to God’s—was hers. Throughout my adult life, Gerda has been a light to lead me.
When some members of both our families and other acquaintances learned that I now wrote fiction full-time while Gerda brought home the bacon as well as the eggs and potatoes that went with it, they took this development as proof that I was a good-for-nothing like my father. They pitied Gerda—and from time to time needled me.
For Gerda and for me, for so many reasons, failure was not a possibility we could accept. At the end of the five years, she quit her job so that we could work together. She managed our finances, did book research, and relieved me of all the demands of life and business that sapped creative energy and that kept my fingers away from the typewriter.
By then, we were making a respectable living but not a fortune. During the next five years, the quality of what I wrote improved, but progress in craft and art was seldom matched by increased financial rewards. After a Pennsylvania spring in which we never saw blue sky for forty days—very biblical—we had moved to California for the better weather, and incidentally because of opportunities to do screenwriting. In my early Hollywood ventures, however, I found the film business unfulfilling and depressing. We knew that novelists come and go, that if I did not become essential to a publisher’s bottom line, I would sooner rather than later be one of those who had gone and was forgotten.
By 1980, success began to come. Twenty-nine years later, as I write this, worldwide sales of my novels are approaching four hundred million copies. Critics have been largely kind, readers even kinder.
Besides a passion for the English language and an abiding love of storytelling, success required persistence and countless hours of hard work. The central experience of my life and of Gerda’s has been hard work, at least sixty hours a week, often seventy, sometimes more.
Our faith tells us that when the last hour comes, the best places to be taken are while in prayer or while engaged in work to which we committed ourselves in cheerful acceptance of the truth that work is the lot of humanity, post Eden. If done with diligence and integrity, work is obedience to divine order, a form of repentance.
For many years, as we gave ourselves to work, we talked about getting a dog. Even in the days when we were on a tight budget, we surrounded ourselves with beauty—cheap posters instead of original oil paintings, carnival glass instead of Daum vases—because beauty soothes the troubled mind and inspires. A dog can be a living work of art, a constant reminder of the exquisite design and breathtaking detail of nature, beauty on four paws. In addition, year by year, we became more aware that this world is a deeply mysterious place, and nothing confirmed the wonder of existence more than what we saw happening between dogs and people with disabilities at Canine Companions for Independence. Being guardians and companions of a dog would be one way to explore more fully the mystery of this world.
We knew that dogs are not well loved if kept largely in the yard, that they are pack animals born to live within a family, and that a dog therefore requires almost as much time as a child. We hesitated to take the plunge because of our work schedules and because after more than three decades of marriage, we had a rhythm to our life that worked and that we feared disrupting.
But in September of 1998, a dog finally entered our lives. Over the subsequent nine years, she often amazed us, frequently astonished us, always delighted us, and in time evoked in us a sense of wonder that will remain with us for the rest of our lives. As any man or woman is not only a man or a woman but is also a spirit corrupted in minor or major ways, so this dog was not only a dog, but also a spirit uncorrupted as no human spirit can be. Of all the agents of this world that have changed me for the better, this dog takes second place only to Gerda, and she brought as much to Gerda as to me.
This dog was as joyful as the most joyful of her kind. She possessed all the many virtues of her species. She was as direct as all dogs are. But she was uncannily intelligent, as well, and in a most undoglike way, she was also at all times mysterious and capable of a solemn behavior that was not merely mood, that was a ceremonial solemnity, as though she observed an important truth implicit in the moment and wished for you to recognize it as well. Gerda and I were not the only ones to witness this behavior, and the more that I grew aware of it and heard it remarked upon by others, the more I became open to the changes this special dog would make in me.
Along came Trixie.
III anticipation, adventure, and anal glands
SHE ARRIVED WITH her name. Trixie. I joked sometimes that it sounded more like a stripper than a dog. They told us we could change it and that she could quickly be taught to answer to a new name. But if it sounded more like a stripper than a dog, it sounded more like an elf or a fairy than a stripper. Elves and fairies are magical beings; and so was she.
Trixie came to us not as a puppy but as a highly educated and refined young lady of three. As a consequence of elbow surgery, she had taken early retirement from a career as an assistance dog to a beautiful young woman, Jenna, who had lost both legs in a traffic accident. Trixie went into service just as Jenna began the student-teaching portion of her senior year at college, and made quite an impression in an elementary-school classroom.
Since 1990, Gerda and I have been supporters of the Southwest Chapter of Canine Companions for Independence. This remarkable organization raises and trains assistance dogs of four kinds.
A dog in a “service team” is paired with an adult or adolescent with physical disabilities—paraplegics, quadriplegics—and performs tasks such as calling elevators, opening doors, picking up dropped items that a person in a wheelchair can’t reach…Some adults who could not live alone before receiving a CCI dog achieve independence; children in wheelchairs gain confidence—and a new best friend.
In a “skilled-companion team,” a dog is matched with a child or an adult with a physical or developmental disability, and with that person’s primary caretaker, which is usually a parent. The dog helps with various tasks but primarily provides companionship, establishing a deep bond of love. The effect these dogs can have on an autistic child or one with cri du chat is nothing less than miraculous.
A dog in a “hearing team” alerts his deaf or hard of hearing companion to alarm clocks, smoke alarms, doorbells, and other sounds.
“Facility team” dogs are paired with teachers, rehabilitation specialists, or caregivers in hospitals, in classrooms full of kids with developmental disorders, in nursing homes…These dogs work miracles every day.
The assistance dogs given by CCI to people with disabilities do great work because of their training, but their most exceptional achievements may be a consequence of their qualities as dogs.
Tom Hollenstein, a friend and board member of CCI’s Southwest Chapter, suffered a major spinal injury in a bicycle accident when he was twenty-four. A tall, handsome, personable guy, Tom found himself in a wheelchair, living with his parents again. He is one of the most highly motivated people I’ve ever met, and he could not long endure a lack of independence. With his first assistance dog, Weaver, Tom took control of his life, moved out of his parents’ house into his own apartment, landed a job, and never looked back. Weaver was something special, and one of those human-dog bonds formed that was even deeper than usual. Tom has said that, given the choice of never having been disabled or never having known Weaver, he would choose the dog and therefore the spinal injury. Tom does not speak about such things lightly; he means what he says. He told me that when he lost his four-legged companion, he discovered, in his grief, depths of emotion that he had not realized were in him.
I first read about CCI when I was researching a novel,
