This photo is from Norm's first day in my house. He would have been about one year and four months (or so) old.
So today will be the story of how Norm ended up living in my house. One nice, sunny and warm morning on December 16, 2011, I opened up the garage door to go to work. And there, in my driveway, was this ecstatically happy white dog I've never seen before, greeting me like I'm his favorite human ever. This dog was not showing any signs of being stressed out or nervous or scared. Just really really happy.
I had something I needed to do at work that morning, and I wasn't really sure what to do, but I knew letting him run around the neighborhood (with a very busy street on the back side of my house) was not an option. So I got him to go into my backyard, which is walled off with a side gate like just about every backyard in Las Vegas. He went to the backyard with absolutely no difficulty. I went in the house and filled a big bowl of water and left him with that while I went to work.
When I got to the office, a very short drive away, I got my assistant Carole to come with me to take this very happy white dog to the vet to see if he was chipped. We get back to my house. I'm not sure if he had a collar or if he was nude -- I think I had a leftover collar to put on him from when I had my greyhound -- but I had a leash and with absolutely no difficulty or struggle, this white dog jumped into the car for an adventure ride to the vet.
He was chipped. And the vet's office was able to call the owner and let them know the dog was at the vet's office. The owners lived a block and a half from me, but I had not known them or the dog at this time. We Las Vegans don's socialize much with our neighbors. Apparently, I learned later, the neighbor that the vet's office called absolutely sunk when she got call from a vet. She was immediately assuming the dog had gotten out (which he had) (and, which, apparently, he was doing with frequency), and onto the busy nearby street and had been hit by car, which would explain why a vet was calling. Nope. The dog was happy and healthy and had been on the loose.
The then-owners worked long hours, at jobs not really close by, so it was difficult for them when this dog got loose. Like mine, their backyard was enclosed by a cinderblock wall and had a gate. Their gate had grating on it. The dog either was shimmying up the gate using the holes in the grating for climbing. Or he was jumping high enough to grab the top of the gate and work his way over top of it. He then would fall about six feet or so to the concrete. What a shock then that, later in life, this dog would develop degenerative hip disease after months of jumping/falling down several feet onto concrete.
Regardless, he was serially getting out of the backyard. Which was both dangerous for the dog and frustrating for the humans. He had worn them out and so we agreed that I would take this dog in. On the cellphone connection, I misheard them telling me what his name was. The owner said "Norton." I heard "Norman." And the rest is history.
Norm had absolutely no hard feelings toward his prior owners. When he would see them on our walks -- which happened regularly until they moved to the other side of the country -- at which point we stopped running into them because, even though Norm's walks were very long, we didn't make it to Arkansas on even our longest walk -- but when Norm saw them he was ecstatically happy to see his old friends. So Norm clearly had a great life when he lived with them. He just wanted to go out and explore the neighborhood some when they were not home.
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