My dog talked

I'm on my way to my current time in Taiwan. I'm just letting you know that I'm not this character that came to Taiwan from Ohio. Actually I'm not even from Ohio, but I'm off subject, so let's go on to my talking dog.

Gizmo was part of the family.

My dog passed away earlier this year in 2011, He was a shih tsu that we adopted in 2001, he enriched our lives and actually made our family more interesting.  He had a special relationship with my mom, my dad was his walker, my sister was his keeper and I was the person that he annoyed.  We adopted him from a pet store in Delaware, Ohio for US$100.  Very cheap for a pure bred Shih Tsu who was 5 years old at the time of adoption. He followed my sister out of the store, and to the car as we took him home. That's how he walked into our lives.

The first week that we had him, he didn't bark, he didn't growl, he didn't make a noise. He was testing us out. But when my friends came over while my family went to Chicago for the weekend, he let loose some barks! A bark that came in bursts of threes. It was always a bark in bursts of three. As we observed over the 10 years that we owned him, he had special ways of doing things and it always had to be the same, sometimes and to this day, we think he had OCD.

Neighbors cat eating Gizmo's Food. Gizmo got no respect
from neighborhood cats. 

He also had a penchant for trying to be friends with cats. We believed that his previous owner had cats and he was friends with his previous owners cat. The problem that arose for him is that the cats in our neighborhood didn't like him. They would hit his head, paw at his head and usually a neighbors cat would follow us home from walks and go into our house. Once again, Gizmo would try to be nice but the cats wanted nothing to do with him.  I'm guessing he just wanted to be friends with them, but not every animal liked him.

When we went on walks, people knew who he was. When i came home from College on the weekends, Gizmo would want us to take him for walks. It came down to me since my family volunteered me to take him for walks. My family would say, "Oh, Gizmo knows where to go for walks, just follow him."  I trusted my family and I let Gizmo take me for a walk. On our way I would pass people who would say, "Hey Gizmo" or "Hello Gizmo!" to which i would ask my dog when they were out of ear shot, "how do they know  you?" He would look back at me and have a kind of smirk on his face and kept walking. My dog was famous! 

Gizmo Leading the way for walks

And finally this is what makes Gizmo unique and the title of this article.  You have probably heard of dogs saying "I love you" and "mamma" and other cute sayings dogs say. Well, my dog learned how to growl my name.  He probably heard my mom and dad call me Howard and learned how to growl my name over time. I would ignore Gizmo when I was playing my PS2 NHL hockey and Madden Football games. It got to the point that he would wait for me to finish the games so we would go to sleep. He'd sit on the couch behind as I was playing my games and he'd growl "HOWAR" until I turned around and looked at him. A few times I would ignore him completely and he'd growl "HOWAR, HOWAR, HOWAR" three times until I acknowledged that he was there. He was definitely a fun dog and though he's gone now, I still have the memory of him calling me "HOWAR, HOWAR, HOWAR." Told you, he had OCD. 

This dog learned to say my name.