A Big Little Life

To Gerda, who shared the wonder and the loss, who knows that the pain was so great because the joy before it was even greater, and who had the courage to do it all again. Bliss to you.

Dogs live most of life in Quiet Heart.

Humans live mostly next door in Desperate Heart.

Now and then will do you good to live in our zip code.

—TRIXIE KOONTZ, Bliss to You

Table of Contents

Cover Page

a big little life

Dedication

Epigraph

I a spooky moment around which the entire story revolves

II life before trixie

III anticipation, adventure, and anal glands

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

V if she could talk, she’d do stand-up comedy

VI she poops on command, but not just anywhere

VII cnn, cci, tv, and tk

VIII i screw up, dog takes the rap

IX this is where i belong

X please don’t send my sweet dog to jail

XI things that go boom

XII things that go bump in the night

XIII a nose for trouble

XIV freedom of speech

XV water, wonder, work

XVI time and memory

XVII dogs and death

XVIII elbow surgery and meatballs

XIX “may i tell you a wonderful truth about your dog?”

XX dr. death and dr. berry

XXI critic, author, dog entrepreneur

XXII endings always come too fast

XXIII “in my end is my beginning”

everafter...

Copyright

About the Publisher

I a spooky moment around which the entire story revolves

THE SPOOKY MOMENT central to this story comes on an evening more than ten years ago.

Trixie, a three-year-old golden retriever of singular beauty and splendid form, adopted the previous September, is in her fourth month with my wife, Gerda, and me.

She is joyful, affectionate, comical, intelligent, remarkably well behaved. She is also more self-possessed and dignified than I had ever realized a dog could be.

Already and unexpectedly, she has changed me as a person and as a writer. I am only beginning to understand the nature of those changes and where they will lead me.

January 1999:

Our first house in Newport Beach, in the neighborhood known as Harbor Ridge, had an exceptionally long up-stairs hallway, actually a gallery open to the foyer below. Because this hall was carpeted and thus provided good traction for paws and because nothing breakable stood along its walls, I often played there with Trixie on days when the weather turned foul and on cool winter evenings when the sun set early.

Initially, I tossed a ball and sometimes a Kong toy down the hall. The Kong was about six inches long, made of hard rubber with an inch-wide hole through the middle. You could stuff a mixture of peanut butter and kibble in the hole, to keep your dog occupied for an hour or longer. I tried this twice, but Trixie managed to extract the tasty mixture from the Kong in five minutes, which was less time than I took to prepare it.

One evening the rubber Kong bounced wildly and smashed into a small oil painting, splitting the canvas. The painting was very old, and it was one of Gerda’s favorites.

When she noticed the damage a few days later, I fessed up at once: “The dog did it.”

“Even standing on her hind feet,” Gerda said, “the dog isn’t tall enough to do it.”

Confident that my logic was unassailable, I said, “The dog was here in the hall when the damage occurred. The Kong toy was here. The Kong belongs to the dog. The dog wanted to play. If the dog wasn’t so cute, I wouldn’t have wanted to play with her. Hall, dog, Kong, cute, play—the damage to the painting was inevitable.”

“So you’re saying the dog is responsible because she’s cute.”

I refused to allow my well-reasoned position to be nit-picked. I resorted to my backup explanation: “Besides, maybe she isn’t tall enough, but she knows where we keep the stepstool.”

So, because the dog had damaged the painting, in sub-sequent play sessions in the hall, we could not use the rubber Kong. Furthermore, I would not throw the tennis ball anymore, but would only roll it.

I explained the new rules to Trixie, whose expression was somber. “This is a valuable teaching moment,” I concluded. “You see, I’m sure, that if you had gone to your mother immediately after you damaged the painting and had taken responsibility, you would not now have this blemish on your reputation.”

Following the new rules, I always released the tennis ball with a snap of the wrist that gave it the velocity to roll the length of the hall. Trixie thundered after the ball, either snaring it near the end of its journey or snatching it out of the air if it ricocheted off the leg of a console and took flight. She returned it to me with dispatch, and at once I fired it off again. After twenty minutes, her flanks heaved, her tongue lolled, and though she still considered the tennis ball to be a priceless treasure, she was prepared to entrust it to me for a while.

Lying on the floor, facing each other, Trixie panted and I stroked her luxurious golden coat as she caught her breath.

From the week she came into our lives, Trixie and I had spent some time most days lying on the floor together. I found it relaxing for the obvious reason that a cuddle with a loving dog is always calming. I also found it strange, because she would stare into my eyes as long as I wanted to meet hers—ten minutes, twenty, thirty—and she would rarely be the first to look away.

These sessions were meditation but also communication, though I can’t explain what she communicated other than love. I can say that I frequently saw in her eyes a yearning to make herself understood in a complex way that only speech could facilitate.

