A Big Little Life

were at home.
    The beach was a different environment from where we lived in the hills, yet we could drive there in less than halfan hour. If we kept clothes and personal items at the second house and never had to pack to go there, if we took no work with us, we could break free of the grindstone. Between Friday afternoon and Sunday evening, we would relax by the water, and then return rested to the house on the hill.
    That was the theory.
    Our beach house was on Balboa Peninsula Point, featured a pier and dock on Newport Harbor, was designed by a brilliant architect, Paul Williams, and was constructed in 1936. We remodeled the house, took it back to its Art Deco roots, furnished it, and looked forward to mere fifty-hour workweeks.
    To a person, friends and relatives who stayed there called the beach house magical and said it was the most restful place they had ever been. In the six years that we owned it, Gerda and I managed to stay in our getaway just thirty nights. Vito and Lynn, Gerda’s brother and sister-in-law, coming all the way from Michigan, enjoyed the house more nights in those six years than we did.
    We have been so long at the grindstone that we’ve developed an abiding affection for it: the smell of wet granite, the soft rumble as the wheel turns and turns, the tickle as it gently abrades the nose. I am fortunate that I am enchanted by language and find meaning in my work.
    As the day of Trixie’s arrival approached, the beach house was new enough to us that we still believed we would spend lazy weekends in our pier pavilion, sipping wine, leisurely studying AARP brochures regarding thebenefits of fiber and the dangers of driving faster than twenty miles an hour.
    Even by that time, I had written several books in which canines were featured in major or supporting roles—from Watchers to Dragon Tears , and our friends knew how much we wanted a dog. They also knew that Gerda and I were long accustomed to being a family of two, and some expected that we would have difficulty sharing each other as completely as a dog would require.
    The morning of the day when Trixie would arrive, I visited the construction site where we were building a new house. Our general contractor, Mike Martin, was a friend who became like a brother to Gerda and me during the course of this long project. Mike stood six feet four and seemed even taller by virtue of his personality; big and strong, gentle and soft-spoken, quick to laugh, white-haired at fifty, he dressed always in white sneakers, blue jeans, and one Reyn Spooner Hawaiian shirt or another. Mike was charismatic but self-effacing, a combination I have encountered only a few times in my life, and he cared deeply about his friends. As we stepped out of the construction trailer to have a look at whatever problem had brought me to the site, Mike said with concern, “You know, with a dog, any dog, even one of these CCI dogs, things aren’t going to be as neat as you like them. It’s going to make you a little crazy.”
    Gerda and I have a reputation among friends for being unusually neat and orderly. I’ve never quite understood this, because none of our friends is slovenly and disorderedby comparison with us. Mike and his wife, Edie, had two dogs yet kept an immaculate home. As a creator of exquisite hot rods, he was obsessive about detail, which is evident in every square foot of the house he built for us. Yet here he was, with his usual concern, warning me that any dog we took in would inevitably bring with it enough disorder to put me at risk of a mental breakdown.
    It is true that we fold our socks rather than roll them, that we iron our underwear, that for years I would not wear jeans that didn’t have a crease pressed into them, that prior to a dinner party I use a tape measure to ensure precisely the same distance between each place setting (and between each element of each place setting), that Gerda would rather be coated in honey and staked out on an anthill than go to bed when there’s even one dirty spoon in the kitchen sink, and that if a guest discovered water spots on a wineglass, we would be no less mortified than if he had found someone’s body compressed into a cube in our trash compactor. None of this means that we’re obsessive. It means only that we care.
    In response to Mike’s concern that we were too oriented toward order and neatness to cope with a golden retriever, I said, “This dog is well trained, totally housebroken.”
    “I’m not