XVI
time and memory
EACH TIME I write about dogs in a novel or a work of nonfiction, I receive a few letters accusing me of anthropomorphizing them, of ascribing human attributes to mere animals.
Some of my correspondents have an aversion to dogs, and they are annoyed to see one portrayed with what they deem is excess affection.
Others write from a moral high ground, which they claim in the name of their religion. They are certain to a fault that God’s grace extends only to human beings, that other living things on this Earth are pretty much like the low-paid extras that fill out crowd scenes in movies. I suppose they must interpret the biblical admonition that God knows of every sparrow’s death to mean not that He cares for all of His creatures in this fallen world, but instead that He has a worldwide surveillance system so awesome that even Homeland Security could not replicate it.
A few correspondents reject the concept of human exceptionalism and believe that any animal is superior to any person. If I ascribe human qualities and characteristics to a dog, these folks feel that I am demeaning canines.
Finally, an animal psychologist or a zoologist, or a naturalist of another kind, will assure me that the human qualities and emotions I see in dogs are not what they appear to be, that the mind of any animal is radically different from ours. Depending on their area of expertise, they will assert all manner of astonishing things: that a dog has no sense of its individuality, no true self-awareness, as we do; that a dog’s mind is insufficiently complex to engender emotions; that a dog cannot reason from a cause to an effect.
Nonsense.
All of us, scientists and nonscientists alike, find it difficult almost to the point of impossibility to see the world through another human being’s mind, which is why we’re continually surprised by what even our friends and neighbors are capable of doing. The serial killer next door is routinely described as a quiet, nice, ordinary guy by those who imagined that they knew him.
What a leap it then is to insist that we can know absolutely how the mind of another species works. The great advantages of a mutual language and a shared culture fail us daily in our efforts to understand our own kind. With dogs, the experts have only theory. Evidently, the prospect that the world at its deepest level rests on a mystery we cannot solve this side of death is so terrifying to some that our wondrous dogs must be regarded as nothing more than meat machines lest their true and astonishing nature should cause us to consider how magical is our very existence
One caveat: When discussing the possible thoughts, reasoning, and intentions of a dog, we must remember that overall intelligence varies from breed to breed. Levels of intelligence also vary from individual to individual within the same breed, just as it varies from one human being to another. Trixie was a very smart golden.
I HAVE OFTEN read and been told that dogs have no sense of time. I don’t believe this, but what I do believe is that the people who say it have no sense, period.
Believing dogs have no sense of the passage of time, you should not be concerned if you leave old Spot alone for one hour or four hours when you go out for an evening. In either case, his perception supposedly will be that you have been gone awhile, for a period he can’t measure, perhaps for a minute or perhaps for a day.
Trixie possessed such a precise and reliable sense of time that we would not have needed clocks or watches to keep her on her daily schedule. After a breakfast of kibble, she received an apple-cinnamon rice cake at eleven thirty, just before her midday walk, and then a dish of kibble at three-thirty, prior to her afternoon walk. Gerda, Linda, Elaine, and I daily experienced Trixie’s uncanny promptitude. Never later than the appointed time, but never more than a minute or two earlier, she came to whoever had custody of her; with the tap of a raised paw or with a bump of her nose, or by placing her head in your lap and rolling her eyes, she announced that in case you hadn’t noticed, the hour had come for food, exercise, and toileting. Year after year, she announced these daily routines with accuracy.
Eventually, we grew so accustomed to the reliability of the clock in Trixie’s head that it ceased to amaze us, but we never stopped being impressed by the way she adapted to daylight-saving time. When we sprang forward an hour in the spring and then fell back an hour in the autumn, she was never an hour late or early, but still to the minute in sync with the reset clocks.
When she came to us, Trixie accepted the work schedule that Gerda and I maintained, which kept us at our desks until at least six o’clock, often until seven or later, though we were up every morning by five thirty or six.
