A Big Little Life

hippopotamus than the real animal. Given open-minded attention by a reporter, I will be as preposterous as anyone since time immemorial, thereby saving him the need to invent idiocies to attribute to me.
    The Pinnacle team showed up on schedule, and they were a pleasant surprise. The producer and crew were friendly, considerate, professional, and they all had a sense of humor that put us at ease. Beverly Schuch, the on-camera host and interviewer, was a gracious woman who joined in the crew’s joking.
    I am publicity-shy, but Gerda is an extremely private person who might want to shoot out the limelights if you directed them at her. I was surprised that the Pinnacle folks induced her to participate so fully in the program.Years after, I enjoyed reviewing the parts of the tape in which she appeared, so lovely on a warm September day.
    Trixie, however, had none of Gerda’s hesitancy. We learned with Pinnacle that she enjoyed the limelight. She did everything asked of her—walk here, walk there, turn this way, sit, smile—as if instead of going through assistance-dog training, she had attended modeling school. She was in fact a camera hound.
    Early on the second day with Pinnacle , we traveled to the Oceanside campus of Canine Companions for Independence. Gerda’s brother, Vito, and his wife, Lynn, were in their second week at the beach house, and they agreed to accompany us to take care of Trixie if we were with the film crew just when Short Stuff’s schedule called for food or a bathroom break.
    Judi, the Oceanside campus director, gave Pinnacle a tour of the facility and encouraged them to film a session with the trainers and the current class of dogs heading toward graduation. Everyone from CNN became so enthralled with CCI that they remained not “just for an hour,” as the producer initially envisioned, but for the entire morning and the early afternoon. Later that year, they filmed a one-hour special about CCI that ran in the Christmas season.
    During our tour, we came to the kennels, in which puppies were currently housed, all of them eight to ten weeks old and soon to be handed over to the volunteers who would raise them. Judi suggested that Gerda and I go into the play yard between kennels, get on our knees,and meet the puppies, which she would release from their pens with the flip of a switch. In these two days, Gerda had been in front of a camera more than she hoped to be in a lifetime, so she backed off, leaving me to face the ferocious pack alone. When the puppies were released, most proved to be golden retrievers, the others Labradors. They raced exuberantly to me. In an instant, I was wearing a live-puppy coat.
    In the care of Vito and Lynn, Trixie watched me go into the fenced kennel and pressed to the chain-link with interest, as if saying, I used to live here, Dad. But why would you want to? The house on the hill is way better than this .
    Then the puppies exploded into the play yard and clambered over me. I laughed with delight—and Trixie at once turned her back on this display and refused to watch. Vito and Lynn tried to get her to turn to the fence once more, but she clearly disapproved of me cavorting with cute puppies.
    We took this to mean that after just a few days, she had bonded with us, and she did not want to consider that she might have to share our affections with another dog. Hour by hour, we were more certainly a family of three.
    Long before that day, Oceanside had thoughtfully set aside a large tract from which the city council intended to carve gifts of land to be granted to worthy nonprofit organizations. CCI’s Southwest Chapter had previously been quartered in the San Diego area, but had moved north to accept Oceanside’s generosity. In a moment between sessions with Pinnacle , Gerda and I asked Judi Pierson what CCI intended to do with the substantial portion of their land they had not already built on, and she described a project that intrigued us and that eventually became an important part of our future—and Trixie’s.
    After returning to Newport Beach that afternoon, we took the Pinnacle team to dinner at Zov’s Bistro in Tustin, for years our favorite restaurant. Zov didn’t have a pro-dog policy, but that day she made an exception and allowed us to bring Trixie. Our golden girl went under the table, facing out, and got up only to lap at a bowl of water.
    An hour before the end of dinner, when I glanced down at Trixie to be sure she remained content, I saw