A Big Little Life

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 aboveher 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 trusttheirs, 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