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 boards 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.