A Big Little Life Read online

  Trixie delighted in these daily grooming sessions, as if they were the doggy equivalent of spa visits. She learned the sequence of the comb-out, and lying on her grooming blanket, she extended a leg just when you needed to comb the feathers on it, rolled from one side to the other with a dreamy sigh. For Gerda and me, grooming this dog qualified as meditation and induced in us a Zenlike state of relaxation. As a result, her coat was always lustrous and silky.

  Not long after Trixie became a Koontz, we invited friends to Sunday lunch, already confident that Trixie would be better behaved than I would. Mine is not a high standard of conduct, so her behavior was impressive only because it exceeded mine by a wide margin.

  After combing Trixie, we had more tasks—preparing appetizers, arranging flowers, setting the table—than time to accomplish them. We raced this way and that all morning, and as eleven o’clock drew near, our anxiety escalated to panic. A moment after we completed preparations, the doorbell rang.

  Our friends found Trixie as delightful as she found them, and the next four hours unfolded so well that Martha Stewart would have pinched our cheeks in approval. Toward the end of lunch, Short Stuff began to bump her nose against my leg and paw at me for attention while we were still at the table. Just in case anyone has ever affectionately referred to Martha Stewart as Short Stuff, let me clarify that I am speaking here of Trixie. This bumping-pawing was uncharacteristic behavior. I told her, “Down,” a command I would never have issued to Martha Stewart but one that good Trixie obeyed, lying on the floor beside my dining-room chair. After a few minutes, she sought my attention again, and I said, “Down,” and as before she at once obeyed.

  After lunch, we adjourned to the living room with coffee, to continue our conversation. Trixie sought my attention and Gerda’s more than once. We petted her, rubbed her ears, stroked her chin, but she began to paw at us again, as if she was impatient to play. We denied her in a firm but loving tone of voice. We would play vigorously, but only when our guests had departed.

  Finally Trixie stopped seeking play and sat directly in front of the sofa, staring solemnly and intently at me, as if she had recently read a book about mind over matter and hoped, with nothing but focused thought, to levitate me. When I ignored her, she finally left the room for a while and later returned in a less insistent mood.

  A few minutes after our guests departed at three thirty, I found a wet blot on the off-white carpet in the family room. Pee. Trixie had gone to the farthest corner, where our guests would not see this faux pas when they passed by the archway, but it was pee nonetheless.

  Because Gerda was once a Girl Scout, she learned to be prepared for anything. Trixie had never had an accident that left a “biological stain,” as the label on the Nature’s Miracle jar referred to it, but Gerda was ready with a cleanup kit in a canvas carryall. We set to work on the carpet, hoping to address the spot before it became a permanent mark.

  Trixie sat at a distance, watching us with what I took to be embarrassment. Her ears drooped, and she hung her head.

  Although she was irresistibly cute, I steeled myself to speak to her in a soft but disciplinarian tone. “This is not good,” I told her. “Bad. Bad dog. Bad, bad dog. Daddy is disappointed.”

  She settled onto her belly and crawled across the room as if she were a soldier in a war and my soft words were rifle fire spitting past overhead. She went to a corner as far from the pee as she could get. She lay there with her nose against the baseboard, her back to us, beyond embarrassment, mortified.

  As we cleaned the carpet, I kept glancing at Trixie. She looked so pathetic, facing into the corner, that I wanted to go to her and put a hand on her head and tell her all was forgiven. Gerda suggested I do just that, but I said the dog must have been testing us to see if we had the spine to be good masters. We must do the right thing or risk further such challenges.

  And then…then I remembered what we had been told the day they brought Trixie to us: “If this dog does something wrong, the fault will be yours, not hers.” I now understood that when she bumped my leg with her nose and pawed for attention at the dining-room table, when she stared at me as if attempting to levitate or teleport me, she had been telling me that she needed to toilet. With horror, I thought back to how frantic we had been all morning as we prepared for our guests, and I realized that I had forgotten to take her outside for her late-morning pee.

