Dean Koontz: A Big Little Life: A Memoir of a Joyful Dog

Trixie was a joker, all right, and when she wasn’t lying in wait under a table for a laugh, other furniture inspired her humor. A console, a dresser, a sideboard, any item on short legs intrigued her. She would stand with head lowered, sniffing the narrow space under the piece. By her urgent attitude, she seemed to say that she had trapped a critter and that we ought to have a look at what she cornered. If we didn’t take her suggestion right away, she would lie down and paw at whatever might be in the hidden space.

Inevitably, when we got warily on our hands and knees to peer under the furniture for the mouse, nothing was there. The way Short Stuff grinned at us, I swear this was her idea of a practical joke. We fell for it again and again, and when we refused to be conned, we saw her pull the trick on other people.

In the Harbor Ridge house, we once had a real mouse loose on the lowest of three floors. In the kitchen, I lined up a series of mousetraps in the lid of a box that I could carry to the lower floor, and I baited them with chunks of cheese, one by one.

Trixie stood at the counter, at my side, interested in my task but drawn also by the aroma of Velveeta. Five times, as I carefully put down a set trap, it sprang, flipping into the air with a hard snap, which caused Trixie to twitch but didn’t frighten her into flight. The sprung traps cast bits of cheese to the floor, which Trix snatched up with pleasure.

In truth, I shouldn’t be allowed any nearer to a mousetrap than to an armed nuclear device. I’m no more mechanically inclined than I am gifted at bird imitations.

After I carried the traps downstairs and placed them, I decided I needed four or five more. My strategy when I am out to kill a mouse is not to trust in its taste for cheese. Should it be that rare mouse disgusted by the very idea of cheese, I distribute so many traps in each small area that the little beast will inevitably blunder into a deadly mechanism the first time it ventures from cover.

In the kitchen again, where Trixie waited, I put five more traps in the box lid. She watched me solemnly, but instead of waiting for more cheese to be flung by sprung traps, she made a low throaty noise of concern and backed away from me, tail between her legs. She backed across the kitchen and through the doorway to the family room, and kept backing away, away, in my line of sight, until she was at the farther end of that adjacent room, fully forty feet from where she had started. Once there, she made several wheezing sounds that were as close to laughter as I can imagine a dog getting. Her tail began to wag, and she grinned at me.

I know as surely as I know anything that she was having fun at my expense, mocking my mechanical ineptitude with the easily sprung traps. She was saying, I really want the dropped cheese, Dad, but I want to live, too, so I’m getting out of the death zone.

G. K. Chesterton-who had two dogs, Winkle and Quoodle-wrote more than a little about the importance of laughter in a well-lived life, and of laughter’s role in a marriage, he said: “A man and a woman cannot live together without having against each other a kind of everlasting joke. Each has discovered that the other is not only a fool, but a great fool.” Dogs love to play the fool, and as part of the family, they are quite capable of recognizing the fool in us, and of celebrating it with a joke now and then.

DURING THOSE FIRST days with Trixie, we learned that her personal tao, the code of virtuous conduct by which she lived, included a proscription against pooping on our property. She would pee on our lawn, but she refused to do the nastier act within the borders of our domain. She lived with us for eight years, nine months, and five days, and not once in all that time did she break this self-imposed rule, which had nothing to do with her training.

As part of CCI’s excellent instruction, their canine graduates obey a toileting command. When you speak this word, they do number one and then number two (if they need to), with nearly as much dispatch as they sit or lie down when given one of those commands.

Considering the many tasks these dogs can perform, I was for a while surprised that people unfamiliar with CCI were routinely most amazed by the toileting command. “It’s astonishing,” friends would say, and then at once wonder, “but why would anyone even think to teach a dog such a thing?”

The answer is that a person in a wheelchair is not easily able to escort a canine companion outside at the animal’s whim. It’s more convenient for them if the dog is fed on a strictly observed schedule that establishes a daily toileting rhythm. If in addition they can speak a command that encourages the dog to do its business promptly, instead of waiting while it wanders around in search of precisely the best spot to leave its treasure, all the better.

Trixie needed to toilet after breakfast in the morning, again between eleven o’clock and noon, again after her three thirty meal, and just before bed. Overnight, she could wait twelve hours, if necessary, without a need to visit Mother Nature.

Because she had an hour-long walk each morning and a half-hour walk in the afternoon, we didn’t always employ the toileting command, and she did not absolutely require that we give it. She realized we were allowing her some license in the matter on the longer walks.

But even if we gave the command while on our property, she would refuse to do more than pee. After she had done number one, if we then repeated the command, encouraging her to proceed to number two, she would stare at us in disbelief, as if to say, What- are you kidding me? This is our home, we live here.

We are blue-baggers. We always pick up after our dog and double-bag it, whether we’re on our property, a neighbor’s, or in a park. Regardless of where Trixie did number two, we collected it, so she knew we weren’t going to leave it where it dropped. When returning from a walk, we always went directly to our trash enclosure to put the filled bags in the proper can. Gerda would often say to Trixie, “We have to stop at Bank of America and make your deposit,” and it seemed to me that our furry daughter knew this was a joke, as she would wag her tail and grin.

Our house on the hill had an ocean view, and like many such communities in southern California, the lots were on the small side because the land value was prohibitive. On the view side of the residence, we had no lawn, only patios, but on the street side, a modest breadth of grass offered any dog an appealing lavatory. Any dog but Trixie, who insisted always that she must cross our property line before proceeding to the more momentous half of her potty routine.

The beach house required of her a more complicated analysis in order to live by her toilet tao. The back of the house, which faced the water, had no lawn, only patios and a sandy beach. The front of the house faced on a street so narrow that it was more properly called an alley, though I heard it referred to as a lane, a court, and a gallery by those who didn’t want people to think that their front door must be flanked by Dumpsters against which winos slept. Across this alley, behind our house, lay three lots that were also part of the property. Here were grass, gardens, and lemon trees. Often, I commanded Trixie to relieve herself in this green haven, but intuitively she knew this was still part of our grounds, and she would not squat.

A high wall separated those gardens from the public street to which, inevitably, I would have to lead her. Between the street and the public sidewalk, a four-foot-wide greensward offered grass and trees. The city required us to mow and keep healthy the grass in this public greensward, for the length that it paralleled our lots. Other neighbors had to tend their portions of the strip, and some of them replaced the grass with bricks, for easier maintenance.