightmares for years to come.
No one seemed to care about that dog’s ramblings. It was as if leash laws did not exist — and for all I know they did not exist in Tampa in the late 1970s. If such laws did exist I think they might have been laxly enforced, for I remember a petition of sorts, the slogan of which was "Love, License, Leash Your Dog." I knew this phrase from public service announcements, but it was communicated mostly through bumper stickers placed on people’s cars and trash cans. I do not know if that slogan was new at the time, but it was new to me and it seemed to be new to the neighborhood.
As I remember it now this "Love, License, Leash Your Dog" movement was an attempt to amicably communicate differences between pet owners and non-pet owners, but the issue led to no shortage of angry altercations between the two sides. Those altercations were uncommon at the time of my incident on Versailles Drive, but became more common over the next several years as pet owners came to accept that their loving animals, virtual family members in most cases, were terrifying beasts to other people. I seem to remember this rising awareness as similar to that of smokers coming to understand that their cigarette puffs were unpleasant and noxious to non-smokers, and even to other smokers.
My memory of these scenarios may be warped. I was young at the time, but one rather strange memory involving my father is very clear in my mind. A neighbor’s dog had been allowed to roam the neighborhood for months. That dog would, of course, occasionally leave its droppings one lawn or another, and since this dogs home was next door to us we seemed to get more of that than other houses.
My father’s attempt to communicate his displeasure for this situation took a strange form. He did not confront the dog owners directly. Instead he attempted to place a "Love, License, Leash Your Dog" bumper sticker on the dog itself. This dog, whose owners also allowed it to chase after cars, bikes, and joggers; was clearly a bit threatened by this maneuver when it occured on our front lawn. My father never successfully got the sticker on the dog, but the effort resulted in a strange dance between him and this hapless dog. The dog’s legs buckled a bit, and there may have been a bit of a yelp as the dog ran off, leaving the unstuck bumper sticker in the grass.
Those dreams of unknown, invisible beasts preparing to pounce on me from behind the bushes filled my sleep through some portion of adulthood, probably ending in my mid 20s. In those dreams a dog is never visually articulated, nor is it really even assumed. Nevertheless I connect these dreams directly to the dog chases from Versailles Drive because during those chases I never looked directly at the dog. In these dreams I never look toward the bushes for fear of provoking whatever is back there, but the sense of hunted vs. hunter is no different than knowing what type of beast the enemy is.
