Once upon a time, I had no dog. However, one fateful evening at a restaurant in town, my family told me that they had a surprise for me.

"You have to guess what it is," they said. "Your clues are that it is a little bigger than a breadbox, it doesn't come from a store, and it is hairy." Of course, this last clue should have tipped me off, but I have this peculiar trait of randomly becoming dense. Thus, I couldn't figure out what it could be that my family had in store for me, and they wouldn't tell me until we got home.

After being pointed to the garage, and becoming extremely confused as to what sort of surprise would be in the garage, I opened the door and saw a small to medium-sized, black, tan and white dog! After years of wanting a dog, this was a good surprise, indeed. Finally, a pet of my very own!

However, I soon found out that this dog had been a stray that my sister, Melissa, had found roaming around the neigborhood. This meant that we would try to find the owners, and that we couldn't keep the dog forever. For this reason, we did not name the dog, and merely called him "Pooch," "Dog," and "Poocher."

My family put advertisements in the newspaper and around the neigborhood, in hopes (not shared by me) of finding the true owners of "Poocher." Every day, I would check the classified section of the paper for ads reading: "Lost Dog: smallish and cute dog lost near your neighborhood, Jeremy. So give him back! I also dreaded receiving a fateful phone call which would mean that I would have to give him up.

After a month and a half, though, we had received no word. Thus, Poocher, as we now had consistently been calling him, became our dog. It was too late to change his name, since he had already become accustomed to one new name, and we figured it was best to not give the dog an identity complex.

Regardless, Poocher has now lived with my family, and then me at college, since 1990. He knows very few tricks (three, actually) but he does respond to the commands for them in three different languages. Now that he is a college dog, Poocher gets all the attention a dog could hope for. If you meet him someday, be sure to rub his belly; if you do, you will have a friend for life.