A Big Little Life

situations. Squirming with pretend delight, I spoke in a voice breathless with excitement, words tumbling over one another: “Let’s go to doctor! Trixie go, doctor, doctor! Holy moly, fun, fun, Trixie, Dad, doctor, fun, fun! Play dog doctor game, fun, fun! Go, go!” Dogs are strongly food oriented, but if they think a great good time is being had somewhere and they can bepart of it, they will accept a delay in mealtime in order to get to the party.
    Considering how well dogs read us the rest of the time, I’m surprised how reliably this cheap trick can whip them into a state of excitement and distract them even from breakfast. I would think once in a while the dog might realize, Waaaait just a minute. The last time there was going to be a holy-mol-fun-fun-go-go thing, I ended up with a needle in my arm, a cone around my head, and a thermometer up my butt. Their perpetual readiness for play is endearing, and their willingness to forgive deception time after time is one of the key differences between the heart of a dog and the human heart.
    Trixie bought my wriggling, breathless promise of fun. She allowed me to lift her into the SUV, and as we drove off into the still-dark morning, she panted at the windows, anticipating a grand adventure.
    I felt like scum. Not the worst kind of scum. Not the kind of scum you’d scrape off a kitchen floor in Hell. I felt like the kind of scum you sometimes find on the skin of a tomato that’s two days past overripe, but that was bad enough.
    We arrived at Dr. Berry’s facility early, just as the mobile MRI arrived aboard an eighteen-wheeler. The truck was so huge, it looked like the transport that a villain in one of Roger Moore’s James Bond movies would use to haul around a doomsday weapon in search of the most visually exciting landscape in which to have a chase scene.
    Trixie pranced to the reception desk, and the womenthere cooed and fussed over her. After giving me an I’m-all-right-Dad look over her shoulder, she went with a veterinary assistant through a swinging door, where she would not find the promised party.
    At home, with more than five hours to kill before we would have our girl back and hear what surgery she might require, I could not concentrate to write. I could pass the time doing correspondence, a mountain of which looms constantly in a writer’s life, or I could spend the morning sulking in an armchair, looking through magazines, and binge-eating cookies. By cookies, I mean the human kind, not the dog kind; this was not a self-punishing Freudian guilt-fest. As I stuffed myself with cookies, I did to some degree consider it a form of penance for deceiving the Trickster: If I keep this up, I’m going to be gross, I’m going to be as disgusting as Jabba the Hutt, the Beautiful People of Newport Beach will recoil from me in revulsion, and that’s exactly what I deserve. Okay, no more of those regular chocolate chip. Time for some of the chocolate chocolate chip.
    Gerda and I met with Dr. Berry at eleven thirty. He clipped the MRI pictures of Trixie’s spine to the display board and asked if we could see the problem. The images were so crisp and clear that even Dr. Death might have been able to see the problem, assuming sobriety. Our girl’s spine was revealed as an exquisitely regular series of black and white forms—until near the base, the pattern compressed, deteriorated. One of the spaces that allowed a spinal nerve to pass freely from the spinal cord, betweenthe vertebra and spinous process of vertebra, was drastically narrowed by excess bone that pinched the nerve.
    I hasten to say that I’m not necessarily describing Trixie’s condition in correct medical terms. I didn’t ask Wayne Berry to proof the previous paragraph. I want to convey how his explanation sounded to me, an ignorant layman alarmed by even the most benign medical terms like “intravenous injection” and “Band-Aid,” because it made my heart heavy with worry. Spinal conditions, I thought, frequently brought with them the possibility of paralysis.
    Short Stuff could not climb stairs without pain. Lately she had not been in a mood to chase a tennis ball, obviously because of the pinched nerve. At every toilet, she made multiple attempts at a bowel movement, awkwardly and repeatedly crabbing forward in her squat before at last making a successful effort, because straining at stool stressed the affected nerve. She required surgery to grind away the excess bone and allow the