That dog

Jon Stewart brought me to tears last night. It wasn't because he was talking about some atrocity happening in the world, a celebrity who died tragically too young, or recounting that scene from Forest Gump where Forest asks Jenny if his son is smart or if he's like him.

Nope. Jon Stewart brought me to tears talking about his dog, Dipper, who he'd lost the day before taping last night's Daily Show. As you can see in the video, he can barely get through telling us about how he met Dipper, how he came to be his dog and how much he meant to him and his family.

For Stewart, Dipper was that dog.

Anyone who's ever had a dog, whether they admit it or not, on some level understands the deal they're making from the start—that they're going to be with us for far too short a time, during which they'll steal your heart and never, ever give it back.

And anyone who's lost a dog understands how deep the grief runs. I've been through it with dogs I've loved too many times. Even now, they're always in my orbit, and my life. My home is emptier without them, and my life is immeasurably better in every way for them having been here.

Except for the shedding. I could do without the shedding.

In the clip, Stewart wishes we all find that dog. For me, it was Max. An actual German long-hair German Shepherd, Max was the world's greatest dog. Literally not a day goes by I don't miss him.

Maybe that's because his ashes are still sitting on mantle. Who's to say?

It's been said before but I'm going to say it again: with their unconditional love, unlimited joy and undeniable loyalty, we don't deserve dogs. We just don't.

Anyway, tonight I hope Dipper is playing hard with his new best friend Max.

And like Jon Stewart, my wish for you is that you're lucky enough and blessed enough in your life to find that dog.

Ace 2014-2023

At first, Ace wasn’t the one. Gus was the one.

It was January 2016, and we were only a few weeks past losing Max, the world’s greatest dog. I’d been saying loudly and repeatedly I wasn’t going to be ready for another dog for a long while, and I didn’t want to hear any conversation about racing out to replace Max (as if any dog could ever replace him).

Fast forward three and half weeks. I started scrolling the Westside German Shepherd Rescue website and came across Gus. He looked like an awesome dog, and bore quite the resemblance to Max. And since WGSR was having an open house soon, I thought what would be the harm In going down there and shaking paws with Gus in person.

So on a Saturday morning, with the wife and daughter in the living room in their jammies watching a leftover Hallmark Channel Christmas movie, which explains why I have no recollection of it, I came bursting in fully showered, dressed and ready to go.

”Where are we going?”

”Downtown to the Westside German Shepherd Rescue. Just to look.”

I’d never had a rescue dog and was curious about it and what the dogs were like. Max had been a German import: a true German German Shepherd we had since he was a puppy. I thought if we ever got a rescue, it'd be strange not to know who he was from the time he was a puppy, but it might be nice to have one that came housebroken, with adult teeth and without an appetite for couches and pillows.

At the open house, Gus was beautiful but scared, as many of the dogs were. Clearly he'd had an abusive prior owner and was fearful of people, particularly men. This is true of a lot of rescue dogs. When you see these beautiful dogs recoil and put their tail between their legs when you try to pet them, it makes you hope there’s a deep, dark circle in hell for people who abuse these animals.

Anyway, after meeting Gus, another shepherd named Jake and a couple others, we were ready to head back home. The woman at WSGR who’d been doing the introductions, and seeing we weren’t having much luck, asked us what we were looking for. We basically described another Max. She said, “Hang on, I have someone I want you to meet.”

She went in back, and a few minutes later came out with Ace.

He was beautiful. Where Max’s eyes had been dark, Ace’s were light brown and a little freaky looking. Max had smaller triangle-shaped ears, and Ace had two giant ears sticking straight up that we figured could pick up 300 channels. Max was a long-haired German Shepherd. Ace was a short hair.

We spent some time with Ace, walked with him a bit and then let my daughter walk him. She got down to eye level with him, where he proceeded to put his giant paw in her hand and give her face a sloppy, paint roller size licking.

That did it. We were at the point of no return.

Ace was our beautiful boy for six years. Every German Shepherd bonds with a person, and in Ace's case it was my wife. He was her shadow, her protector, her love, following her everywhere and always having to know where she was and what she was doing.

If she'd had plans for a life going to the bathroom alone, Ace put an end to them.

About three years ago, we discovered in the most terrifying way that Ace had epilepsy. I've posted about it here, so I won't revisit all the gory details now. We managed his seizures, which would run few and far between and then, for no reason, frighteningly close to each other.