  I had failed to follow her schedule, and the pee on the family-room carpet was my fault as surely as if I produced it from my own bladder. As Trixie had been mortified, I was chagrined, which is mortification compounded by disappointment in oneself. I went to her, stroked her, apologized, but she continued to hide her face in the corner.

  Gerda had not joined in the verbal disapproval—“Bad dog. Bad, bad dog”—so as usual I was the only hopeless idiot in the room, but she felt so terrible for Trixie that she wanted as much as I did to get us past this moment. “It’s her dinnertime. After her kibble, give her a cookie, two cookies. Let’s take her down the hill to the park, throw the ball as much as she wants. When we come home, we’ll give her a Frosty Paws,” which was a frozen treat, ersatz ice cream for dogs.

  We did all of that, and through every step of reparations, we kept saying, “Good dog. Good Trixie. Good, good Trixie. Bad Daddy. Gooooood Trixie. Bad, bad Daddy.”

  IX

  this is where i belong

  TWO MONTHS PASSED in a blizzard of tennis balls, which Trixie would retrieve until either I had no more strength to throw them or she dropped from exhaustion.

  The shimmer and flash of her golden coat in the sun, the speed with which she pursued her prey, the accuracy of every leap to catch the airborne treasure, the forepaw landing followed by a whip-quick turn the instant the back paws touched the earth…She was not just graceful in a physical sense. The more I watched her, the more she seemed to be an embodiment of that greatest of all graces we now and then glimpse, from which we intuitively infer the hand of God, infer the truth that this world’s beauty is a gift to sustain the heart, and infer the reality of mercy.

  Every time that she came indoors from a walk or a playtime, or from a toileting, we wiped her feet with a damp white cloth to keep dirt out of the house. Some dogs are sensitive about their feet, but Trixie allowed us to manipulate her paws as we wished.

  Following a tennis-ball session, however, we used two cloths to scrub not just her paws but also her back legs all the way up to her hocks and the pasterns of her forelimbs past her heelknobs, to remove the grass stains, which were so plentiful that her fur turned bright green. In the chase, when she was too late to leap and snare the ball in descent, she went after it on the bounce with manic glee, sliding dramatically into the catch. If I showed her the green stains on the cloth after scrubbing her, she always sniffed them and then grinned broadly, as if remembering her exuberant play.

  When we spent a few days at the beach house, we had no lawn or public park large enough to accommodate a game of throw and retrieve, so we played Trixie’s second-favorite sport: find the ball. I put her on a sit-stay in one room and went into another, where I hid the tennis ball under a sofa cushion, under an armchair, behind a potted plant, or someplace more cunningly chosen, like high above her head and trapped between a window and a pleated shade. The call “Trixie, find” brought her padding into my room at a near run, head low and nose quivering as she sought the scent of the green nap and rubber.

  She never failed to find it, even when I hid it in one room and called her from another, a trick to which she tumbled quicker than I expected. The second time that I hid it in the same room, she went directly to the spot where I had concealed it the first time, to be sure I’d bothered to find an original hiding place.

  Balboa Peninsula offered a three-mile boardwalk—actually a paved path—between the oceanfront houses and the beach. Gerda and I often walked it with Trixie. The other walkers, with and without dogs, the in-line skaters weaving through the foot traffic at high speed, the surfers carrying boar
ds to the water, an Indian woman dressed in a colorful sari, a brooding cat curled atop a gatepost, kiting seagulls crying like lost souls: Often during these walks, Trixie would look up at us with a bright expression that said, Did you see that, wasn’t that amazing?

  Trixie inspired me to look at things from a new perspective, made the familiar fresh again, somehow shared with me her recognition of great beauty in mundane scenes, and reawakened in me an awareness of the mystery that is woven into the warp and weft of everything we perceive with our five senses but can know only with our hearts. This may be the primary purpose of dogs: to restore our sense of wonder and to help us maintain it, to make us consider that we should trust our intuition as they trust theirs, and to help us realize that a thing known intuitively can be as real as anything known by material experience.

