All pet lovers think that their pet is the greatest. I am not a pet lover. When Charlie came into our lives I thought he was going to be a bother. As time went on I realized that Charlie was not quite a dog but seemed to be a "little kid". He was extremely inquisitive and had such a vocabulary recognition that he understood most of what was said. Most notably he would peer directly into your face and make good eye contact when he was spoken to. He was also very intelligent - he would put his toys on the top of a 5" high box to act as a table as he would play with them. He loved to watch the arcade games with balls. As you can see in one of the pictures his excitement as he jumps as the skee ball is rolled. Also, his attention span far exceeded an average child's as he would sit for hours watching for a mouse that would never appear. Whenever an object was out of place in the home or work, he would bark to inform us of the problem. He would even bark at flies and try to bite at them. One of his favorite events was to go into our greenhouse to pick tomatoes. The only problem was that he couldn't tell the green cherry tomatoes from the red ripe ones.
   His health problems started around the age of 1 and he had bladder surgery to remove bladder stones. Two years later he had a second bladder surgery and at the age of 7 he had another. When he was 5 years old his breathing became somewhat noisy with lots of sneezing. We were very surprised to find that he had a very rare (especially for the location in our Schnauzer) cancer - multi lobular osteo CHONDRO sarcoma (a cartilage based tumor) in the rear nasal cavity with extensions pushing into the brain and behind the right eye. Since surgery was out of the question (the tumor was surrounding optic and nerve ganglia) we opted to give him a full course of radiation with some chemotherapy. We also started researching other non conventional cancer treatments involving diet and herbal treatments (no weird or holistic stuff) that are accepted by the health arena. Other than dry eyes from the radiation and temporary loss of facial hair, Charlie seemed to be fine. He was always called "a happy dog" by others and he had a great disposition considering his health problems and being put out around 40 times. Even just before his last day he would play like a puppy and ignored his labored breathing and what we realized later was headaches most of the last 3 weeks of his 8 years and 4 months.
   Charlie was with us at home and work and so we had much time together. The enjoyment we received from the "little kid" more than offset the problems and I did not look at his problems as being a bother. He was truly man's (and woman's) best friend and companion and will be greatly missed.        CHARLIE'S MEMORIAL PICTURES