Last Friday, Ace had a seizure that medically and behaviorally altered him in a way he couldn't come back from. So we made the decision every pet owner dreads, and knows they'll have to make eventually. As my friend Scott Thomson says, "They're angels with expiration dates."

We wanted to make his send off as lovely, if that's a word you can use, as possible for him. We gave him an In-N-Out burger-double patty (but not a Double Double cause of the cheese - he was an all meat guy). We leashed him up and took him for a long walk around the neighborhood, where he got in all his usual sniffs and explorations. When he got back to the house, he enjoyed some whipped cream his favorite way: straight from the can. He was in good spirits.

Instead of a cold veterinary office, we had a vet come to the house and said our goodbyes through our tears in the backyard. We were all down on the ground around him, holding him and making sure he knew how much we loved him.

Right now I imagine Ace and Max having a conversation about how the wife, daughter and I were as dog owners.

ACE: Did he do that stupid treat-in-his-mouth thing with you?

MAX: All the time! But it made him happy so I put up with it.

ACE: He'd always brag about how we'd never rip his face off.

MAX: Good thing he wasn't a mind reader!

ACE and MAX laugh hysterically.

Ace was the strong, silent type. And without his giant presence and even bigger heart, now the house is silent.

We'll miss his manly sighs when he laid his powerful body down. The way he looked up at you with his "Don't you love me?" face whenever we held anything edible in our hands. The look on his face when he'd lay dreaming on the love seat. His joyful howling when he knew he was going on a walk.

We're going to miss every little thing about him, and we'll love him forever.

Most people get one great dog in their life if they're lucky. As the wife said, we definitely exceeded our quota.

ACE: Who're all these treats and giant bones for?

MAX: They're for us pal!

ACE: Do we take them over that bridge right now?

MAX: Not yet. We're going to wait here awhile.

One cool cat

If you know anything about me — and if you don't, go back and read the previous twelve-hundred posts, I'll wait here — it'll be pretty clear I'm without a doubt quite the vocal dog lover. I love most dogs, especially the larger breeds. The kind that lets me send my kid to the liquor store at midnight and say "Dad needs a beer. Take the dog."

I'm particularly partial to German Shepherds. I'm currently on my second one, Ace, who was a rescue and is just the sweetest boy. And of course before him, there was the world's greatest dog, Max. You can read Max's story in the wonderful, moving, heartfelt, funny, beautiful labor-of-love book Gone Dogs, available here. Or here. And even here.

But despite being a dog person, I have a secret I don't tell many people. However given the readership numbers here I feel pretty safe in, shall we say, letting the cat out of the bag (sorry).

A long, long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, I had a cat. Her name was Mr. Kitty. And I loved her.

The short story is Mr. Kitty was a stray who followed my then girlfriend now wife home and never left. So right off the bat we had something in common.

We named her Mr. Kitty because we weren't close enough to check out the equipment, so we went with that.

Mr. Kitty would show up at my girlfriend's door every night. We'd feed her, take her on walks around the block (she just followed us) and then bring her in for the night where she'd sleep on my head. We'd let her out in the morning when we were leaving for work, and she'd always be there to greet us when we got home.

When we moved into my apartment in Santa Monica, even though there were no pets allowed we brought Mr. Kitty with us. We'd hide her when the maintenance people had to come in, or when the fire alarms in the building went off and we'd have to walk down seventeen flights of stairs with her disguised under a blanket or in a box.

A close friend of ours who's a veterinarian estimated she was about four years old. She was seventeen when we had to say goodbye to her. So for thirteen years, I had a cat.

Who slept on my head.

Who I gave subcutaneous fluids to everyday for years for her kidney disease.

Who when she got seriously old and ill, I gave cat enemas to so she could do her business without straining or being in pain. This was something I could've gone my whole life without knowing how to do and I would've been just fine.

When my son was born, someone gave us a Moses basket as a gift. But we never used it for my son. We put it under his crib, and it became Mr. Kitty's bed when she got to be too old and weak to hop up on ours.

Not long after, the time came to say goodbye. We took her to my vet friend, and I held her on my lap as she passed. I cried every time I thought about it for weeks after. I still do.

So when people say I don't know what it's like having a cat, a small, knowing smile comes across my unfairly handsome face. I know they're wrong. I know exactly what it's like, because I had the coolest cat ever.

