Norm Stories: All Those Times People Would Stop Their Cars Just to Meet Norm

Here's another thing that I thought was unique about Norm. On our walks, people who I never met before would stop us and ask me, "Is that Norm?"

Maybe this happens with other dogs, but I've never seen it happen with anyone but Norm. People would come up to me on our walks -- long walks -- and tell me they had heard about Norm from a neighbor or a friend and when they saw this white dog walking his long walks, they just had to stop and meet Norm for themselves. This even happened on more than one occasion with people driving past us. They would turn their cars around and stop just to ask if it was Norm and, once confirmed, fuss on him while he, in turn, fussed back on them. Sometimes people would stop their cars not because they knew it was Norm, but because they would always see this happy white dog walking all over the area, in places a mile or so from the last place they would have seen Norm, and they just wanted to meet this happy, well-exercised dog.

Norm, of course, was always happy to meet people under either of those sort of circumstances. Actually, I don't need that last part. He was always happy to meet people and the people he met were almost always happy to meet him. (There would be the occasional non-dog person that Norm would try to convert to being a dog person. He was occasionally successful.)

And this doesn't even count the dozens of times that people who were also walking stopped to introduce themselves to Norm. Not to me. Norm. I was just his personal assistant.