- When we still lived in Tel Aviv, I used to take Sharav to a lot of places with me, and if he wasn’t allowed inside, then I would just tie his leash up outside to wait for me…
- When he wasn’t doing the charming bed face or leg face, Sharav frequently stuck his face between people’s legs…
- In order to fly on an airplane from Israel to the United States, Sharav had to be vaccinated for rabies…
- When Sharav and I moved from San Francisco to New York in 2013, he stayed with my parents in Maryland while I rented an apartment…
- Sharav and I moved together seven times…
- Though Sharav was not aggressive with people or other dogs…
- Sharav and I only had one off-leash near-disaster…
- Dogs were not allowed in my apartment when I adopted Sharav…
- Good relationships can benefit a lot from some healthy, positive teasing…
- Sharav mostly stayed at home while I went to work, at least until 2020…
- The first few days that I spent with Sharav were a whirlwind of confusion…
- Sharav has been gone for a few days, and as I move about the apartment, I keep hearing these little noises that I previously would have assumed were Sharav puttering about…
- Sharav was healthy when he first came to live with me in April 2007, he but he got sick almost right away…
- Sharav had been injured shortly before meeting me in the shelter…
- Though bathing Sharav at home was really unpleasant, a couple of times, I took him to a place that charged less money for me to use their equipment to bathe him myself…
- In 2011, a Malinois named Cairo killed Osama Bin Laden in Pakistan…
- Sharav was not only my best friend, but the best friend I ever had…
- After the supermarket incident when Sharav was almost stolen from me, I went to get a haircut in Tel Aviv and tied Sharav’s leash to a bicycle post outside the barber shop…
- Though Sharav was not a barker, when I first adopted him, he definitely was a howler…
- Thinking back to the time before I first met Sharav – were there really entire days that passed when I didn’t leave my home at all…
- What is a dog’s sense of time…
- I could never stand to bathe Sharav in my bathtub…
- On our off-leash walks around Manhattan, which could sometimes stretch for as much as ten miles…
- After I taught Sharav as a puppy that biting was unacceptable, he came to find it so objectionable that he would literally pull his mouth away if a person’s hand was inside it…
- When we moved to America in 2011, I had no credit…
- Often I was asked in Israel if Sharav was a זאב (wolf)…
- I spent much of my childhood asking my parents for a dog for every birthday and Hanukah…
- Sharav was already starting to go gray when we lived in New York between 2013 and 2017…
- When we lived in San Francisco, the city opened a brand new dog park on a patch of dirt along a freeway just a couple of blocks from our apartment…
- Many people were surprised to learn that Sharav did not bark…
- It was when he was around a few months old that I discovered that Sharav was not a German shepherd at all…
- In 2014, and then again later in 2015, Sharav and I had a really ugly mouse infestation at our apartment on East 30th Street…
- Of the thousands and thousands of pictures I have of Sharav, only a tiny handful are of him and me…
- I never brushed Sharav’s teeth…
- Because of Sharav, I met many, many, many, many people to whom I otherwise never would have spoken…
- Sharav was an extremely finicky eater…
- Sharav is asleep and has the hiccups and I want to go over and hug him…
- Since I started working from home in March 2020 due to the pandemic, Sharav and I did not have a comfortable living situation for most that year…
- Sharav endured thousands upon thousands of boops on his snoot…
- It turned out that dogs, even with short hair, tend to shed and molt…
- Moving from apartment to apartment and city to city was always extremely rough on Sharav…
- Well into his old age, Sharav was extraordinarily fond of “puppy stretch”…
- After the issue in late 2013 that caused Sharav to lose all that weight until I switched him to the Natural Balance duck and potato food…
- It’s 8 January 2024 and today would have been Sharav’s 17th birthday…
- I do not drive, and Sharav and I lived together in New York City for nearly a decade, but dogs are not supposed to enter the subway system…
- Besides almost losing Sharav at the beach one time, in all the off-leash walking – coming to thousands of miles in major cities – it was incredibly rare to face any negative consequences…
- Because Sharav used to shed so much (and because I wasn’t always so great about brushing him), I eventually welcomed a Roomba into our lives…
- The pandemic changed a lot about Sharav’s life and mine…
- As Sharav and I moved around from city to city, we loved discovering the neighborhood-by-neighborhood subcultures of dog parks and dog people…
- Thank you to everyone who helped me with Sharav over the years…
- Like his person, Sharav’s hair started going gray long before he slowed down…
- My favorite times to give Sharav tons of praise and treats were whenever he experienced something new and a little bit scary (but harmless)…
- One thing that utterly befuddled Sharav was “fetch”…
- It’s hard to overstate how good Sharav was with people and with other dogs…
- Some months after I adopted Sharav and he almost immediately fell ill from ticks, I took him to visit friends for a holiday weekend at the rural hilltop where they lived…
- Like Israelis, Americans also did not exactly have an easy time with the name “Sharav”…
- Besides the famous bed face, Sharav liked other furniture too, and also favored the closely related “leg face”…
- For the longest time, I hated brushing Sharav inside and would only do it outside on the sidewalk or in a park…
- Sharav’s favorite treat was the rind of a parmigiano reggiano…
