A Big Little Life Read online

  At two and a half, Trixie retired from her assistance work with Jenna, but at three, she became an assistance dog of another kind with Gerda and me. She mended us in many ways.

  The director of the Southwest Chapter of CCI, at that time a woman named Judi Pierson, had often encouraged Gerda and me to take a release dog from their program. Not every puppy has the talent, temperament, or physical qualifications to get all the way through the two years of training that leads to graduation.

  A puppy raiser, always a volunteer qualified by CCI, raises the dog from its eighth week, after it is turned in by the breeder. The puppy raiser, who has the dog for approximately sixteen months, teaches it to sit, stay, lie down, heel, walk on a loose leash, toilet on command, and other basic tasks.

  Thereafter, if the dog has done well, it goes to the CCI campus for six months of more intense training, during which it will acquire more skills than I possess, a statement that anyone who knows me will confirm without hesitation.

  If the dog fails out for any reason, it is offered to the person who raised it.

  These folks are amazing. To rear and train one of these animals is to fall in love with it—yet these volunteers routinely return their charges to CCI for advanced training and often take another puppy, putting themselves through the loss again because they believe in this organization. Some have raised twenty or more dogs, and it is awe-inspiring to consider how many lives they have changed.

  Sometimes the puppy raisers are not able to fit one more pooch in their house, or their circumstances have changed. Then a home must be found for the dog that is being released from the program.

  Year after year, as Judi urged us to take a CCI release, we longed to say yes, but we were concerned that we could not give the dog the time and attention it needed. We kept telling Judi—and each other—that we were too busy, that we would have to wait until my writing career entered a quieter phase.

  In August of 1998, I completed Seize the Night, the sequel to my novel Fear Nothing, one of many of my books in which a dog is among the cast of principal characters. Every time I wrote a story that included a canine, my yearning for a dog grew. Readers and critics alike said I had an uncanny knack for writing convincingly about dogs and even for writing from a dog’s point of view. When a story contained a canine character, I always felt especially inspired, as if some angel watching over me was trying to tell me that dogs were a fundamental part of my destiny if only I would listen.

  At dinner one evening near the end of the month, I raised the subject with Gerda: “We keep saying we’re too busy to add a dog to our lives, but I’m afraid we’re going to be ninety years old and still too busy. Maybe we should just do it, busy or not, and make it work.”

  We never had children. Since Gerda and I set up shop in 1974, we had been together every day, virtually all day, for twenty-four years. We were apart only twice in thirty-two years of marriage. We were a tight team, and we were daunted by the prospect of having another person in the house. We knew that a dog, no less than a child, would be a person.

  At the end of dinner, we were agreed. We weren’t ready for a dog, but we were going to make ourselves ready.

  In September, I called Judi and told her the next time they had a release dog to place, we would give it a home.

  She said, “What kind of dog do you want—a mooshy one or a not-mooshy one?”

  Because mooshy sounded slightly disgusting, I assumed I wanted a not-mooshy. Apparently, I was not as informed about dog terminology as I thought I was, so I decided to ask for a definition.

  “A Labrador retriever wouldn’t be a mooshy dog,” Judi explained. “The breed has a huge amount of energy and always likes to be doing something. A golden retriever, however, is playful and energetic when it wants to be, but is also happy just lying around, observing or cuddling or snoozing. A golden retriever is a mooshy dog.”

  I had always admired goldens for their beautiful coats, their comic-gentle-noble faces, and their sweet temperaments. I was fifty-three years old, and although I exercised regularly and still had a thirty-inch waist, the indefatigable American Association of Retired Persons already harassed me monthly with their mailers, insisting that I should recognize I was in denial, should face the fact of my mortality, and should join them to receive all the senior-citizen discounts, denture-adhesive analyses, and funeral planning that they stood ready to provide. I decided that a mooshy dog was exactly—and perhaps only—what I could handle.

  Judi said that CCI had several goldens being released from the program. Finding a good one would be easy. She was about to leave on a two-week vacation, and we arranged for her to bring the dog to our house on Newport Harbor, rather than to our main residence, in two weeks.

  We had bought the beach house to induce ourselves to take most weekends off. We had become workaholics, stuck in the tar pits of our home offices seven days a week. The hassles of packing and traveling even to a place as near as Santa Barbara had come to outweigh the benefits of getting away, and we had ceased to be able to resist the pull of work when we were at home.

  The beach was a different environment from where we lived in the hills, yet we could drive there in less than half an hour. If we kept clothes and personal items at the second house and never had to pack to go there, if we took no work with us, we could break free of the grindstone. Between Friday afternoon and Sunday evening, we would relax by the water, and then return rested to the house on the hill.

  That was the theory.

  Our beach house was on Balboa Peninsula Point, featured a pier and dock on Newport Harbor, was designed by a brilliant architect, Paul Williams, and was constructed in 1936. We remodeled the house, took it back to its Art Deco roots, furnished it, and looked forward to mere fifty-hour workweeks.

  To a person, friends and relatives who stayed there called the beach house magical and said it was the most restful place they had ever been. In the six years that we owned it, Gerda and I managed to stay in our getaway just thirty nights. Vito and Lynn, Gerda’s brother and sister-in-law, coming all the way from Michigan, enjoyed the house more nights in those six years than we did.