Staring into Trixie’s eyes, I was sometimes silent but at other times talked to her about my day, my problems, my hopes, whatever came into my head. Those who love dogs know well this kind of rap. The dog does not react—and is not expected to react—to any of this, but listens and wonders. Dogs swim through a sea of human speech, listening attentively for words they recognize, patiently striving to interpret what we say, although most of it is and always will be incomprehensible to them. No human being would have such patience. Counting the many commands she had been taught when in training to be an assistance dog and all that she had learned on her own—cookie, chicken, walk, duck, stepstool, oil, painting, restoration, electromagnetism—her vocabulary was at least a hundred words. It would more than double over the years. This got me thinking…The recognition that words have meaning, the desire to remember them, the intention to act on those that are understood—does all of this lead to the conclusion that the dog also yearns to speak?

On that January night, because Trixie had been an undiluted joy during the previous four months and had already been a force for positive change in me, I said, “You’re not just a dog. You can’t fool me. I know what you really are.”

As if in response, she raised her head, eased back slightly, and regarded me with what might have been concern. Golden retrievers have versatile brow muscles that allow them a wide range of facial expressions. She never before responded to me in this fashion, and I was amused to interpret her look as meaning, Uh-oh, somehow I’ve blown my cover.

“You’re really an angel,” I continued.

To my surprise, she scrambled to her feet as if in alarm, ran down the hall, turned, and stared back at me. Muscles tensed, legs spread for maximum balance, head lifted, ears raised as much as a golden can raise them, she seemed to be waiting for what I might say next.

I’m seldom speechless. Trixie’s behavior, which seemed to be a reaction to my words, as if she understood every one of them, raised the fine hairs on the nape of my neck and left me mute.

Intrigued, I got to my knees, wondering what she would do next, but she continued to watch me intently when I rose to my feet.

For a minute or two we studied each other from a distance of twenty feet, as though we both expected something of consequence to happen. Her tail did not wag. It wasn’t lowered as it would have been if she had been the least fearful. It was a perfect plume, as still as if she had stepped outside of time, where nothing could move her or even one hair upon her, nothing except her own will.

“Trixie?” I finally asked, and when I spoke, she retreated another ten or fifteen feet and turned again to face me in the same expectant stance as before.

This was not a dog who wanted solitude or even distance. The closer she could be to us, the happier she appeared. When I was writing, she would sometimes slink under my desk and curl herself into the shape of an ottoman, and she sighed with pleasure when I rested my stockinged feet on her. With Gerda even more than with me, this sixty-plus-pound creature behaved like a lapdog, most content when embraced.

This was the first and last time she wanted distance from me. As we stared at each other, I began to realize that regardless of what Trixie’s behavior implied, if it implied anything at all, I should not pursue this matter further if only because it disturbed her. Besides, I was dealing here with the ineffable, the pursuit of which offers endless frustration but no reward other than the thrill of the chase.

I sat on the hallway floor, my back to the wall, legs straight in front of me, and I closed my eyes. The nape of my neck tingled for a while, but when the fine hairs stopped quivering, Trixie returned to me. She snuggled against my side. Putting her head in my lap, she allowed me to rub gently behind her ears and stroke her face.

Later, I told Gerda about the incident, but of course she could make no more of it than I could. We don’t have paranormal experiences or go to psychics. We don’t even read our daily horoscopes.

I write fiction for a living. I could spin a score of intriguing scenarios out of this one spooky moment with Trixie, but none would be as strange as the truth, if it could be known in this instance. Truth is always stranger than fiction. We craft fiction to match our sense of how things ought to be, but truth cannot be crafted. Truth is, and truth has a way of astonishing us to our knees, reminding us that the universe does not exist to fulfill our expectations.

Because we are imperfect beings who are self-blinded to the truth of the world’s stunning complexity, we shave reality into paper-thin theories and ideologies that we can easily grasp, and we call them truths. But the truth of a sea, in all its immensity, cannot be embodied in one tide-washed pebble.

When we write a novel, concoct a new political system, devise a theory to explain the workings of the human mind or the evolution of the universe—we are fictioneers, bleaching the rich narrative of reality into a pale story that we can better comprehend. We go wrong when we don’t admit the unknowable complexity of reality, but we go dangerously wrong when we claim that one pale story—or an anthology of them—is truth. We arrive at the paleness to avoid consideration of the daunting truth in all its fierce color and infinite detail.

I can never know the truth of that spooky moment with Trixie, but what I do know is that throughout the years she was ours to cherish, she continually surprised us, as truth will. She made us laugh every day, and at times we wept in anguish because of her. She weighed only sixty-something pounds, I occasionally called her Short Stuff, and she lived less than twelve years. In this big world, she was a little thing, but in all the ways that mattered, including the effect she had on those who loved her, she lived a big life.