Which is the reason I don't want another one.

That, and the fact Ace has another name for cats. He calls them appetizers.

Here's the scoop

If you know anything about me, and if you don’t by now then maybe our season is just over, you know I own two fabulous dogs.

Ace is our German Shepherd rescue. We think he was two-years old when we got him, and he had the unenviable job of following our first German Shepherd Max, the world’s greatest dog (who you can read about in the stunning book of dog stories Gone Dogs, the perfect gift for that special dog-loving someone). However Ace has risen to the occasion swimmingly. He is an awesome guy with a completely unhealthy attachment to my wife. Look at her the wrong way. Go on, I dare ya.

Then there’s Lucy. We like to refer to her as an American Sock terrier. My daughter’s friend’s dog had puppies, and Lucy was one of them. She just came home with my wife and daughter one day. I didn’t want to love her, but here we are (talking about Lucy, not the wife and daughter).

Anyway, if you happen to have the good fortune of owning a dog, you already know there are so many great things about it.

The unconditional love.

The excitement no one else in your life will ever have for you when you return from being gone ten minutes.

The tail-wagging faster than windshield wipers set on high.

The warmth and comfort laying next to them on the floor, or if you’re like us, the bed.

The deep-sleep twitching that defies the boundaries of sweetness.

But for all those great things about being a dog parent, there are some realities of dog ownership we don’t discuss often (even though I’ve mentioned them before here and here).

In a word: poop. With big dogs come big poops. For the longest time, because I bought it when Max was the world's cutest puppy, the only thing I had was a small scoop to clean up the yard after my big dog.

It was frustrating, time consuming and extremely unpleasant. Just like my high school girlfriend.

Stay with me. It may not seem like it, but I’ll land the plane in a minute. Sometimes, even though the obvious answer is right in front of me I just don’t see it. I remember one time I was having lunch with a co-worker at Carl’s Jr. right after the BBQ Chicken Club sandwich came out. I told her, “This would be a great sandwich if it didn’t have that flavorless bacon.” To which she replied, “Take the bacon off.”

Like I said, slow on the uptake.

Here’s what that has to do with dog poop. We were at our fabulous friend Joan’s house one day. Joan had two or three large dogs, and at one point she went to clean up after them. I noticed she was using a super-sized poop scooper, and was easily making short work of the souvenirs her pups had left. The clouds parted, the angel choir sang and a little voice in my big head said, “Don’t you feel stupid now Einstein.”

Later that very same day, I became the proud owner of the large poop-removal device you see here: the easy-grip, rubber-fitted wood handle, the oversized tray, the convenient clasp that keeps the two together when not in use.

It’s definitely made the chore much more, not fun, but less unpleasant. There’s no struggle to make things fit. I’m able to collect more at once. And it’s far less stressful and time-consuming than it used to be.

No snappy end line today—poop is funny enough. But all this talk of it does remind me of the old joke: There's this guy who ran off to join the circus. The job he got was walking behind the elephants, scooping up their droppings. When his friend told him he should quit, and asked him how he could do such an awful, disgusting job the guy said, "What? And give up show business?"

All alone in the moonlight

Here's what I love about my friend Nicole. When I confessed to her, somewhat quietly and definitely with a heapin' helpin' of personal shame, that I actually wanted to go see the movie CATS, without missing a beat she said, "I DO TOO!" So right then and there we made a date to get liquored up (the only way to enjoy it) and go.

Sadly, by the time we were ready to make a night of it, CATS was out of the theaters (tried for an "out of the bag" joke here, I just couldn't make it work).

Anyway, this post was going to be all about how awful the movie is, the horrible reviews, the millions it cost Universal, why I wanted to see it and how on her worst day Nicole is a far better writer than I am (although I wasn't going to dwell on that).

But on the way to looking for an image to go with this post, I ran into a bunch of CATS parody posters.

If you know anything about me—and I believe you may know more than you want to by now—you know I'm a dog person. I'm constantly overdoing it with posts on the interwebs about my Hide-A-Sock terrier Lucy, and my second German Shepherd Ace.

By the way, you can read all about my first German Shepherd Max in a tearjerking yet heartwarming story I wrote for a book called Gone Dogs, which every dog lover should have sitting on their coffee table, and every dog lover's friend should be buying them. What's that? Oh sure, you can buy it here.

I may have digressed a bit.

