May 6, 2010. Thursday.
Situation: Moi told me today that on her morning walk Mway was carrying a large stick in her mouth and Moi accidentally hit it and jarred it against her. Back at the house Mway has crept under the bushes beside the house and won’t come out. Moi has gone to work, and soon I’m going to check in on Mway. I work tonight, and I plan to leave early to do some extra work, so I should be taking Mway for a walk early in the afternoon today. I end up taking Mway out about 1:30.
State of the Path: Moi has come home from work, and when I tell her I want to take the limb chopper, or “loppers” as she calls them, to some of the honeysuckle bushes, she encourages me to not only trim back but to take down the entire honeysuckle bush by the log jam. It takes me a little time to find the loppers, but when I finally do, I take off on the walk with the sole determination of trimming more of the honeysuckles. First I cut off some of the thick branches of the honeysuckle along the old orchard, then I go down to the creek at the log jam. The bush there is growing around what I’m pretty sure is some kind of locust tree. I lop off the branches as close to the ground as possible, until there is nothing left but a stump, and that gives us at least another foot of pathway along the edge of the creek where Moi believes the ground is getting undermined. I trim a few other branches under the ashes, then I go to the honeysuckle on the other side of the feed channel. Ironically, to straddle the channel, I have to grab hold of the honeysuckle to support me. So when I’m on the other side, I only cut off some of the higher branches, betwixt and between am I about whether this bush might in the end actually be useful in crossing the channel. Walking up toward the clearing, I notice the first signs of poison ivy coming up beneath the goldenrod next to the strawberry patch.
State of the Creek: As I’m walking along, in anticipation of hearing and seeing some frogs leap into the water, I suddenly hear a splash behind me, much louder than the plopping of a frog, which stops me in my path. When I turn around, though, I see nothing.
The Fetch: I’ve brought along a small stick I found on the porch, and Mway, as enthusiastic as ever, fetches this more times than I bother to count. After one of the fetches, as Mway is spinning around and I’m bending over to pick up the stick, she barks right into my ear – and I’m almost loath to go on. But I realize this was only an accident of timing, and I continue tossing the stick until Mway decides on her own that she’s done enough.
2 comments:
Yes. It’s hard to imagine how you could learn the meanings to verbs, let alone the other parts of speech.
Again, I must emphasize that the process is chaotic. It’s not as though the dog first learns the meanings of nouns and then proceeds methodically to other grammatical items. And here we are beginning to deal with the idea of iconicity. Let me show you what I mean by taking you through my experience with one of the first books I found lying on the floor, an illustrated children’s book entitled “The Adventures of Taxi Dog” (by Debra and Sal Barracca, pictures by Mark Buehner). This book has a lot of illustrations, and it’s a story about a taxi driver in New York City who adopts a stray dog and brings it along with him while he’s driving his taxi around the city. At the time I first came across this book about the only words in it that I knew were “dog,” “car,” “tree,” “baby,” and “face.” I certainly didn’t know “taxi,” “New York City,” “hospital,” “fare,” “airport” – indeed, most of the words in the book. Actually the book first made me quite anxious, because I thought it might be about going to the monster’s house, a tragedy too close to home, but as I nosed quickly through the pages I didn’t see any pictures of a monster-like creature and his diabolical instruments, so I eventually settled down to study the book. My first impulse was to look for confirmation of those words I already knew, and while it was reassuring to find the word “Dog” – something that looks pretty close to “dog” – on the cover, it was disconcerting not to find the word anywhere else (except in repetitions of the title in the front matter). I did find “dog” included in the word “hotdog” -- this on a page with a picture showing the man giving the dog something to eat, although the food item was not something I recognized, and I assumed tentatively that “hotdog” might mean “feed dog.” I also found the word “tree,” although this was on a page without any trees in the picture, but I’d already encountered this trick of words appearing on a page without the words being illustrated, and I was relieved to find trees pictured on other pages. On the same page I found “tree” I also found the word “faces,” something that smelled very much like “face,” and reassuringly the page did picture a lot of people, most of them with their faces visible. I might as well pause for a moment and point this out: among the few words I knew I was often seeing them with an “s” appended to them, and I was trying to make sense of what this might mean. I suspected that it might indicate plurality, because the letter “s” has curves in it something like the numeral “2,” but I wasn’t sure, because here was an instance where I found “faces” with faces, but only “tree” with trees. For a time, while I was learning the words for numbers, I thought I’d find words like “twoface” or “2face” and “threetree” or “tree3” all over the place, but nothing like these words ever cropped up, except eventually the word “two-faced,” which of course means something quite different. Maybe this is enough for now. M.
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