A Big Little Life

after Trixie’s arrival, From the Corner of His Eye, I brought closer to the surface those spiritual issues that had underpinned some of my previous books: that the world is a place of mystery and purpose, that science—especially quantum mechanics—and faith are not antagonistic to each other but are in fact complementary, that we are a community of potential saints with a shared destiny and each of us is a thread in a tapestry of meaning. When it was published, it received more generous reviews than could be squeezed into the first five pages of the subsequent paperback edition. That was lovely, but reviews are not as satisfying as reader response. In its first eight years, Corner has sold six million copies worldwide and has generated tens of thousands of letters from readers, some of the most intelligent and moving mail I have ever received.
    I dedicated Corner: “To Gerda. In the thousands of days of my life, the most momentous was—and alwayswill be—the day we met.” I had dedicated other books to Gerda, but with this novel, I finally felt that I’d written one worthy of her.
    Five years later, I dedicated a book to Trixie. By then, in my slow and thickheaded way, I had at last fully realized how much she had changed not only me but my writing.

XX
dr. death and dr. berry
    ONE EVENING, AFTER we had moved into our new house, Trix and I went to the backyard so she could pee before bed. Inside once more, as she preceded me up the back stairs, eager for the cookie she would receive from her kitchen stash, she suddenly let out a thin but sharp yelp, a single fraction-of-a-second cry, and froze with her back legs and forelimbs on different steps. She turned her headto stare at me with alarm. I could not persuade her to lift a single paw. She seemed prepared to stand there forever, and her flanks were trembling. Shaken by a presentiment that this was the first moment of a living nightmare, I carefully lifted her and carried her up to the kitchen.
    When she was on a level floor, she appeared to be fine. She padded directly to where her cookies were kept and favored me with one of her you-know-I-deserve-a-treat looks. I wanted to believe the moment on the stairs had been without serious meaning, but I knew better. Fearing for her, suspecting that one kind of suffering or another lay ahead of her, I gave her three cookies and would have given her the whole jar if she hadn’t turned away after three and gone to her water bowl.
    We rode up to the master suite in the elevator, avoiding the stairs. This was a larger, more modern, and more professionally installed elevator than the one that we had in the previous house. Instead of clattering up and clamoring down on cables, the cab was on the end of a hydraulic ram that raised and lowered it quietly, without any shrieking apes in the attic. Trixie had no reservations about riding in it.
    To spare Gerda from a sleepless night, I didn’t tell her about the scary moment on the stairs until morning. After breakfast kibble, when I took Trixie out to toilet, she had difficulty getting her bowels started. She squatted, began to strain, immediately stopped and crabbed forward, tried again, stopped, crabbed forward, as if the straining caused her discomfort. Finally she managed to do her business.
    I took her to her vets at the animal hospital, and they X-rayed her spine. The preliminary diagnosis was that Trixie had a spinal problem and would need to undergo an MRI before it could be determined whether she required surgery.
    We made an appointment with a veterinary surgeon who had the best references. After two days of avoiding stairs, we took Trixie in at five o’clock in the morning for an MRI. We were told that we could pick her up twelve hours later, at five in the afternoon. This seemed an inordinately long time, but they explained that she needed to be fully recovered from sedation before they would release her.
    At five o’clock sharp, when we returned, a veterinary assistant brought Trixie out to the reception lounge. Our girl was in shocking condition. She wobbled when she walked, and her legs repeatedly went limp under her, dumping her on the floor. Her lower eyelids were so prolapsed that her thoroughly bloodshot eyes looked as if they would roll out of the sockets, and they were weeping copiously. She did not appear to recognize us, neither wagged her tail nor responded in any way when we touched her and spoke to her.
    We knew that the veterinary surgeon was