So anyway while I was looking for the CATS movie poster for this post, I ran across several parody cat posters. Apparently there's an entire cat underground that spends their days on Photoshop making these posters. Any one of which I'm guessing is better than the CATS movie.

So for your pleasure, here are a few I found that I'm pretty sure are more entertaining than the movie.

And Nicole, one word: Cable.

Gone Dogs

It's taken me years, but I've finally written something I believe people will actually want to read and enjoy (and I think we both know it's not this blog).

Not that you don't already love my spellbinding prose about twin-turbo engines in Korean sports sedans. Or my memorable musings about the unparalleled amenities, Nappa leather and 22-way adjustable driver's seat in the top-of-the-line, flagship of the fleet. And I have no doubt you're waiting with bated breath—and who would blame you—for the next installment of a little gem I like to call Exceptional Lease Offers.

I'm just messin' with ya. I don't read 'em either.

What I'm talking about here is the story I've written about the world's greatest German Shepherd—the late, great Max—in the newly released, beautifully produced coffee-table book Gone Dogs.

A project by dog lovers extraordinaire Jim Mitchem and Laurie Smithwick, Gone Dogs is a heart-warming, heart-breaking and ultimately life-affirming collection of stories about the power of love through our relationships with dogs who are no longer with us.

A call went out to parents of all kinds of pups to submit stories of their dearly departed canines, and I was lucky enough to have the one I wrote about Max selected for the inaugural volume.

Since I am in advertising—I'm not proud—I'm going to be shameless about it and just ask for the order. What you need to do right now is go to Amazon and buy several copies for your dog-lovin' friends. And their dog-lovin' friends. In fact, I know it's only August, but why not beat the Christmas rush and stock up on a few copies for the holidays.

I also want to say that I can't thank Jim and Laurie enough for including my story. It means the world to me knowing people will get to see what a magnificent dog Max was, and how much I loved him.

Here's what I'm saying: order yourself a copy today. And when it comes, just sit, stay and enjoy every one of these beautiful, heartfelt stories.

Starting with mine.

Remains of the day

Shrink wrapped, pine box, paw print in clay and a Forget Me Not card on top, Max came home today. It's safe to say just not in the way we'd all hoped.

When I went to our vet to pick up Max's remains, there was a lobby full of anxious pet owners waiting to see the doctors. I can only imagine me walking out with a pine box filled with the ashes of a 90 lb. German Shepherd was not a confidence builder.

We're all moving forward, but slowly. His empty crate with the thick mattress pad still sits in the corner of our living room. While it would take about one minute to collapse it and put it away, no one seems quite ready to do it yet. We're still grieving the loss, and I imagine the same will be true with his remains.

We have this nice notion of spreading his ashes around the yard where he loved to play and hang out, saying a few words, shedding a few tears and then moving on. But the truth is not a day goes by where the conversation doesn't turn to Max, and we get a little weepy.

So like disassembling his crate, it's going to take a while for us to work up to the finality of spreading his ashes and saying goodbye for the last time.

Strange as it sounds, it is nice to have him home. And I think Max, being the fun-loving playful guy he always was, would appreciate what I've said to his remains several times since they've been here.

"Max, stay."

Max 2004 - 2016

It was love at first sight.

We'd known we wanted a German Shepherd because we'd already tried one on for size. We rescued a GSD puppy named Ruby. She was about 5-months old and beyond cute. What we didn't find out until after she bit my daughter in the face was she'd belonged to a homeless man and had lived on the streets since she was born. One day the owner of the rescue was walking by her, recognized Ruby as a pure-bred GSD, and bought her from him.

Once we brought her home, she slept on the bed with us. Nipped at our heels. And didn't take to training in the slightest. Then, on the fifth day we had her, in what was probably a bit of overactive puppy play, she decided to jump up and have a quick, light chomp on my daughter's face with her razor puppy teeth. She pierced her skin, drew blood and scared my daughter. So Ruby bought herself a one-way ticket back to rescue.

What we learned from the experience was we loved the German Shepherd breed. But we decided we wanted to know a little more about who the dog was and its history.

The day was sunny and warm when we made the congested drive on the 91, then halfway up a hill on an unpaved road out to Thinschmidt Kennels in Corona. They'd just gotten in a litter of German import puppies. It was almost too much cute to bear. In one kennel there were about 5 or 6 playing, all short-haired shepherds except for this one brutally cute fur ball off to the side. He was quieter and less rambunctious than the rest.