  Our first stay at the beach house with Trixie came on the four days of Thanksgiving weekend. On Sunday evening, we returned to our house on the hill—and experienced an unexpected moment of piercing emotion, courtesy of our golden girl.

  Whenever we were out with Trixie and came home with packages of any kind, we always let her into the house through the connecting door from the garage, switched on the foyer light, and told her to wait. A minute or two later, arms loaded with grocery bags or mail, we followed her inside and always found her patiently waiting.

  Returning at night, that Sunday after Thanksgiving, we followed this routine, but when we entered the house with armfuls of laundry and feast-day leftovers, Trixie was not in the foyer. The rest of the house was dark, and when I called her name, she did not appear out of either the living room or the family room, or out of the dining room.

  A sweeping staircase rose from the foyer and turned to meet the open gallery that served the second-floor rooms. At the head of these steps were the double doors to the master suite, one of which stood open, as we had left it.

  Carrying a favorite Booda duck in her mouth, Trixie bolted from the dark bedroom, where many of her toys were stored near her dog bed. In a state of great excitement, she hurried down the stairs and raced repeatedly around the foyer, squeak-squeak-squeaking the duck, bounding more than running, capering more than bounding, nothing less than rapturous. We had never previously seen her in such a state of bliss.

  Gerda and I stood watching this exhibition with astonishment, at first wondering about the reason for it, but then arriving at the obvious explanation as Trixie’s jubilation continued undiminished. Although only three years and two months old, our girl had lived in six places: with her breeder for two months, with her puppy raiser until she was nearly eighteen months, at CCI during the six months that she received advanced training, with Jenna, the young woman she assisted for six months, with her puppy raiser again, while recuperating from elbow surgery, and most recently with us. When we had taken her to the beach house for the holiday, she recognized it as the place where she had met us, must have recognized it because she did not rush to explore it as she always did a new place. Throughout that four-day weekend, she expected that we would pass her along to yet new people and that she would be leaving her sixth home for her seventh. When we took her back to our house on the hill, she raced up the stairs to the master suite, found her bed where it should have been, found all her toys as she had left them, and realized that she was not being shipped off to a new place after all.

  The running, the bounding, the capering, the squeak-squeak-squeaking merriment was a celebration of the recognition that this was still her home and that we were her family forever. We were so touched, we knelt at once on the foyer floor to further reassure her. Trixie came to us, tail lashing, butt wiggling furiously. She dropped the toy duck and licked our hands, though she was not a dog given to much licking. She snuffled against our hands, and gave us that joyful golden smile from which every lover of the breed takes much delight.

  Scientists and animal behaviorists have written libraries full of nonsense about the emotions of dogs, suggesting that they do not have emotions as we know them, or that their exhibitions that appear to be emotionally based do not mean what we interpret them to mean in our sentimental determination to see a fellowship between humanity and canines. Like too many specialists in every field, they are educated not out of their ignorance but into ignorance, because they are raised to an imagined state of enlightenment—which is actually dogmatism—where they no longer experience the light of intuition and the fierce brightness of common sense. They see the world through cloudy windows of theory and ideology, which obscure reality. This is why most experts in economics never see the financial disaster coming until the wave breaks over them, why most experts in statecraft and military strategy can be undone by an enemy’s surprise attack.

  As anyone who has ever opened his heart and mind to a dog knows, these creatures have emotions very like our own. The usual arguments against this truth are, by their convoluted nature and by the hidebound materialism that informs them, revealed as sophistry or, worse, as the dogmatic insistence of science that is in fact scientism.

  That night, on our return to the house on the hill, Trixie was declaring, This is where I belong, and was expressing her joy that at last she had a place in the world from which she would not be taken.

