A Big Little Life

though she still stalked rabbits until she spooked them away, she remained aware of the sky as she had not been previously. She became interested in birds and passing aircraft. Like a door, the world above had opened to her.
    By Trixie’s striking intelligence, by her sense of humor, by the uncanny moments when she seemed to reveal a spiritual dimension, she renewed my sense of the mystery of life. Now it seemed that the looming blimp restored to her a small lost measure of her own wonder.
    And at our beach house one morning, a similar incident deepened Trixie’s appreciation of the harbor.
    The pavilion on our pier, which overlooked the gangway and the boat slip, was spacious enough to accommodate asofa and dining table with four chairs. This was the perfect place from which to watch the Christmas boat parade or to have a glass of wine before bed, when the lights on the farther shore shimmered across the dark water.
    During one of our infrequent visits, Gerda and I were having breakfast at the pavilion table and reading the Sunday newspapers, when I heard a soft burst of sound, the whoosh of escaping air. I assumed it was a noise related to one of the many boats docked and moored nearby, a venting of the bilge or something too nautical and arcane for me to understand.
    The third time the sound came, it was followed by Trixie’s winsome little squeal of delight. She was behind me, lying on the deck, her forepaws hanging over the edge, head pushed under the lower horizontal of the railing, staring down at something in the water.
    Gerda and I knelt, flanking our girl, and saw a sea lion a few feet away, a creature weighing at least eight hundred pounds. It turned slowly in the water as if pirouetting for our entertainment. Because the tide was high, the surface of the harbor lay only two or three feet below the floor of the pier. The glistening black eyes of the sea lion seemed to remain focused on Trixie as slowly it turned, turned, turned.
    Tremors passed through Short Stuff’s body, and we gentled her with our hands, though she seemed to be less frightened than excited. When the sea lion concluded its performance and glided on its back under the pavilion, Trixie shot to her feet.
    Abruptly I knew she would dive in after the creature when it reappeared.
    Even as Trixie turned from us, I shouted, “Grab her collar!”
    I missed getting hold of her, Gerda missed, Trixie scurried to the farther side of the structure, we scrambled after her, and we both gripped her collar an instant before she would have gone under the railing and into the drink.
    Sea lions can be aggressive. I suppose the creature would have dived deep and away if Trixie plunged into the harbor beside it, but the possibility that she would have been harmed or even killed was not insignificant.
    Now that she knew an exotic hidden world lay below the surface of the sea, Trixie wanted to explore it. Henceforth, every time we were on the pier, she watched the water for a school of fish, a raft of seaweed, anything mysterious, and then wanted at once to race down to the boat slip to have a closer look.
    We had to keep her on a leash the last few times we went to the beach house. But every time she saw something in the water that she wanted to investigate, I hurried with her down the gangway, and we walked the boat slip together. Some days, we made this trip six or seven times an hour.
    She was made especially nuts by the brown pelicans that dove for fish and surfaced, flying, far from the point at which they disappeared into the water. If they could live in both realms, in the air and below the surface of the sea, why couldn’t both worlds be accessible to a water retriever with webs between her toes?
    For a dog, the world is an ever-expanding carnival of mysteries. Every new experience enchants, and every morning is full of promise.
    As children, we share that attitude, but we evict it when we become adults, as if the knowledge that comes with experience needs to occupy that particular chamber of the mind, as if wonder must make way for wisdom. But wisdom without wonder is not true wisdom at all, but only a set of practical skills married to tactical shrewdness of one degree or another.
    Wonder inspires curiosity, and curiosity keeps the mind from becoming sick with irrational ideologies and stultified with dogma.
     
    WHEN I SAY that Trixie restored my sense of wonder, you might be curious to know what had happened to it. Life had happened to it.
    My