A Big Little Life

mile from the restaurant, but Trix grinned, panted happily, and used her tail as she had not used it in a week.
    By the time we reached our destination and parked, every muscle in her body was tensed. She faced the tailgate with such anticipation that she seemed to be saying, Open the darn thing or I’m going right through it.
    In spite of her excitement, she allowed herself to be lifted out and gently set down. Then, as if propelled by her rotating tail, she strained to the limit of her leash and led us past the main entrance to the restaurant, along a promenade that served an open-air shopping plaza, and around to the patio on the back of the establishment.
    Gustaf greeted us, lavished attention on Trixie, and led us to a table overlooking the promenade. When Gerda and I were served our first course, Short Stuff received a dish of the miniature meatballs.
    For the rest of the evening, she either sat at the railing that encircled the patio or lay with her chin on the bottom horizontal and her face between two staves, watching with interest as people—and a few dogs—strolled past on their way to and from the shops. Her tail did not continuously move in broad sweeps, but it never fell entirely still, either. The tip of it twitched, twitched, twitched, because she knew that her long confinement was over and that soon she would be allowed to go on long walks and to play again. She had her life back, life was good, and she was never depressed thereafter.
    All breeds of dogs have a sense of smell much greater than that of any human being, some of them merely thousands of times greater, some tens of thousands. It’s possible that Trixie caught a thread of scent unique to the Swedish restaurant even when we were a mile away from it and even though she was inside an SUV.
    Researchers once concocted a complex odor in a laband taught a bloodhound to react to it in a specific fashion. Then they took the hound to the bottom of Manhattan Island, while others on the team traveled to the upper end of the borough, thirteen miles away. At the top of Manhattan, at a prearranged time, the researchers pulled the stopper out of a bottle of the laboratory-brewed stinky stuff and saturated a cloth with it. They waved the cloth in the air. They had chosen a day when a breeze moved north to south across the island, and they clocked the wind speed with anemometers at both the upper and lower locations. Less than a minute after the breeze should have carried the singular scent from one end of the island to the other, through one of the largest cities in the world, through millions of people and through a miasma of uncountable smells, the talented hound detected it and reacted to it, although the molecules must have been widely dispersed by air currents.
    Trixie was no bloodhound. However, originally bred to work with hunters, golden retrievers are blessed with a sophisticated sense of smell. The restaurant was only a mile or so away, not thirteen miles, and a only few thousand people, not many millions, occupied the territory between our SUV and the restaurant. She might have snared an unraveling ribbon of scent from the air.
    But I suspect that the other and no less amazing explanation is the correct one. We’d taken her to that restaurant by the same route on at least thirty occasions, and at the end of each fifteen-minute journey, she had received a dishof miniature meatballs. I think she learned that series of right and left turns and the approximate times between each turn, and associated that pattern of travel with the meatball treat. Her eruption out of listless depression into tail-wagging delight at the instant that I turned right onto the last street in the route is too meaningful to discount.
    Or maybe she just read our minds.

XIX
“may i tell you a wonderful truth about your dog?”
    THE SECOND NOVEL I wrote after Trixie came to us was From the Corner of His Eye , a massive story, an allegory that had numerous braided themes worked out through the largest cast of characters I had to that time dared to juggle in one book. The central theme around which the others wound was expressed by a character in the novel, a black minister named H. R. White, in a famous sermon of his,and I used part of that sermon as an epigraph prior to chapter one:
     
    “Each smallest act of kindness reverberates across great distances and spans of time, affecting lives unknown to the one whose generous spirit was the source of this good echo,