A Big Little Life

campus for six months of more intense training, during which it will acquire more skills than I possess, a statement that anyone who knows me will confirm without hesitation.
    If the dog fails out for any reason, it is offered to the person who raised it.
    These folks are amazing. To rear and train one of these animals is to fall in love with it—yet these volunteers routinely return their charges to CCI for advanced training and often take another puppy, putting themselves through the loss again because they believe in this organization. Some have raised twenty or more dogs, and it is awe-inspiring to consider how many lives they have changed.
    Sometimes the puppy raisers are not able to fit one more pooch in their house, or their circumstances have changed. Then a home must be found for the dog that is being released from the program.
    Year after year, as Judi urged us to take a CCI release, we longed to say yes, but we were concerned that we could not give the dog the time and attention it needed. We kept telling Judi—and each other—that we were too busy, that we would have to wait until my writing career entered a quieter phase.
    In August of 1998, I completed Seize the Night, the sequel to my novel Fear Nothing, one of many of my books in which a dog is among the cast of principal characters. Every time I wrote a story that included a canine, my yearning for a dog grew. Readers and critics alike said I had an uncanny knack for writing convincingly about dogs and even for writing from a dog’s point of view. When a story contained a canine character, I always felt especially inspired, as if some angel watching over me was trying totell me that dogs were a fundamental part of my destiny if only I would listen.
    At dinner one evening near the end of the month, I raised the subject with Gerda: “We keep saying we’re too busy to add a dog to our lives, but I’m afraid we’re going to be ninety years old and still too busy. Maybe we should just do it, busy or not, and make it work.”
    We never had children. Since Gerda and I set up shop in 1974, we had been together every day, virtually all day, for twenty-four years. We were apart only twice in thirty-two years of marriage. We were a tight team, and we were daunted by the prospect of having another person in the house. We knew that a dog, no less than a child, would be a person.
    At the end of dinner, we were agreed. We weren’t ready for a dog, but we were going to make ourselves ready.
    In September, I called Judi and told her the next time they had a release dog to place, we would give it a home.
    She said, “What kind of dog do you want—a mooshy one or a not-mooshy one?”
    Because mooshy sounded slightly disgusting, I assumed I wanted a not-mooshy. Apparently, I was not as informed about dog terminology as I thought I was, so I decided to ask for a definition.
    “A Labrador retriever wouldn’t be a mooshy dog,” Judi explained. “The breed has a huge amount of energy and always likes to be doing something. A golden retriever, however, is playful and energetic when it wants to be, butis also happy just lying around, observing or cuddling or snoozing. A golden retriever is a mooshy dog.”
    I had always admired goldens for their beautiful coats, their comic-gentle-noble faces, and their sweet temperaments. I was fifty-three years old, and although I exercised regularly and still had a thirty-inch waist, the indefatigable American Association of Retired Persons already harassed me monthly with their mailers, insisting that I should recognize I was in denial, should face the fact of my mortality, and should join them to receive all the senior-citizen discounts, denture-adhesive analyses, and funeral planning that they stood ready to provide. I decided that a mooshy dog was exactly—and perhaps only—what I could handle.
    Judi said that CCI had several goldens being released from the program. Finding a good one would be easy. She was about to leave on a two-week vacation, and we arranged for her to bring the dog to our house on Newport Harbor, rather than to our main residence, in two weeks.
    We had bought the beach house to induce ourselves to take most weekends off. We had become workaholics, stuck in the tar pits of our home offices seven days a week. The hassles of packing and traveling even to a place as near as Santa Barbara had come to outweigh the benefits of getting away, and we had ceased to be able to resist the pull of work when we