Eventually, we grew so accustomed to the reliability of the clock in Trixie’s head that it ceased to amaze us, but we never stopped being impressed by the way she adapted to daylight-saving time. When we sprang forward an hour in the spring and then fell back an hour in the autumn, she was never an hour late or early, but still to the minute in sync with the reset clocks.
When she came to us, Trixie accepted the work schedule that Gerda and I maintained, which kept us at our desks until at least six o’clock, often until seven or later, though we were up every morning by five thirty or six.
Within two weeks, however, Trixie decided that we were insane for working past five o’clock, and she set out upon a campaign to free us from our offices at a normal quitting hour. One day, promptly at five, she came to the farther side of my U-shaped desk and issued not a bark, but a soft woof. When I turned away from the computer to discover what disturbed her, I could see only her glorious big head above the desk. She stared at me with an intense expression that Gerda called the “Ross look.” Ross Cerra, her father, had a frown of disapproval that could wilt a fresh flower from a distance of forty feet. After telling Trix that it was not yet quitting time and that she must be patient, I turned my attention to the keyboard once more.
Fifteen minutes later, she issued another sotto voce woof. This time her head was poked around the corner of the desk. Her Ross look had grown so solemn that Ross himself could not have matched its effect. Again, I told her the time to quit had not arrived, and I returned to the scene that I was writing.
At five thirty, she came directly to my chair and sat staring at me. When I didn’t acknowledge her, she inserted her head under the arm of my chair, squinching her ears and fur, peering up at me with such a forlorn expression that I couldn’t ignore her. A few minutes later, I knocked off early and took her outside to play.
The following afternoon, when she woofed softly at five o’clock, I didn’t yet understand that she was on a crusade to change our lives. As before, she started from the farther side of my desk, poked her head around the corner fifteen minutes later, and came to my chair at five thirty. When she squeezed her head under the chair arm and implored me with her melancholy gaze, I realized she had a strategy and the tactics to fulfill it.
I tried to defend the sanctity of my work schedule, but her wiles were irresistible. Within two weeks, we regularly knocked off work at five thirty, and within a month, because of the clock in Trixie’s head and her diligent insistence, five o’clock became the official end of the workday in Koontzland.
SOME WILL TELL you that dogs’ memories are short, that they retain only what has been drilled into them through repetitive training and what relates directly to their basic needs of food, water, and shelter.
My polite response to that is, “Balderdash.”
Vito and Lynn, who had been vacationing at our beach house when Trixie came to us from CCI, returned the following year to stay two weeks again. On their first evening there, we drove a Ford Explorer to the peninsula to pick them up for dinner, and Trixie rode in the cargo space, gazing out the tailgate window at the world receding.
When greeting people whom she had met before, Short Stuff’s enthusiasm was directly proportional to how much fun they had been on the previous occasion. As usual, Vito and Lynn had been more fun each day than an entire amusement park, and that was before the cocktail hour. When they got into the backseat, Trixie lost her composure. She wiggled excitedly, tail slap-slap-slapping the walls of the cargo space. She made that winsome, hardly audible squeal of ecstasy in the back of her throat. Unable to contain herself, she sprang into the backseat, between them, which she had never done with anyone before, and lavished on them the Tongue of Love, though she rarely licked.
She had seen them several days on their previous visit, but not again for a year. Yet her behavior confirmed beyond doubt that she not only recognized them but also remembered that they had been great company. No other explanation holds water, especially since Vito had long ago stopped wearing that liver-scented cologne.
But Trixie displayed remarkable long-term memory, as well. In one instance, going back to her earliest days as a puppy…
A year earlier, when Vito and Lynn had accompanied us to the CCI campus in Oceanside, with the crew of Pinnacle, Gerda and I asked Judi Pierson what would be done with the large portion of their land not yet used. She said they hoped to build a residential facility in which each class of people with disabilities could stay for the two weeks that were required to learn how properly to handle and care for their dogs.
At that time, those who were chosen to be teamed with a dog (henceforth “team partners”) had to stay in area motels and motor inns during the two-week “boot camp.” This was unsatisfactory for at least three reasons. Some of the team partners could not easily afford those two weeks of lodging and dining out. Older motels could not usually accommodate people in wheelchairs, and some of the team partners could find rooms only miles from the campus, which made an exhausting day of instruction even more draining. And with the class scattered to numerous locations every night, there was less camaraderie, fewer opportunities for the team partners to cheer on one another.
CCI envisioned a wheelchair-accessible residential facility on the Oceanside campus, with rooms large enough to accommodate the team partners and their family members, with also a full-service catering kitchen, a dining room, a lounge, and other features. Gerda and I agreed to make a grant to CCI through our charitable foundation, for the purpose of constructing this residential facility.
A few years later, the grand opening celebration was tied to the graduation of the first class-numbering ten or twelve, I think-that had stayed in the new residence hall. When Gerda and I arrived with Trixie, we were surprised to see a monument sign on the front lawn that identified this as the DEAN AND GERDA KOONTZ CAMPUS of Canine Companions for Independence. We do not ask any charity to which we contribute to emblazon our names on anything. It had not occurred to us that this would be done as a surprise. While we prefer to keep a low profile, CCI is so close to our hearts that we were more touched than embarrassed by this tribute.
Every parking space along the street was taken, and neither Gerda nor I realized that a space in the CCI lot, near the front door, was reserved for us. We followed a road to the top of a long hill overlooking the campus and parked at a considerable distance.
When Trixie jumped down from the back of the SUV, she was adamant about getting to CCI quickly. This was the campus where she received her six months of advanced training and from which she had graduated with Jenna years ago. I assumed that she was excited by nothing more than nostalgia for the old days when she had been the class clown. No horse could have pulled harder than Trixie pulled me, and on the way down the hill, I thought she would drag me off my feet. Gerda kept saying, “Wait, wait, slow down,” and as I struggled to keep my balance on the slope, I couldn’t explain that Trixie had for the first time in my experience become a rowdy girl who ignored all the rules of leash training.
If Trix continued this behavior once inside CCI, I would need to explain how I had allowed their perfectly trained young lady to be transformed into a candidate for a dogs-gone-wild video. Some of the blame might credibly be placed on an exuberant yellow Lab who lived across the street and was a bad influence, even though no such Lab existed, but I didn’t have enough time to work out plausible details to support a claim that she had eaten fermented kibble.