April 8, 2010. Thursday.
Situation: After we visit the tax lady in the morning, I take Mway out about 12:30, so I can rest up later for work tonight.
State of the Path: When I step out on the porch, Moi is on the stoop, shaving off the bark of a sapling for a pole in her new wigwam, which she calls Wigwam II. As she carries the sapling down to the wigwam, with Mway following her, I go out to the old orchard to look for jack-in-the-pulpits, which Moi says I might find now underneath the kids’ broken down tree fort. I don’t see any jack-in-pulpits, but all throughout the orchard floor, mixed among the spring onions and other grasses, I see purple flowers, which I first mistake for gill-of-the-ground but later learn from Moi are violets. Audubon suggests to me that they may be either dog violets, which have leaves and flowers on the same stalk, or common blue violets, which have leaves and flowers on separate stalks – if I remember, I should be able to tell tomorrow which ones these are. I meet Moi down at her wigwam, and we walk down to the creek. There Moi points out to me some gill-of-the-ground, which I now am reminded actually has more of a blue flower than a purple one like the violets. She then discovers some of the little white flowers that I had first noticed a week or so ago (they are a little bigger now) – and she tells me they are cheeses. “What?’ I ask. “Cheeses,” she repeats, “Like cheese, only cheeses.” And indeed I find cheeses listed in Audubon, although the leaves in the photo don’t look like what I remember seeing down by the creek.
State of the Creek: Moi watches some water striders in one of the pools of the creek and says, “I like the way the water spiders cast shadows.” I look into the pool to see what she’s talking about. I see a couple striders, and they seem to have big globular appendages attached to their undersides that move in tandem with their upper body. “That can’t be their shadows,” I exclaim, as Moi walks away. And I look at the striders for a while, and only when I see one pass very close over a rock and the globular appendages disappear am I convinced that I’m looking at shadows. I come to realize that when the strider passes over a rock that is deep enough in the water, the sun casts a shadow onto the rock that distorts their spindly legs into fat blobs encircled by a ring of light.
The Fetch: One fetch. When I get back into the house I am sweating and dying for a glass of ice water.
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And Have You Ever Wondered?
When you think, you may find that sometimes you have a stream of words going through your head. It might go something like this: “They call them stupid. They understand what we say better than we understand them. She understands all she wants to. Vindictive too. Wonder what I look like to her. Height of a tower? No, she can jump me.” Do you think that a dog might have a stream of odors going through its head in a similar fashion?
When you look at a word you know, you usually don’t have to think twice about what it means. But if you look at a word you don’t know, you could look at it forever and never discover its meaning. Assuming that a dog can learn a few simple words, do you believe there are any words a dog could never comprehend? Before you answer, consider that many words for abstract concepts derive from metaphors for concrete things: “concept” itself comes from the Latin words com, “in,” and capere, “to take”; “comprehend” from com and prehendere, “to grasp”; “consider” from com and sidus, “star”; “concrete” from com and crescere, “to grow”; “abstract” from ab, “away,” and trahere, “to draw”; “metaphor” from meta, “among,” and pherein, “to bear”; and “derive” from de, “from, away,” and rivus, “stream.”
On the other hand, if you detect an odor, but you don’t know what’s causing the smell, what does this tell you about yourself? Do you believe there are any odors you could never learn the meanings to?
Jack London begins his famous novel The Call of the Wild with the statement “Buck did not read the newspapers.” Can you think of any meaning of the word “newspaper” that would make this statement patently untrue? Do you believe that Jack London really knew as much about dogs as he pretends to know in his novels?
In re-reading this blog since my last post on December 24, 2011, I feel it incumbent upon me to append this comment. Several times over the last couple years, Moi has remarked that M “has no sense of smell”! -- citing as evidence that, whereas Blue used to snatch up a piece of food dropped on the floor right away, M has trouble finding such a piece of food until you point out to her where it is, and, whereas Blue could track down small animals like a rabbit or ground hog by smell, it seems M must rely on her hearing to do this – and this applies also to her fetching of a stick. I don’t know if in making these remarks Moi is questioning anything that M is saying here. It seems to me she isn’t, because she hasn’t said so explicitly, which she could easily do (further proof, also, that Moi, if she’s read this blog at all, has done so only sporadically, probably ignoring the comments all together). In M’s defence, I can only say that Moi’s remark that “she has no sense of smell” must surely be an exaggeration – perhaps, compared to some other dog’s, M’s sense of smell is not so highly developed, but certainly it must be far better than a human’s, though the fact that she has to rely on a finger point to locate a piece of dropped food is indeed troubling.
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