A dog named Zampano

I'm a dog-person, always been. My parents tried to get me hooked on cats, and I do like cats, but nothing could ever come near the love I have for those hairy, loyal beasts. When I was five, I met my first 'real' dog. To this day, I don't count my grandfather's dog as 'real', because he was tiny and grumpy and had no love left for children, but I still didn't feel like I knew a dog to that point.
This changed when I met a giant Leonberger-Mix. Just so you can get the mental image right, have a look at this Wikipedia picture of Leonbergers:

From Svenska Mässan from Sweden - Grupp 2 LEONBERGER, C.I.B. NO V&NORD V-14 NO V-15 NORD UCH SE JV-13 SE V-14 -15 Namupalan Bling Smack Chap, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=47878872

So one sunny day, I, being five and therefor both indestructible and invincible, at least in my own little mind, asked if I may take over the leash and walk this pony-sized dog named "Zampano". And since my mother was nowhere around to scream at the lady-owner, she said "sure, here," and gave me the leash. I guess she was so happy that at least someone- namely me- wasn't afraid of her monster dog, that she went a bit overboard with generosity.
Now that I had the leash, I started walking. The lady owner was close behind me, getting ready to grab the leash in case the dog did what he always did, which was dragging her to kingdom come until she found a lantern post to hang on to, but it didn't take her long to understand that this wouldn't happen.
For the first time in big-ass-Zampano's two-and-a-half-years of life, he actually walked calmly, watching out for the little human thing holding onto the leather thing that he usually used to steer mankind around.
We walked her dog for a whole half hour and I would have kept it up longer, if my mother hadn't caught up to us and thrown a fit at the sight of me holding the leash to a dog that the neighbors ran from. It took her a while to grasp the concept of her little angel being more in tune with giant, slobbering monsters than pink dresses and sandboxes, but when she did, she rolled her eyes for the first time in my young life, then decided that being a dog person was still better than getting hooked on drugs.
I, for one, was in love, truly and forcefully so, and what Zampano started was a lifelong obsession with the canine folk that lasted to this day.