  We have been so long at the grindstone that we’ve developed an abiding affection for it: the smell of wet granite, the soft rumble as the wheel turns and turns, the tickle as it gently abrades the nose. I am fortunate that I am enchanted by language and find meaning in my work.

  As the day of Trixie’s arrival approached, the beach house was new enough to us that we still believed we would spend lazy weekends in our pier pavilion, sipping wine, leisurely studying AARP brochures regarding the benefits of fiber and the dangers of driving faster than twenty miles an hour.

  Even by that time, I had written several books in which canines were featured in major or supporting roles—from Watchers to Dragon Tears, and our friends knew how much we wanted a dog. They also knew that Gerda and I were long accustomed to being a family of two, and some expected that we would have difficulty sharing each other as completely as a dog would require.

  The morning of the day when Trixie would arrive, I visited the construction site where we were building a new house. Our general contractor, Mike Martin, was a friend who became like a brother to Gerda and me during the course of this long project. Mike stood six feet four and seemed even taller by virtue of his personality; big and strong, gentle and soft-spoken, quick to laugh, white-haired at fifty, he dressed always in white sneakers, blue jeans, and one Reyn Spooner Hawaiian shirt or another. Mike was charismatic but self-effacing, a combination I have encountered only a few times in my life, and he cared deeply about his friends. As we stepped out of the construction trailer to have a look at whatever problem had brought me to the site, Mike said with concern, “You know, with a dog, any dog, even one of these CCI dogs, things aren’t going to be as neat as you like them. It’s going to make you a little crazy.”

  Gerda and I have a reputation among friends for being unusually neat and orderly. I’ve never quite understood this,
because none of our friends is slovenly and disordered by comparison with us. Mike and his wife, Edie, had two dogs yet kept an immaculate home. As a creator of exquisite hot rods, he was obsessive about detail, which is evident in every square foot of the house he built for us. Yet here he was, with his usual concern, warning me that any dog we took in would inevitably bring with it enough disorder to put me at risk of a mental breakdown.

  It is true that we fold our socks rather than roll them, that we iron our underwear, that for years I would not wear jeans that didn’t have a crease pressed into them, that prior to a dinner party I use a tape measure to ensure precisely the same distance between each place setting (and between each element of each place setting), that Gerda would rather be coated in honey and staked out on an anthill than go to bed when there’s even one dirty spoon in the kitchen sink, and that if a guest discovered water spots on a wineglass, we would be no less mortified than if he had found someone’s body compressed into a cube in our trash compactor. None of this means that we’re obsessive. It means only that we care.

  In response to Mike’s concern that we were too oriented toward order and neatness to cope with a golden retriever, I said, “This dog is well trained, totally housebroken.”

  “I’m not talking about that kind of thing,” Mike said.

  “We know it sheds. We’ll give it a long combing every morning.”

  “I’m not thinking about dog hair.”

  “It’ll go to a groomer for a bath and the full works every Thursday, so I’ll never have to express its anal glands myself.”

  “I’m not thinking about that stuff, either,” Mike said, “though I usually do think of anal glands when I think of you.”

  “You’re fired,” I said.

  “I’d be worried,” he said, “except who else would want to work for you?”

  “Maybe someone who’s actually built a house before,” I replied.

  Prior to committing himself to the ten years of planning and construction that our house required—including four years with three architects before the third one delivered what we wanted—Mike had been a mason and then a swimming-pool contractor. Our house was the first he built, and the two architects whose plans we did not use were always trying to get him fired, which is one of the reasons that Gerda and I let them go.

  Over the years, we have learned that the most important quality anyone can possess is character. If a person has true character—which always includes a sense of honor and duty, as well as a tough set of personal standards—he or she will not fail you. Experience matters, but an experienced homebuilder without character is forever a trapdoor under your feet, waiting to be sprung. When we asked Mike if he could take on a project as complex as this one, he said yes without hesitation, and we hired him with confidence. We never had a regret.

  Now on the morning of Trixie’s arrival, in the affectionate mockery that is a characteristic of our relationships with most of Gerda’s and my friends, Mike said, “By neat, I mean your days won’t be as structured as you’re used to, and your time won’t be used as efficiently anymore. You’ll find out what it’s like being a normal person after all these years of being so damned abnormal.”

  I said, “I think of myself as delightfully abnormal.”

  “Yeah, right,” Mike said.

  “The dog,” I predicted, “will not bring a tenth as much chaos into my life as you have, and because she’ll be bathed once a week, she’ll also smell better.”

  “It’s happening again,” he said. “I’m thinking of anal glands.”

  IV

  “if this dog does something wrong, the fault will be yours, not hers”

  LINDA, A COMPUTER maven and all-around talent, has been Gerda’s and my primary assistant for so long that she will need to be in therapy for the rest of her life.

  On the other hand, before she came to us, she did contract work for the state of California, instructing bureaucrats in the software they used. California government is so dysfunctional, by comparison with Koontzland, that it must have seemed like an asylum to Linda, while our little corner of the world might well have struck her as a restful sanitarium.