- Working dogs like Malinois really benefit from getting a lot of exercise…
- I didn’t date very much before adopting Sharav, but somehow he made me seem more attractive to women…
- Did I really just write ten thousand words about my dog who died…
- Sharav almost got us evicted from our East 29th Street apartment – that actually allowed dogs!…
- I never treated Sharav like a child in a fur coat…
- Sometimes I felt like Sharav’s personal photographer…
- Sharav and I spent 5,940 days together…
- In all of our homes, Sharav always tried to pick a “spot” from which he would have a good view of me…
- Something about interacting with Sharav induced some small subset of people to say the weirdest shit…
- In April 2011, shortly after Sharav and I left Tel Aviv and when we were staying with my parents in Maryland, he breathed in some kind of nasal irritant at the park…
- Sharav definitely looked very vicious to people who didn’t like dogs…
- Sometimes the praise that I gave to Sharav was just verbal (כלב טוב)…
- Years after adopting Sharav, when we were living in San Francisco, I found out how difficult it was to adopt a dog from an American shelter…
- My family’s dog Latke died when I was just seven…
- When we lived in Tel Aviv, in the couple of years before I got accustomed to waking up early on weekends specifically to walk him, Sharav would sometimes lick my feet as they dangled off my bed…
- Many people advised me to obtain false paperwork that would identify Sharav as an “emotional support animal” so he would be able to fly with me in airplane cabins when we traveled…
- I have thousands and thousands of photos and videos of Sharav…
- One of Sharav’s favorite facial expressions was “bed face”…
- Besides not being popular as a name, the word “שרב” was one half of a phrase that had a special significance to any Israelis who had spent a chunk of 1991 in bomb shelters…
- I poured my heart and soul into training Sharav, thousands and thousands of hours of training…
- Though many dogs love to get dressed up for a night on the town, Sharav despised wearing clothes – and believe me, I tried to get him to like it….
- Sometimes Sharav vomited for no reason whatsoever…
- When I set out to do crate training, I discovered that it was shockingly difficult to buy a dog crate in Israel…
- Scrolling through my album of Sharav pictures is, besides a memorial to him, a monument to the great advancements in camera technology over the past 16 years…
- In the last year or so before Sharav died, I started making it a point to tell him “good night” and “I love you” whenever I went to bed…
- There were exceptions to Sharav’s incredible ability to get people to chill out…
- Sharav hated any situation where the ground or floor did not seem real…
- To complete Sharav’s adoption, I had to do a little paperwork and make a “donation”…
- Am I, in a way, mourning myself…
- I’m 42 years old and I spent my last 16 years with Sharav, and my first seven with Latke…
- Sharav was not a popular name among my fellow dog people in Tel Aviv…
- Besides the time that Sharav was attacked on an isolated hilltop in Israel and after the time he was consumed by sneezes in Maryland, his most serious illness was in late 2013…
- Though Sharav did not care for clothes, he used to get so proud whenever he got to wear his fancy Kelty dog backpack with two saddlebags…
- Though fetch wasn’t Sharav’s cup of tea, he did like to play “stick”…
- Because Sharav had been living on the street and had apparently endured run-ins with motor scooters…
- An idiotic idea that I heard many times in my early days with Sharav was that it was wrong to tell a dog “No,” and that the proper way to train a dog was exclusively with positive reinforcement….
- I took this photograph of myself with Sharav on his 16th birthday last January…
- Though Sharav used to love coming to the office with me sometimes, he did not love it at all when I began working from home on a full time basis in March 2020 due to the pandemic….
- Whenever I traveled anywhere…
- It took a long time to love Sharav, but I finally realized it one night…
- I used to fold Sharav’s ears back when he was a puppy…
- Though he loved playing with other dogs on the street and loved dog parks when he was younger, by the time we moved to New York in 2013, Sharav had mostly lost interest in specialized dog runs…
- Since I adopted Sharav in 2007, basically everything about my life changed multiple times…
- When I got Sharav, I really didn’t know what it was going to be like to have a dog…
- One of my favorite things to do with Sharav has become sitting quietly and listening to him snore…
- The first picture I ever took with my iPhone‘s portrait mode was of Sharav…
- My parents adopted Latke as a puppy about a year before I was born…
- Sharav and I loved to walk in the snow…
- I adopted Sharav from Vitaly’s home in South Tel Aviv on the afternoon before יום הזיכרון…
- Walking off-leash, by my side in the heel position (רגלי) was a great joy for Sharav…
- I trained Sharav to walk on my left side, in the “heel” position…
- After our difficult and cramped 2020, the final home that Sharav and I shared together in Brooklyn was our best by far…
- Sharav loved playing with other dogs…
- I never intended to adopt a Belgian Malinois…
- Whenever I got lazy about brushing Sharav, his furry undercoat would produce tufts that poked through his hairy overcoat…
- When Sharav was a puppy, I sometimes used to leave movies playing at home for him when I went to work during the day…
- Sharav has been gone for a week and his hair is all over the apartment, his belongings scattered about…
Thank you to everyone who helped me with Sharav over the years. I hope you know that he loved you, and he loved spending time with you.
Would you be willing to share some memories or photos of Sharav with me?