I knew the minute I saw him he was the one.

My wife was drawn more to his sister, one of the short-haired ones. But almost at the exact same time she was telling me this, the fur ball got up, came over, sat on my wife's feet and looked up at her.

It's a good thing stealing hearts is legal in Corona.

We used to joke that Max never read the German Shepherd manual. He had no idea how scary or mean he was supposed to be. Not to say he was a pushover, but he wasn't a high-strung shepherd that was tightly wound and always on alert. He was a sweet guy - unless you were the postman, a stranger coming up our walkway or someone he didn't like when my daughter was walking him.

I used to tell Max to sit. Then I'd put a chicken treat halfway in my mouth, lean over, and he'd bare his teeth, get right up to my face and gently take it from me. When I did this in front of some people, it scared the hell out of them. All I heard was how they'd never let a dog like Max get that close to their face. And sure, I suppose the fear with some German Shepherds would be getting your face ripped off. But the thought never crossed my mind. Or his. That's not who he was.

He especially loved to roughhouse in the backyard with my wife, because she was the one who'd really get into it with him. She gave as good as she got, and she was proud of the souvenir bruises up and down her arms that came from their play. When she'd hold his ball before she threw it, he'd jump up and grab her arm with his teeth to try and get it. He'd never bite down, he'd just hold her arm in his mouth like a Golden Retriever.

Maybe it's not so much he didn't read the manual as he read the wrong one.

Max's fighting weight was between 85-92 lbs. He wasn't a small dog, but because we saw him every day we never thought of him as large - he was just our dog. However every once in awhile, when someone approaching us would suddenly give him a terrified look then cross the street to pass us, or the pizza delivery guy jumped back five feet off my front porch when he saw me holding Max at the door, we'd remember he wasn't exactly a chihuahua.

Because he was a long-haired GSD and a lot of people had never seen one before, they loved to tell us he was a mixed breed and not a pure bred. This was despite the fact we'd seen pictures of his parents in Germany, knew his bloodline going back five generations and had papers on him. Oh yeah, and he was our dog. We always got a kick out of it.

Max had a lot of nicknames, but my favorite was the one my wife gave him: The Gunslinger. It was because in the middle of the night, he'd decide to come into our bedroom and sleep on the big pillow we had for him on the floor in there. He'd slam our bedroom door open like saloon doors in the old west, then he'd come and crash down on his pillow.

It only gave us heart attacks for the first five or six years.

When we got Max, the breeder stressed how important it was to socialize German Shepherds, even more so than most breeds. He was a large dog, and he had to be comfortable around people. So it seemed to me a few bring-a-dog-to-work days was a good place to start.

Almost everyone who came in contact with Max loved him for how beautiful he was inside and out. I worked at Y&R when I started socializing Max, and I brought him in a few times to get him used to strangers (and believe me, nobody's stranger than people who work in ad agencies - BAM!). After people met him, they weren't strangers very long.

Kurt Brushwyler, Ben Peters, Johanna Joseph Peters, Debbie Lavdas, Imke Daniel, Cameron Young, Amy Cook, Zac Ryder, Leroy Tellez, Janice MacLeod and Cecilia Gorman, thank you for loving on Max so much in those early days. He hadn't been exposed to a lot of people at that point, and your kindness, caring and demonstration of love towards him gave him a sense of confidence and security, and taught him from the beginning people weren't something to be afraid of.

I don't know if you all remember doing that. I'll never forget it.

Here's another thing: even though Max was the dog-liest of dogs, he was cat like in that it often seemed he had nine lives.

Years ago he had what turned out to be a bacterial infection that caused him to stumble and fall, off balance and confused. At first we were told it was likely a brain tumor. Fortunately, our close friend David Feldman is one of the premier diagnostic veterinarians in the country. We told him Max's symptoms, sent him the tests, and he prescribed antibiotics. It cleared up in a few days.

About three years ago, my wife noticed Max was being lethargic and not his usual self. Her Jedi instincts jumped into action, and she rushed him to the vet where they discovered a giant mass on his spleen which could rupture and kill him at any minute. Again, we turned to David, who arranged for us to bring Max to his practice where there was a surgeon and team standing by at midnight on a Saturday night. At two o'clock in the morning, we got a call Max had come through his spleen-ectomy just swimmingly.