  Back in 1998, Linda occupied an office in our house on the hill. But our second assistant, Elaine, who had come to us after retiring from another job, worked in our office suite in a commercial complex called Newport Center.

  Linda and Elaine had asked if they could meet Trixie when we did. They were friends as well as employees, and the addition of a dog to our lives made them happy for us. Besides, they were always looking for one reason or another to skip work, and this was a much better excuse than claiming for the sixteenth time that a beloved grandmother or beloved aunt had died.

  Also with us were Vito and his wife, Lynn, visiting from Michigan and staying in the beach house for two weeks. They had a dog they loved, a not-mooshy Labrador retriever named Rocky, so we figured they could help us adjust to our new daughter.

  Judi arrived with Trixie’s puppy raiser, Julia Shular, who also had with her a black Labrador in training for CCI. They had all of Trixie’s favorite toys, a bag of her kibble, and what seemed like 9,324 pages of instructions on her care.

  Joint surgery will force the retirement of any assistance dog because, in a pinch, it might need to pull its partner’s wheelchair. Even after healing, the problem joint puts the animal at risk. Having recuperated for six months, our daughter was fully recovered.

  When Trixie entered the house off leash, she had a sprightly step and an eager, inquisitive expression. Tail swishing, she came directly to Gerda and me, as if she had been shown photographs of us and knew we were to be her new mom and dad. Then she politely visited with Linda, Elaine, Vito, and Lynn, sharing the fur.

  Cynics will tell you that love at first sight is a myth, but their opinion is not to be respected, and only reveals the sad condition of their hearts.

  We fell in love with Trixie at first sight, in part because of her beauty. Her mother, Kinsey, was a gorgeous specimen, and her father, Bugs—Kinsale Bugaboo Boy—was a winner of multiple dog-show prizes. Her grandfather Expo also had been a show-dog champion. Trixie had a good broad face, correct ear size and placement, dark eyes, and a black nose without mottling. Her head and neck flowed perfectly into a strong level topline, and her carriage was regal.

  Beauty took second place, however, to her personality. Although well behaved, with a gentle and affectionate temperament, she had about her a certain cockiness, as well. During that first meeting, she seemed always to be either laughing or ready to laugh, and Judi said she had been the class clown of her graduating group.

  Because the male Labrador remained in training, Trixie took advantage of her new status as an ordinary dog to tease him and to tempt him to break his sit-stay. While we listened to Judi and Julia instruct us in Trixie’s basic commands, we watched our girl take three different toys to the Lab and hold them inches from his face, jubilantly squeaking them to impress on him what fun he was missing.

  Her favorite toy was what we called a dangle ball, a big fuzzy ball dangling on a loop of braided rope. She swung this in front of the Lab’s face, like a hypnotist swinging a pendant on a chain, and when he let his mouth sag open, tempted to make a grab for the toy, Trixie stepped back, insisting that he break his sit-stay.

  In spite of our girl’s clownish tendency, we supposedly would rarely need to correct her behavior. Judi said that Trixie was so well trained and so smart that “if this dog does something wrong, the fault will be yours, not hers, because you will have gotten a command wrong or will have forgotten to do some part of her daily routine that she requires to stay on her schedule.”

  Linda and Elaine left, not to return to work, as we might have hoped, but to make funeral arrangements for beloved aunts who had died that morning. What a sad world this is, with so much death.

  When Judi and Julia left a few minutes later, Trixie set off to explore every corner of the house, bottom to top and down again. She would repeat this
practice over the years in every friend’s house to which she was invited. With one exception, she never took liberties with anything in those homes, but her curiosity was matched only by her assumption that she was welcome to snoop everywhere.

  Vito, Lynn, Gerda, and I took Trixie with us to dinner that evening at a restaurant that welcomed dogs on its patio. When given the command “under,” she settled under the table, facing out, and watched the other diners. She showed no interest in our food, was never restless, and made no sound.

  Later in the evening, we brought her for the first time to our house on the hill, and she at once explored it as she had explored the beach house. We put her bed in a corner of the master bedroom, and she settled into it. Although we invited her to sleep at the bottom of our bed, and although she’d had some furniture privileges in her previous homes, she preferred the familiarity of her dog bed.

  As we were lying in the dark, waiting for sleep, Gerda said, “A little scary, huh?”

  I knew what she meant: The responsibility for this beautiful creature was now ours alone. Her health, her happiness, and the maintenance of the training that made her not only an ideal canine but also contributed to her confidence and to her sense of her place in the world—those things we must attend to no less dutifully than we would have tended to the needs of a child.

  Sometime during the night, I woke with the feeling that I was being watched. Gerda and I sleep in a pitch-black room, where the windows are covered by wooden panels at night. I didn’t want to switch on the flashlight that I keep on my nightstand, so still lying on my side, I squinted in search of animal eyeshine, but could see none. Tentatively, I reached out past the side of the bed with my right hand, and at once found Trixie’s head. For a couple of minutes, in the dark, I rubbed the sensitive part of one of her ears between my thumb and index finger, and she leaned into this caress. Then she sighed and returned to her bed in the corner, and soon slept.