Essays

Unless I just took a ghost dog out to pee, she’s fine. Several people wrote with condolences–misinterpreting, I think, the line of the dedication that says Trixie is “an angel on four feet.” She has been an angel since the day that she came to us, but always very much alive. I’ve made a couple of verb-tense changes in the dedication for the paperback edition, just to avoid confusion. Trixie is 10, turns 11 next October, and with the veterinary care and healthy diet available to dogs these days, she should be with us another five years or more, especially as she is on the small side for a golden, weighing in at 68 pounds, except in those weeks when she cages a few corn chips and extra peanut butter, but even then she has never ballooned to more than 236 pounds.