He had a round, merry face and a warm smile, and his slight musical accent was charming. And he always wanted to reach down and stroke Trixie’s head while we exchanged pleasantries about the weather or about something in the news.
One day, as Trixie and I approached him, he said, “May I tell you a wonderful truth about your dog?” I said that nothing would please me more, and he said, “Perhaps you know what she is. Do you know what she is?”
Assuming he wanted to know her breed, I said, “She’s a golden retriever.”
“Yes, she is,” he replied, “but that’s not what I mean. In our religion, we believe in reincarnation. We live many times, you see, always seeking to be wiser than in our previous life, wiser and more virtuous. If we eventually lead a blameless life, a perfect life, we leave this world and need not endure it again. Between our human lives, we may be reincarnated as other creatures. Sometimes, when someone has led a nearly perfect life but is not yet worthy of nirvana, that person is reincarnated as a very beautiful dog. When the life as the dog comes to an end, the person is reincarnated one last time as a human being, and lives a perfect life. Your dog is a person who has almost arrived at complete enlightenment and will in the next life be perfect and blameless, a very great person. You have been given stewardship of what you in your faith might call a holy soul.”
The grandfather’s voice and manner were enthralling, and his comments about Trixie were so kind and sweet that I thanked him and said we’d always thought she was special. He said, “Tell your wife what I have told you,” and I assured him that I couldn’t wait to tell her and would do so as soon as I got home.
This might seem strange, but I walked a block before it occurred to me to connect his words to the incident in which I told Trixie that I knew she was an angel masquerading as a dog, and to the night that she seemed to take a tour of the upstairs with a presence invisible to me. A not unpleasant chill traveled my spine.
As a Christian, I do not believe in reincarnation, but I believe there was something unique and significant about Trixie. Many people recognized that uniqueness and expressed their perception of it in different ways. Frequently, when we were on a restaurant patio with Trix, other customers, having watched her during dinner, stopped by our table to say a word about her, and more often than referring to her beauty or to her good behavior, they said, “She’s really special, isn’t she?” We always said, “Thank you. We think she’s very special.” But after the grandfather told me what he believed her to be, I was more than previously aware of how often the word special was used to describe her.
Our friends Andy and Anne Wickstrom, whom we had known since my college years and who grow more interesting-or maybe just more strange-year by year, came to stay with us for a week in our new house. They were taken with Trixie, and she with them, and the five of us had a grand time. A month or so after they had returned home to the East Coast, we were chatting on the phone, and Anne said that they had tried to tell friends about Trix, to convey how special she was, but eventually realized that words and anecdotes simply were inadequate to make anyone fully understand Short Stuff’s magical personality and appeal.
Writing this memoir, I have come up against that wall many times. I have had to accept that although I have done my best to paint this portrait of her, I am incapable of doing her justice. The ineffable cannot be described. A mystery is a mystery precisely because it has not been solved, and some mysteries are insoluble.
In that second novel written after Trixie’s arrival, From the Corner of His Eye, I brought closer to the surface those spiritual issues that had underpinned some of my previous books: that the world is a place of mystery and purpose, that science-especially quantum mechanics-and faith are not antagonistic to each other but are in fact complementary, that we are a community of potential saints with a shared destiny and each of us is a thread in a tapestry of meaning. When it was published, it received more generous reviews than could be squeezed into the first five pages of the subsequent paperback edition. That was lovely, but reviews are not as satisfying as reader response. In its first eight years, Corner has sold six million copies worldwide and has generated tens of thousands of letters from readers, some of the most intelligent and moving mail I have ever received.
I dedicated Corner: “To Gerda. In the thousands of days of my life, the most momentous was-and always will be-the day we met.” I had dedicated other books to Gerda, but with this novel, I finally felt that I’d written one worthy of her.
Five years later, I dedicated a book to Trixie. By then, in my slow and thickheaded way, I had at last fully realized how much she had changed not only me but my writing.
XX dr. death and dr. berry
ONE EVENING, AFTER we had moved into our new house, Trix and I went to the backyard so she could pee before bed. Inside once more, as she preceded me up the back stairs, eager for the cookie she would receive from her kitchen stash, she suddenly let out a thin but sharp yelp, a single fraction-of-a-second cry, and froze with her back legs and forelimbs on different steps. She turned her head to stare at me with alarm. I could not persuade her to lift a single paw. She seemed prepared to stand there forever, and her flanks were trembling. Shaken by a presentiment that this was the first moment of a living nightmare, I carefully lifted her and carried her up to the kitchen.
When she was on a level floor, she appeared to be fine. She padded directly to where her cookies were kept and favored me with one of her you-know-I-deserve-a-treat looks. I wanted to believe the moment on the stairs had been without serious meaning, but I knew better. Fearing for her, suspecting that one kind of suffering or another lay ahead of her, I gave her three cookies and would have given her the whole jar if she hadn’t turned away after three and gone to her water bowl.
We rode up to the master suite in the elevator, avoiding the stairs. This was a larger, more modern, and more professionally installed elevator than the one that we had in the previous house. Instead of clattering up and clamoring down on cables, the cab was on the end of a hydraulic ram that raised and lowered it quietly, without any shrieking apes in the attic. Trixie had no reservations about riding in it.
To spare Gerda from a sleepless night, I didn’t tell her about the scary moment on the stairs until morning. After breakfast kibble, when I took Trixie out to toilet, she had difficulty getting her bowels started. She squatted, began to strain, immediately stopped and crabbed forward, tried again, stopped, crabbed forward, as if the straining caused her discomfort. Finally she managed to do her business.
I took her to her vets at the animal hospital, and they X-rayed her spine. The preliminary diagnosis was that Trixie had a spinal problem and would need to undergo an MRI before it could be determined whether she required surgery.
We made an appointment with a veterinary surgeon who had the best references. After two days of avoiding stairs, we took Trixie in at five o’clock in the morning for an MRI. We were told that we could pick her up twelve hours later, at five in the afternoon. This seemed an inordinately long time, but they explained that she needed to be fully recovered from sedation before they would release her.
At five o’clock sharp, when we returned, a veterinary assistant brought Trixie out to the reception lounge. Our girl was in shocking condition. She wobbled when she walked, and her legs repeatedly went limp under her, dumping her on the floor. Her lower eyelids were so prolapsed that her thoroughly bloodshot eyes looked as if they would roll out of the sockets, and they were weeping copiously. She did not appear to recognize us, neither wagged her tail nor responded in any way when we touched her and spoke to her.