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?"

Gum surgery

So this is going to be a quick post tonight. Not for the usual reasons (laziness, lack of discipline, dead battery), but because my mouth is sore and I'm tired.

Obviously from the photo this is a post about gum surgery. I can hear your question from here: "What do achingly cute German Shepherd puppies have to do with gum surgery?" Exactly. My first move when looking for a picture for this post was to go to the Google and search gum surgery.

Take it from me—like the surgery itself, that's something you don't want to do.

A couple visits back, my dentist noticed a small lesion on my lower gum behind my front teeth. Small though it was, they thought it would be a good idea to get it biopsied to make sure it was nothing to worry about. They also think it's a good idea to floss everyday. I'm not going to tell them how well I follow that advice.

Then on my last visit, it had gotten slightly larger. So this morning, at 8 a.m., the periodontist cut it out and sent it on its way. And really, is there a better way to start the day?

The good news is he's done this procedure a million times and seen a lot of these. Once he got it out and had a good gander, he assured me it's definitely nothing to worry about - and the pathology report will just be confirmation of that.

Meanwhile, I'm a little sore, but nothing that Tylenol can't handle. Ironically, for the next couple days I'm also on the same diet my daughter was when she had her tonsils out last month. Being the good patient I am, I'm following those instructions to the letter.

For dinner tonight I had two vanilla milkshakes from In-N-Out. Doctor's orders.

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.

Big dog

If you follow my posts with any regularity – and if you do, a library card would be much more rewarding - you know I’ve written many times about my German Shepherd Max, the World’s Greatest dog.

Max is 90 lbs. He’s a big dog, but I don’t see him that way. It’s because I see him every day, and when I’m rolling around on the floor playing with him, and he’s acting like a puppy (albeit a puppy who could rip my face off with those teeth) I forget he’s a big dog.

But there are occasional reminders.

Like when the pizza delivery guy comes to the door, looks down and sees me holding him by the collar, then jumps back four feet off our front steps. Or when people see me walking him, and they cross the street to give him a wide berth and go around him.

I have to say even though Max is a big dog, he’s the perfect size for me. He’s eleven years old – beautiful, healthy, playful, protective and enjoys a good pizza (delivery person) every now and again. I wouldn't want to bring a dog bigger than he is into the family. Max has been the Alpha dog his whole life, and he's not about to surrender the title now.

I’ve always liked big dogs. Sturdy, hearty, sweet, protective companions I can send with my kids to the liquor store at midnight. ”Daddy needs a beer. Take the dog.”

I’ve never understood the appeal of small dogs. And even if I did, I’ll never understand the reason for embarrassing them and making them feel even smaller by using them as accessories and carrying them in a purse, or a baby Bjorn.

For those of you counting, there were four "them"s in that last sentence.

We have a word for small dogs in my house. They're called “appetizers.”

If it were up to me, and we had the room (and a shovel for cleaning up the back yard), I’d go even bigger. I’d love an Irish Wolfhound. The problem for me isn’t their size, but the fact they only live about six years. They’re heartbreak dogs because they’re in your life and then, just as they've completely staked their claim on your heart, they’re gone.

Another breed I wouldn't mind owning is a Leonburger. Big and lion-like, these gentle giants are sweet tempered and great with everything: kids, other dogs and even cats. Not so nice to strangers though, which works just fine for me.

The problem with the Leonburger - besides the endless burger jokes all the time - "Would you like onions on that?" - is they’re drool puppies. So I'd need someone full-time with a mop, bucket and a lot of patience to follow him around the house and clean up the puddles.

I say I'd need someone because I'm not going to do it.

Now if you'll excuse me, the pizza I ordered is here. Max and I have to answer the door.