Within two weeks, however, Trixie decided that we were insane for working past five o’clock, and she set out upon a campaign to free us from our offices at a normal quitting hour. One day, promptly at five, she came to the farther side of my U-shaped desk and issued not a bark, but a soft woof. When I turned away from the computer to discover what disturbed her, I could see only her glorious big head above the desk. She stared at me with an intense expression that Gerda called the “Ross look.” Ross Cerra, her father, had a frown of disapproval that could wilt a fresh flower from a distance of forty feet. After telling Trix that it was not yet quitting time and that she must be patient, I turned my attention to the keyboard once more.
Fifteen minutes later, she issued another sotto voce woof. This time her head was poked around the corner of the desk. Her Ross look had grown so solemn that Ross himself could not have matched its effect. Again, I told her the time to quit had not arrived, and I returned to the scene that I was writing.
At five thirty, she came directly to my chair and sat staring at me. When I didn’t acknowledge her, she inserted her head under the arm of my chair, squinching her ears and fur, peering up at me with such a forlorn expression that I couldn’t ignore her. A few minutes later, I knocked off early and took her outside to play.
The following afternoon, when she woofed softly at five o’clock, I didn’t yet understand that she was on a crusade to change our lives. As before, she started from the farther side of my desk, poked her head around the corner fifteen minutes later, and came to my chair at five thirty. When she squeezed her head under the chair arm and implored me with her melancholy gaze, I realized she had a strategy and the tactics to fulfill it.
I tried to defend the sanctity of my work schedule, but her wiles were irresistible. Within two weeks, we regularly knocked off work at five thirty, and within a month, because of the clock in Trixie’s head and her diligent insistence, five o’clock became the official end of the workday in Koontzland.
SOME WILL TELL you that dogs’ memories are short, that they retain only what has been drilled into them through repetitive training and what relates directly to their basic needs of food, water, and shelter.
My polite response to that is, “Balderdash.”
Vito and Lynn, who had been vacationing at our beach house when Trixie came to us from CCI, returned the following year to stay two weeks again. On their first evening there, we drove a Ford Explorer to the peninsula to pick them up for dinner, and Trixie rode in the cargo space, gazing out the tailgate window at the world receding.
When greeting people whom she had met before, Short Stuff’s enthusiasm was directly proportional to how much fun they had been on the previous occasion. As usual, Vito and Lynn had been more fun each day than an entire amusement park, and that was before the cocktail hour. When they got into the backseat, Trixie lost her composure. She wiggled excitedly, tail slap-slap-slapping the walls of the cargo space. She made that winsome, hardly audible squeal of ecstasy in the back of her throat. Unable to contain herself, she sprang into the backseat, between them, which she had never done with anyone before, and lavished on them the Tongue of Love, though she rarely licked.
She had seen them several days on their previous visit, but not again for a year. Yet her behavior confirmed beyond doubt that she not only recognized them but also remembered that they had been great company. No other explanation holds water, especially since Vito had long ago stopped wearing that liver-scented cologne.
But Trixie displayed remarkable long-term memory, as well. In one instance, going back to her earliest days as a puppy…
A year earlier, when Vito and Lynn had accompanied us to the CCI campus in Oceanside, with the crew of Pinnacle, Gerda and I asked Judi Pierson what would be done with the large portion of their land not yet used. She said they hoped to build a residential facility in which each class of people with disabilities could stay for the two weeks that were required to learn how properly to handle and care for their dogs.
At that time, those who were chosen to be teamed with a dog (henceforth “team partners”) had to stay in area motels and motor inns during the two-week “boot camp.” This was unsatisfactory for at least three reasons. Some of the team partners could not easily afford those two weeks of lodging and dining out. Older motels could not usually accommodate people in wheelchairs, and some of the team partners could find rooms only miles from the campus, which made an exhausting day of instruction even more draining. And with the class scattered to numerous locations every night, there was less camaraderie, fewer opportunities for the team partners to cheer on one another.