It was not lost on us how close we came to losing him, and we've always considered every day since then gravy.

There was also the time he had his ass kicked by the neighbor's cat, and almost got his eyes clawed out. I'm certain he wouldn't want you to know about that.

In the past few days, he'd been lethargic in the extreme. Not getting up to walk, eat or pee. We took him to the vet, who saw right away he was critically anemic. After some x-rays, he discovered a large mass in the cavity where his spleen had been. It was crushing his intestines, and he was bleeding internally either from it or through it from his liver or kidneys.

There were options, including surgery. But because his red cell count was so low, he never would've survived it. We could've transfused him, but because he was bleeding internally, it would've been like a leaky bucket, going in his vein, bleeding out inside and not doing any good at all along the way. None of the options were promising or guaranteed - except to cause him pain, vastly reduce his quality of life and confuse and scare the hell out of him. He was 11 years old. We weren't going to put him through it.

It's almost always a lose-lose situation when your brain has to win out over your heart.

Since my parents never owned a house, we lived in apartments my whole life. In fact the house I'm in now is the first one I've ever lived in. I could never have dogs growing up. Max was my first. Thanks to him, I know I'll never be without a German Shepherd.

Max also had a very special trick. We didn't train him to do it, he just did it. His trick was making each one of us feel as if he loved us the most (although if I had to place money on it, I'd bet on my daughter). Max will always be the dog of our lives.

So we move on, grateful for having had him as long as we did, and finding peace knowing he's running free in greener pastures. As real dog lovers like to say, he's crossed over the Rainbow Bridge, and he'll be waiting.

It's a crazy world, and the older I get the less sure I am of anything. But there are two things I can say with absolute certainty: Max was well loved every single minute of his beautiful life.

And so were we.

Dog tired

If you’ve been keeping up with this blog – and if you have, you really should investigate getting a library card and reading something more worthwhile – you may already know we recently brought home a new addition to the family.

Her name is Lucy. And since she’s obviously not a German Shepherd, it’s pretty apparent I had no choice or say in the matter. The fact is I never saw Lucy until my wife and daughter walked in the door with her.

Let’s talk about what I like to refer to as “the real dog” for a moment. When we got our German Shepherd Max, the world’s greatest dog, we got him at a breeder. He is a pure bred long-haired German Shepherd. And he’s a German German Shepherd. He was actually imported from Germany, and because of that has more frequent flyer miles on Lufthansa than I do. He responds to commands in German. And when people hear us give him a command, they all ask the same question: “Does he speak German?”

It never gets old.

Since my wife and I are both working, we ponied up the money to have Max trained by the breeder before we brought him home. We figured the smart play was to make sure we didn't have a dog that big that we couldn't control. For six weeks, we drove out to the breeder in Corona on the weekends to work with him.

On the seventh weekend, we brought him home.

The reason I'm explaining what we did with Max is because we're not doing it with Lucy. She's a mutt, with some terrier in her blood. My daughter's friend's dog had puppies, and that's where she came from. No fancy kennels. No imports. No breeders. We're training her ourselves.

And while I'm perfectly capable, it is exhausting in a way I haven't felt in a long time.

Puppies like to sleep for a few hours at a time, then run around like Tasmanian devils for short bursts in between naps. And they have to be watched as they're spinning out of control, to make sure they don't hurt themselves or anyone else. Or break something. Or get so excited they have to express it in the only way they know how. Peeing in the house.

Then there's the part about teething. What you don't notice at first glance - because you're so taken by how cute Lucy is -are the three rows of puppy shark teeth. Fortunately, once she bites that fleshy part of your hand between your thumb and index finger, you never forget.

Everything is a game to Lucy. When she's out in the back yard and done doing her business, my idea is to get her back inside. In her mind, the chase is on. She makes sure I have to chase her all over the yard and work up a good sweat before she decides to go back in the house. This is especially pleasant on mornings when I have to get to work.

The good news is now she's better about sleeping in her crate, and at least she doesn't decide to cry like she's being murdered until about five in the morning.

I was spoiled by Max, the world's greatest dog. And I'll be the first to admit I'm not so good or patient with the puppy stuff.

Even though she'll only weigh about a third of what Max does, and be less than half his height when she's fully grown, I'm hoping I'll grow to love her as much as I do my big old German Shepherd.

For right now, my favorite part is when she doesn't do what she's supposed to, and I get to say "Lucy, you got some 'splainin' to do."

