Big Black Dog

When I was in elementary school, I lived on a local main street. I would walk over to a corner and then walk down a side street to the school.
There was a house on the corner, a house with a fenced yard. Inside the fenced yard lived a big, angry black dog.
Perhaps a reason that the black dog was so angry, was that kids would walk by his yard and shout nasty things at the dog and even throw trash at him.
I saw no point in making the dog angry. So, I thought up a plan. I called the dog, “Big Black Dog.”
(You have to understand that the dog doesn’t speak or understand English, so the dog thought that my name for him was “Bigblackdog.”)
Each school morning, I would walk past the dog’s yard and call, “Hey, Big Black Dog” and I would wave, friendly like. It took a while, actually quite a while, but the Big Black Dog eventually came to recognize me as an okay guy.” Sometimes he wouldn’t even bark and just flick his ears to indicate that he heard me. If he was still running, from an encounter with other kids, he would run and bark, but wag his tail.