  Trixie’s sense of place in our family grew, as did her place in our hearts. Later, in a smaller but nonetheless lovely moment, she repeated this declaration in a much different fashion.

  We had thrown a party at the beach house at which such a good time was had by all that the last guests did not leave until half past midnight and we did not finish the cleanup until almost two o’clock. We had not come prepared to stay the night and needed to return to the house on the hill.

  No dog was ever more people-oriented than Trixie. I believe this was her nature, but her nature had been reinforced by CCI, which must train its assistance dogs to ignore other dogs when on duty with the person that it serves. She met only a few people that she didn’t like, and of course she was adored in return. At a party, she always circulated until she dropped.

  She had barely enough energy to jump into the back of our SUV. Usually, she would have curled up in the cargo space and snoozed in transit.

  Perhaps because we were again at the beach house but now on our way to the place that she considered home, she did not want to be separated from us. As I got behind the wheel and started the engine, Trixie scrambled out of the cargo area, into the backseat, across the console, and onto Gerda’s lap. Weighing sixty-two pounds at that time and given the appearance of greater bulk by her thick golden coat, she looked bigger than her mom. She curled up on Gerda, propped her chin on the curve of the door that might be called the windowsill, and sighed with contentment.

  This is where I belong, the sigh clearly said, and it so touched Gerda that she would make no effort to dislodge her furry daughter. As we drove home, Trixie began to snore, her breath lightly steaming the side window, safe in loving arms.

  Dogs might love a place, as people do, but the only place they love beyond all others is the place where you are. When we left the house on the hill, in Harbor Ridge, home would become wherever we took her.

  Once the walls of our new house were framed and the windows set in place, Trixie padded room to room with tail continuously wagging. Visit after visit, her delight was obvious as she capered through the structure, as though she had developed a deep appreciation for the style of Frank Lloyd Wright, which inspired the project.

  After months of watching her react with enthusiasm to the place, we suddenly realized what most appealed to her. Our Harbor Ridge house was Victorian, with French windows set well above her head. In the new house, windows in many rooms were instead five feet wide and extended ceiling to floor. When the view mattered, that entire wall of a room was one large-paned window beside another, expansive sweeps of wood-framed glass that brought the outer world into the house. In Harbor Ridge, she could glimpse the outside only through a few French doors. In the new place, she could see nature wherever she went, and
this sent her spirit soaring.

  X

  please don’t send my sweet dog to jail

  ON OUR FIRST Christmas together as a married couple, six weeks after the wedding, Gerda and I had too little money to decorate our tree as grandly as we would have liked. Two sets of colored lights, two boxes of cheap ornaments, and a package of aluminum-foil icicles stretched our budget to the breaking point.

  We had furnished our entire rented house for a hundred fifty dollars by seeking bargains at country auctions. This proved to be an effective strategy, but only after we realized we were both raising our hands, bidding against each other, and stopped competing for items we wanted. A sofa bought for three bucks looked handsome after we restrung the springs and reupholstered it with a cheap, attractive material. We attached short legs to an old door, painted it black, and employed it as a Japanese-style dining table. Instead of chairs at the table, we had plump pillows that Gerda stitched together with her sewing machine. They were stuffed with shredded plastic bags—mostly bread bags of soft plastic, so they wouldn’t crackle—that our families and their neighbors saved for us, and when we dined, we sat cross-legged on them. We slept on a bizarre combination sofa bed and trundle bed, no more than a foot off the floor.

  When she visited us, my mother wept at our poverty. “You’re eating on the floor,” she said with great distress, emphasizing the last word of each sentence, as though reciting an official litany of misery. “You’re sleeping on the floor. You don’t have an oven. You don’t have a TV. You’re eating on the FLOOR.” She loved us. She wanted the best for us. My mother had lived her entire married life not knowing if she would have a roof over her head tomorrow, yet she reacted to our humble but happy home as if we were festering in a cardboard shanty in the slums of Calcutta.