The account executive of bodily organs

Here's how my Saturday went.

In the morning when I woke up, I found my dog Max on his pillow in our bedroom. Now, Max comes and goes in and out of our room during the night, but he's never there in the morning when we wake up. But I decided to just accept it for what it was: he finally realized he couldn't tear himself away from me.

When I left the room and called him though, he didn't come. He just stayed on his pillow, looking up at me with those big, brown eyes.

Something wasn't right in dogtown.

We wound up taking him to our dog-walker's vet since our local vet's office was closed. After an X-ray, we discovered why Max was being so sluggish: a grapefruit-sized tumor on his spleen.

It sounds awful, but it's apparently quite common in larger breeds - like German Shepherds - and usually around the eight-year mark. Max is eight and a half.

We were in shock how fast this came on him. Just the day before, we were playing with him in the yard, and he was chasing, jumping, barking and just generally trying to kill us (not literally - we love to play rough with him). The day before, the World's Greatest Dog was the World's Happiest Dog.

David Feldman, a close friend of ours for over 25 years, and the world's greatest vet, explained it like this: the problem is the spleen. If it were the heart, you'd notice his troubled breathing much earlier. If it were his brain, we'd see him unsteady on his feet. But in a dog, much like in a human, the spleen is pretty much a useless organ that does nothing, which is why as the tumor grows on it you don't notice it until it's almost too late.

My wife called it "the account executive of organs." Before you get all over me for that, she was an account person in her former life.

We wound up driving Max up to David's office in West Hollywood around eleven last night, and by midnight he was in surgery. Yes there are vets and emergency clinics closer to us, but when it comes to the big stuff, David and his staff are the only ones we trust. After we dropped Max off, we were able to breathe for the first time that evening.

About 2a.m., we got a call from the doctor at David's practice who did the surgery, saying the words we were hoping to hear, "It couldn't have gone better."

Now there are a few ways this can go. The tumor they removed along with the spleen is either malignant or benign. If it's benign, Max heals up and life goes on. If it's malignant, we have maybe two to four months if we do nothing, and maybe six to twelve if he goes through chemo. And of course, chemo brings its own set of pleasantries with it.

So we'll wait for the pathology report and then we'll have some decisions to make. But while we're waiting, we'll do what we've always done: love Max as unconditionally and fully as he's always loved us.

There are four of us in this house. Max's magic is that each of us thinks he loves us the most.

Don't call me Toto

While I love my German Shepherd more than any reasonable person – even a dog person - should, the truth is he’s not the only dog that’s fetched my heart and not given it back.

There was Fred, the one before Max.

Fred actually belonged to my wife. Having grown up with dogs as she did, I would've expected her to research the breed thoroughly, talk to breeders, get medical checks before she bought one. She did none of that. Instead, she let her heart do the window shopping and got Fred at a pet store years ago at Beverly Center.

When she held him, he spoke to her and said he needed to come home and live with her. Which coincidentally is the same way I wound up here.

I'd always been more of a big dog person. But the thing about Fred was he had no concept whatsoever that he wasn’t a big dog. He’d take on anything: Great Danes, Dobermans, Pit Bulls, FedEx drivers. Fear just wasn’t anything he knew about it. He was a great burglar alarm. Nothing got near the house without us knowing about it. And since Cairn terriers were bred to be ratters, we never had any trace of vermin anywhere near the house (not that we do now, but when Fred was around they didn’t even think about it).

The one downside to having a Cairn terrier was the way people reacted to him. As if it was the most original comment in the world and they were the very. first. person. EVER. to think of it, they’d inevitably say, “Oh look, Toto.”

Toto my ass.

Fred was a fighter, a lover, a guardian angel. He had a sense of humor. As he got older, he was also a cranky old man. He’d lay at the foot of the bed, and when you’d touch him, like a squeeze-toy he’d emit a “grrrrrrrr” letting you know exactly how happy he was about being touched while trying to sleep.

Fred's time to go came two weeks shy of his 17th birthday. Truthfully it probably came sooner, but none of us, especially my wife, were ready to let him go.

When we went to the vet for the final time, my daughter held him while he got the shot. We all cried - sad that he was gone, happy he'd live such an outstanding life for so long (17 is 119 in dog years).

The one thing I've learned is it doesn't matter whether I own a small dog or a big one.

They all seem to have the same giant heart.