A Big Little Life

She looked so cute sitting erect in a theater chair. And we were intrigued by her apparent eagerness for whatever experience might be offered in this strange new room.
    I sat beside Short Stuff and pretended that I knew what I was doing with an array of touch-screen controls more complex than the cockpit panel in a 747. Much to my surprise, the lights dimmed, red-velvet curtains drew aside, and the movie appeared on the screen.
    Warmed by a flush of pride, I told myself that if I could master this, then I might one day figure out how to use the coffeemaker. I have always had big dreams.
    We assumed that after a few minutes, Trixie would become bored with the movie and get off the chair. Five minutes passed, ten, and she remained riveted by the images on the screen.
    Gerda and I repeatedly looked past Trix, raising our eyebrows at each other, amused by her devotion to Sandra Bullock’s comical problems almost as much as we were by the—quite good—movie.
    Perhaps the size of the images or the clarity of the projection transfixed our girl. She remained in the chair during the entire movie. Except for two five-minute periods when she chose to lie on the seat and rest her chin on the chair arm, she sat upright. And even in the down position, she kept her gaze on the screen.
    The second time we used the theater, we ran another comedy, and again Trixie watched it beginning to end,sitting in a chair between her mom and me. I half expected her to ask for popcorn.
    Instead of another comedy, we ran an action film on the third visit to our theater. We were eager to see it because some critics called it cutting-edge, maximum cool, and said the lead character was “a James Bond for the new and much hipper millennium.” The movie was XXX , starring Vin Diesel, and those critics had probably called Dumb and Dumber an intellectual triumph.
    Again, Trixie sat between Gerda and me, attentively watching the screen. For about four minutes. Then she got down, settled on the floor, and stuck her head under the chair. She remained there for the remainder of the film, a more perceptive critic than those who had touted XXX .
    In recent years, if a film didn’t shine in the first fifteen minutes, we knew from bitter experience that it would be a rusted tangle of junk to the end, and we gave it no more of our time. That worked for a while, but we began to resent those wasted fifteen-minute blocks of our brief sojourn on this world, which could have been better spent hanging by our thumbs.
    Yet we were so convinced the praise we read for XXX could not be entirely half-baked that we sat through the whole dismal thing, expecting brilliance to burst from the screen at any moment, stunning us both emotionally and intellectually. Trix, head under her chair, must have been thinking, Do I know these people? What has happened to their judgment? What are they going to force me to watch next —Old Yeller, when the dog gets whacked?
    In subsequent years, she never returned to a theater chair. When we watched a film, she sprawled on the floor and dozed. If we had not destroyed her love of movies by running XXX , perhaps she would have become a major director.
     
    SOME OF THOSE experts who always make my brain itch tell us that dogs can’t see and/or make sense of images on a television or a movie screen because they haven’t the brain power to imagine the third dimension that is missing from a two-dimensional image.
    In our previous house, we watched movies on the big-screen TV in our family room. Usually, I sat on the floor, with my back against the sectional sofa, so I could give Trixie a long tummy rub and ear scratch.
    The screen was much smaller and the image less clear than what we would have eventually in our theater in the next house, but from time to time, Trix seemed to take an interest in the story. If she happened to be watching when a dog entered the frame, she stood and wagged her tail. It was the image that attracted her, because she reacted even when no bark or doggy panting alerted her to a canine presence in the film. Cat actors interested her more than canines. She had been raised with cats and liked them.
    One evening, a character rolled into a scene in a wheelchair, which electrified Trixie. She stood and watched intently, and even approached the screen for a closer look.I’m sure she remembered a time when a person in a wheelchair needed her, and when she served ably.
    She was not an assistance dog anymore, but a princess,