In each little life, we can see great truth and beauty, and in each little life we glimpse the way of all things in the universe. If we allow ourselves to be enchanted by the beauty of the ordinary, we begin to see that all things are extraordinary. If we allow ourselves to be humbled by what we do not and cannot know, in our humility we are exalted. If we allow ourselves to recognize the mystery and the wonder of existence, our fogged minds clear. Thinking clearly, we follow wonder to awe, and in a state of awe, we are as close to true wisdom as we will ever be.

Trixie was innocent and joyful, but also at times enigmatic and solemn. I learned as much from this good dog as from all my years in school.

II life before trixie

WE WERE NOT fortunate enough to have always lived in Newport Beach, California, and I was not always the kind of person who blamed damaged paintings on the dog, largely because, until Trixie, I didn’t have a dog to blame.

Growing up in Bedford, Pennsylvania, I lived with my mother and father in a cramped four-room house. My maternal grandfather built the place. I loved Grandpa John, but in spite of his many talents, he was no more suited to a career in residential construction than I am qualified to perform open-heart surgery.

In the insistently moist cellar, a pair of lightbulbs were nestled deep in the pockets between ceiling joists, allowing us to brighten the darkness only to a sinister murk that did not disturb the colonies of scheming fungus in the corners. As a child, I half believed that the fungus possessed a malevolent consciousness and waited patiently for me to let down my guard.

After my ninth birthday, I shared furnace-tending duties. The iron beast stood opposite the coal-room door. Mornings, I shook the grate to drop the cinders and ashes into the collection bin, shoveled coal through the main door, and lighted tinder to encourage the coal to burn more quickly. On those evenings when I had no school the next day, I would bank the fire to ensure hot coals for the morning and to keep the house heated through the night.

Banking the fire always proved to be an act of folly. This was not a forced-air furnace. Heat rose through a large iron grate in the living-room floor and traveled up-stairs so slowly that on a bitter winter morning, water left overnight in a glass had turned to ice.

We had no bathroom until I was twelve, just a shower-head that sprouted from one cellar wall, over a drain in the concrete floor. Solely to serve the shower and the washing machine, water was heated by a kerosene burner designed by a pyromaniac. A large glass jug of fuel had to be inverted to feed a ring wick by gravity drip. The contraption was shaky, and I expected a kerosene fireball to bloom through the house and turn us into human torches.

A vivid imagination is a blessing if you want to be a writer, but it is also a curse. Sometimes, in the coal room, I wondered if this would be the occasion when the shovel would turn up the pale hand of a corpse concealed under the anthracite. As he was always threatening violence, I had cast my father in the role of murderer.

I can say two positive things about the cellar. First, hot water could be drawn from a faucet, whereas at the kitchen sink only cold water could be had and only by using a hand-operated pump that tapped a well. Second, although acrawl with spiders, the cellar harbored fewer eight-legged stalkers than the outhouse.

When I was eleven, my mother received a modest sum from the settlement of my grandfather’s estate, and she used it to provide the house with indoor plumbing: a small bathroom with hot and cold running water, and faucets in place of the hand-operated pump at the kitchen sink. She also replaced the tar-paper roof with asphalt shingles.

We felt as if we had moved into a palace. After all, we now had a shiny porcelain throne instead of a wooden bench with a hole in it and spiders lurking below.

Although we had few possessions, we were always in danger of losing everything we owned. Our perpetual dance with destitution resulted from my father’s conviction that what he earned would be squandered if spent to pay bills and the mortgage, considering that poker or craps offered him the opportunity to quadruple his holdings in a single evening.

If the cards and the dice proved treacherous, he required the consolation of a saloon. Buying a round for the guys at the bar allowed him to pass for the man of means he dreamed of being.

When not in bars or games of chance, my father held forty-four jobs over thirty-five years, many of them in sales, primarily as an insurance agent. More than once he was fired because he punched out the boss—never a smart career move—or a fellow worker who offended him. Sometimes he quit because he felt unappreciated, and probably because the current enterprise included no one whom he wanted to punch, which made the workday boring.

Although my mother was slender, pretty, and good-hearted, my father chased other women. At least two were female wrestlers. In the 1950s, female wrestlers were as rare as armless banjo players, and they were not the bikinied beauties who began thrashing around in mud during the ’70s. My father had affairs with female wrestlers who had bigger biceps and deeper voices than he did.

When our telephone rang after midnight, the caller always proved to be one barkeep or another, reporting that my father had passed out drunk and needed to be removed from the premises before closing time. If the saloon lay within a few miles of home, my mother and I would trek there on foot and load my father into his car.

On one occasion, a woman at the bar asked my mother if we could give her a ride home, as her date had walked out on her. This sturdy blonde had a perm so tight that her curls would have served as life-saving shock absorbers if anyone had hit her on the head with a sledgehammer.