CCI envisioned a wheelchair-accessible residential facility on the Oceanside campus, with rooms large enough to accommodate the team partners and their family members, with also a full-service catering kitchen, a dining room, a lounge, and other features. Gerda and I agreed to make a grant to CCI through our charitable foundation, for the purpose of constructing this residential facility.
A few years later, the grand opening celebration was tied to the graduation of the first class—numbering ten or twelve, I think—that had stayed in the new residence hall. When Gerda and I arrived with Trixie, we were surprised to see a monument sign on the front lawn that identified this as the DEAN AND GERDA KOONTZ CAMPUS of Canine Companions for Independence. We do not ask any charity to which we contribute to emblazon our names on anything. It had not occurred to us that this would be done as a surprise. While we prefer to keep a low profile, CCI is so close to our hearts that we were more touched than embarrassed by this tribute.
Every parking space along the street was taken, and neither Gerda nor I realized that a space in the CCI lot, near the front door, was reserved for us. We followed a road to the top of a long hill overlooking the campus and parked at a considerable distance.
When Trixie jumped down from the back of the SUV, she was adamant about getting to CCI quickly. This was the campus where she received her six months of advanced training and from which she had graduated with Jenna years ago. I assumed that she was excited by nothing more than nostalgia for the old days when she had been the class clown. No horse could have pulled harder than Trixie pulled me, and on the way down the hill, I thought she would drag me off my feet. Gerda kept saying, “Wait, wait, slow down,” and as I struggled to keep my balance on the slope, I couldn’t explain that Trixie had for the first time in my experience become a rowdy girl who ignored all the rules of leash training.
If Trix continued this behavior once inside CCI, I would need to explain how I had allowed their perfectly trained young lady to be transformed into a candidate for a dogs-gone-wild video. Some of the blame might credibly be placed on an exuberant yellow Lab who lived across the street and was a bad influence, even though no such Lab existed, but I didn’t have enough time to work out plausible details to support a claim that she had eaten fermented kibble.
In the dry and sunny day, the drooping trees did not whisper in the motionless air, but at a higher altitude, a breeze chased clouds toward the faraway coast. In the perfect stillness, shadows of clouds undulated across the ground, and seemed to be spirits invading this tranquil reality from a more turbulent parallel universe. Trixie’s radiant coat shone red blond in the fleeting forms of shade, blond red in the brighter light, her flags fluffy and white in either condition. Perhaps the strangeness of still air and rampant shadows contributed to my impression that our golden girl’s beauty was more ethereal than ever—even though she strained mightily on the leash, as if determined to pull me to my knees.
When we arrived at CCI, I hoped Trix would stop pulling, but my hope wasn’t fulfilled. She hadn’t yet arrived where she wished to be.
A few hundred people were in full celebration, standing in the hallways and between buildings in the courtyards. There might have been a hundred dogs in attendance, not just those who had graduated this day with their team partners, but also younger dogs in their training capes, with their puppy raisers, and release dogs, like Trixie, who were companions to the volunteers who gave so much time to CCI and made it purr like a high-performance engine.
Straining at the leash, Trixie led Gerda and me through the crowd, not the least interested in the double score of dogs she passed or in the people who called her name and reached out to pet her. At last she stopped nose to nose with another lovely golden retriever, their tails lashing with delight. Clearly, this must have been her destination from the moment she exited the SUV.
As the two dogs communed, Gerda and I chatted with the woman who had the other golden. When I described how determined Trixie had been to get to this very spot, she said, “Do you know what dog this is? It’s Tinsey, one of Trixie’s litter mates.”
Most experts will say that a few weeks after the pups in a litter are separated, they no longer recognize one another as brothers and sisters. Insufficient long-term memory.
Hah. Years later, Trixie caught the scent of her sibling from a couple of hundred yards and would not rest until they had been reunited. Considering all the other dogs present that day, this bit of evidence, though anecdotal, convinces me that dogs can remember not only what they learn from repetitive training or what knowledge directly assists their survival, but also what most matters to them otherwise, and they can remember it for a long, long time.