Max

When I was younger, we rescued a Rotty pup, and named him Max, for Maximus.

This dog was bigger than my brother and I combined, but he never hurt us, no matter how wild we got when we were playing with him. My brother would wrestle with him, and Max would ALWAYS win, by the simple expedient of sitting on him.

Me, I rode him like a pony.

Of course, Max was also the reason that we put in a six foot fence.

At that point my parents were running a restaurant, and we had a house right across the parking lot from it. When Max was a puppy, we had a typical four foot chain link fence, and it wasn't a problem. When he got bigger, though, it started to be a problem.

See, Max liked people, and he was smart enough to realize that the cafe was part of our territory, and thus part of his. We never had a problem with him being aggressive with people, but he did frighten a lot of them.

Max, being a big puppy, decided to get out of the yard and go say hi to the customers that pulled in to the cafe lot. And soon, he started taking the slower ones by the hand and leading them to the front door, and then back out to their cars.

He always delivered the right person to the right car.

Of course, the older people got a little startled when a hundred plus pounds of dog came bounding up to them, grabbing their hand, even if gently, in a mouth full of teeth and slobber, and leading them up to the door of the cafe.

Max graduated to being Truck Dog for one of the regular truckers that came through, my brother and I lost our wrestling partner, and we were left with an empty yard...

But not for too long.