Enter Jake Dog

It was Christmas Day, 1989.  Mean Ol' Ms Baby Doll had been with us for almost two years.  I had no idea that our lives were incomplete.

Then I walked into the kitchen of my mother's house and there he was, a puppy who looked lost in a world he knew nothing about.  He was adorable.  

My youngest sister who lived in Milwaukee had a roommate who had a brother, who had bred his Australian Shepherd bitch and wound up with four pure bred puppies in his small apartment. All was well until the landlord discovered what was going on when neighbors complained of the barking at all hours. His sister solved the problem by taking in mother and pups and hiding them from her landlord by putting them in a very dark, very damp basement. 

It didn't last long.  Homes had to be found for the puppies. She convinced my sister that our aging mother needed a herd dog.  And here he was, on Christmas Day, scared of everything around him. I looked at the big paws, figured out he was going to be one big dog, looked at my little mother and knew. There was going to be a dog in my future. 

His name was Jack, or to be precise, Big Jack, the biggest of the litter.  So it said on his papers.  For some reason, my mother objected to Jack. She changed his name to Jake.

For a few months, he lived with my mother but as he grew bigger and bigger, she couldn't handle him.  More and more, I was the one that came over to take him for his walks. He bounced around the snow like a furry rubber ball dragging me with him. He was a handful for me and I was not five feet tall like my mother.  

Gary was good at training dogs so began to help out. We walked together, teaching him to walk with us and not tear our arms off. As January, February and March passed into spring,  poor Jake, who had been trained to do his business on the snow, became confused.  Smaller and smaller patches of snow had to be found. He looked at us and whimpered when he couldn't find those melting white patches. 

In May, my mother decided he was my dog after a lot of suggestions from her friends about taking him to the pound. That was something we could never do to that sweet little dog. Jake would live with Chris and me, but we agreed that my mother and Gary would share dogsitting while I was off on storytelling tours.  

Gary became alpha and would remain so. I was somewhat lower on the pecking order though he was fond of me as he was with everyone.