A Big Little Life

self-blinded to the truth of the world’s stunning complexity, we shave reality into paper-thin theories and ideologies that we can easily grasp, and we call them truths. But the truth of a sea, in all its immensity, cannot be embodied in one tide-washed pebble.
    When we write a novel, concoct a new political system, devise a theory to explain the workings of the human mind or the evolution of the universe—we are fictioneers, bleaching the rich narrative of reality into a pale story that we can better comprehend. We go wrong when we don’t admit the unknowable complexity of reality, but we go dangerously wrong when we claim that one pale story—or an anthology of them—is truth. We arrive at the paleness to avoid consideration of the daunting truth in all its fierce color and infinite detail.
    I can never know the truth of that spooky moment with Trixie, but what I do know is that throughout the years she was ours to cherish, she continually surprised us, as truth will. She made us laugh every day, and at times we wept in anguish because of her. She weighed only sixty-something pounds, I occasionally called her Short Stuff, and she lived less than twelve years. In this big world, she was a little thing, but in all the ways that mattered, including the effect she had on those who loved her, she lived a big life.
    In each little life, we can see great truth and beauty, and in each little life we glimpse the way of all things in the universe. If we allow ourselves to be enchanted by the beauty of the ordinary, we begin to see that all things are extraordinary. If we allow ourselves to be humbled by what we do not and cannot know, in our humility we are exalted. If we allow ourselves to recognize the mystery and the wonder of existence, our fogged minds clear. Thinkingclearly, we follow wonder to awe, and in a state of awe, we are as close to true wisdom as we will ever be.
    Trixie was innocent and joyful, but also at times enigmatic and solemn. I learned as much from this good dog as from all my years in school.

II
life before trixie
    WE WERE NOT fortunate enough to have always lived in Newport Beach, California, and I was not always the kind of person who blamed damaged paintings on the dog, largely because, until Trixie, I didn’t have a dog to blame.
    Growing up in Bedford, Pennsylvania, I lived with my mother and father in a cramped four-room house. My maternal grandfather built the place. I loved GrandpaJohn, but in spite of his many talents, he was no more suited to a career in residential construction than I am qualified to perform open-heart surgery.
    In the insistently moist cellar, a pair of lightbulbs were nestled deep in the pockets between ceiling joists, allowing us to brighten the darkness only to a sinister murk that did not disturb the colonies of scheming fungus in the corners. As a child, I half believed that the fungus possessed a malevolent consciousness and waited patiently for me to let down my guard.
    After my ninth birthday, I shared furnace-tending duties. The iron beast stood opposite the coal-room door. Mornings, I shook the grate to drop the cinders and ashes into the collection bin, shoveled coal through the main door, and lighted tinder to encourage the coal to burn more quickly. On those evenings when I had no school the next day, I would bank the fire to ensure hot coals for the morning and to keep the house heated through the night.
    Banking the fire always proved to be an act of folly. This was not a forced-air furnace. Heat rose through a large iron grate in the living-room floor and traveled upstairs so slowly that on a bitter winter morning, water left overnight in a glass had turned to ice.
    We had no bathroom until I was twelve, just a showerhead that sprouted from one cellar wall, over a drain in the concrete floor. Solely to serve the shower and the washing machine, water was heated by a kerosene burner designed by a pyromaniac. A large glass jug of fuel had tobe inverted to feed a ring wick by gravity drip. The contraption was shaky, and I expected a kerosene fireball to bloom through the house and turn us into human torches.
    A vivid imagination is a blessing if you want to be a writer, but it is also a curse. Sometimes, in the coal room, I wondered if this would be the occasion when the shovel would turn up the pale hand of a corpse concealed under the anthracite. As he was always threatening violence, I had cast my father in the role of murderer.
    I can say two