I sensed that in fact my gentle mother regretted not having a sledgehammer close at hand, but I was too young to figure out that the blonde’s date had not walked out on her but had passed out, that he was my old man. Enlightenment came the following evening when, lying in bed, I listened to my parents downstairs as they argued about the curly one.

As a consequence of post-midnight, father-salvaging expeditions and other mortifying experiences related to his behavior, I grew up in a state of embarrassment. Because my father’s shortcomings were widely known, I cringed when asked if I was Ray Koontz’s boy. Instead of answering directly, I said my mother was Florence Koontz, because no shame came with that association.

From the moment they saw me in the cradle, two of my aunts were convinced that I was no less of a good-for-nothing than my father. If they chanced upon me, a seven-year-old, lazing dreamily in the summer sun, their faces clouded and they declared solemnly, “Just like your father,” as if other boys my age were earning their first hundred dollars at a lemonade stand or volunteering to empty bedpans in nursing homes.

My dad’s lack of interest in me, his fits of rage and violence when drinking, his threats to kill himself—and us—the anguish and anxiety he caused my mother: None of that affected me as deeply as the embarrassment he brought upon us by public drunkenness, skirt-chasing, a tendency to brag extravagantly, and other behavior that made him a subject of gossip and scorn.

By high school, I was shy and insecure, and I compensated for my low self-esteem by being quick with a funny line and playing the class clown. Language skills were my shield and my sword.

In no aspect of my life did shyness manifest more than in my interactions with the opposite sex. If I asked a girl for a date and she turned me down, I never asked her again. She might decline with sincere regret, and it might turn out to be true that her mother was in the hospital and her father incapacitated by two broken legs and her beloved sister stuck in the twenty-third century after participating in a secret government time-travel experiment. However, I assumed that she looked at me, saw my father, and decided that setting her hair on fire would be wiser than accepting my invitation to the sock hop followed by milk shakes at Dairy Queen.

Then in my senior year, along came Gerda Cerra. I had been attracted to certain girls before, charmed by them, captivated, but I had not previously been enchanted. I had not before been smitten. In fact, I thought it was not possible to be smitten if you were born after 1890. Petite, graceful, beautiful, Gerda had a soft voice that made every word seem intimate and romantic. When she said, “Something is hanging from the end of your nose,” my heart soared. Not least of all, her self-possession seemed other-worldly.

That I pursued her, shy as I was, all the way from a senior-year date to a marriage proposal is a testament to the impact that she had on me—especially considering that she turned me down four times.

In the first instance, upon hearing which evening I hoped to take her to a movie, she claimed to be working at the dry cleaner that night. Previously, if a girl in a full-body cast pled immobility as a reason for not accepting a date, I assumed the truth was that she found me repellent, and thereafter I avoided her. But a week later, I approached Gerda with a second invitation.

This time she informed me that, on the evening in question, she would be working at the movie theater, behind the refreshment counter. Here was a young woman who either redefined the meaning of industrious or could not remember the dry-cleaner lie that she had told me a week earlier.

After taking two weeks to restore my courage, I asked her for another date—only to learn she had a babysitting job that night. She seemed to be sincere, but everyone believed Hitler, too, when he claimed that he wouldn’t invade Poland, and we know how that turned out. I did not think Gerda intended to invade Poland, and I wanted to believe I still had a chance to court her, so I accepted her turndown with grace.

Because she might have begun to feel stalked if not cornered, and therefore might reject my fourth invitation by setting her hair on fire, I brooded weeks before asking her to accompany me to an event that she was already required to attend. Year after year, she had been president of her school class; therefore, I invited her to the junior-class dance.

When she declined, claiming to be busy on the night, I appealed to her in what I remember as an earnest tone, although as an honest memoirist, I must acknowledge it was more likely a pathetic whine: “But you have to go to the dance, it’s the junior-class dance, and you’re the junior-class president.”

“Oh,” she said, “I’m going. But I have to spend the first part of the evening selling tickets at the door. Then I operate the record player for a shift, then I sell refreshments for a shift, and then I clean up the gym.”

I declared that those were my top four favorite things to do on a date, which left her no way to be rid of me other than to beat me with her purse or scream for the police.

She smiled and said, “All right.” In her soft voice, those words sounded like a declaration of undying love. Because at that moment nothing was hanging from the end of my nose, I felt as suave as Cary Grant.

Eventually I would learn that her father, Bedford’s shoemaker, immigrated to the States from Italy and had many Old World attitudes, including the notion that children should work by the time they were teenagers. Gerda actually had part-time jobs at the dry cleaner and the movie theater, and supplemented those incomes with babysitting. From the age of thirteen, she bought her own clothes or, because she was a good seamstress, purchased the materials to make them.