June 1, 2010. Tuesday.
Situation: Work this afternoon, take Mway out when I come back, about 4 pm. Today Moi took Mway over to Ezra’s place for a practice run for when she has to spend the day in a kennel this Saturday for Jazz’s wedding. Moi said Mway, who’s not used to a kennel or even riding in a car, was very quiet and humble the whole time, but she feels Mway will be okay. Even as Moi relates this to me, Mway skulks around the house, as if she understands exactly what Moi is talking about. I bring along the clippers for today’s walk.
State of the Path: Immediately beyond the walled garden I start clipping, at whatever sticks conspicuously out in the path: hedge garlic, sumac branches, honeysuckles branches, multiflora and blackberry briars. I would call it a casual clipping, as I don’t spend more than a few seconds at any one place; the only place I clip for a minute or more is down at the creek where the path narrows. Here I spend a couple minutes trimming back about half of the multiflora bush that grows out toward the creek, and also cutting down the goldenrod, jewelweed, and other weeds around it. It gives a little more space on the path, but I really should come down here with the loppers sometime and take out the whole bush. My clipping really only gets at the worst of the vegetation. All throughout the path, there are still weeds that impinge on it; it will take going out with a weed whacker to clear the path any more effectively. Down along the seeps in bug land, the grasses that grow up along either side of the path are now over my head. I trip over the monkey vine on the path, which is now hidden in grass, and I trip over some fallen locust tree branches which are now also hidden. Along the ridge around bug land, I see something moving in the weeds (not far from where Mway cornered the raccoon a few months ago). Mway sees something moving too, and goes into the weeds. I see a shrub wiggling, and weeds shaking, but it looks like Mway can’t find anything, and I walk on.
State of the Creek: Mway wades into the water to cool off. Some of the dead flowers on the water seem to have floated to accumulate at the edges of the creek bank or in front of a cascade of rocks. Some multiflora branches are drooping down in the water.
The Fetch: When I reach the clearing I have to call for Mway to come. She soon comes running up the path, ready to fetch the stick. I’ve brought the lilac stick, but she doesn’t fetch it many more times than she did the “pro-quality” stick yesterday. We play “Put it down” once. By this time, I’m hot and itchy; I have to take my gloves off to the wipe sweat and bugs out of my eyes. Mway passes me at the fork at the main path to beat me back to the porch, and after I make this entry, while Squeak presses against my legs with the hopes of jumping on my lap, I’ll be ready to jump into the pool.
2 comments:
So you were expanding your concept of syntax. Previously you had started understanding subject-verb patterns, “I ride,” “I see.” Now you were discerning subject-verb-object.
Exactly. An actor does something, and often there is another participant in the action. Actor-action-participant. Iconicity tells me these words should be close together and in some sort of order. If someone sees something, that something shouldn’t be too far away, way over on the other page where it can’t be seen, for example. And even if there are other words obscuring the view, you should still be able to make out that something. Eventually I would also be able to understand those in-between words, figuring that they do something to the main words, but that comes later. For now I was still working on the word “I,” whose meaning I still had yet to grasp. I knew what “I” referred to in three different instances, but why use the word “I” rather than “the dog,” “the boy,” or “the man”? Then I realized that in the Gingerbread Man story sometimes “the boy” or “the man” was used. On the page where the boy is pictured looking in the oven, the passage just before the “I” section is “The little boy sat in the kitchen and watched the oven.” I didn’t know what all these words meant, but I knew enough that it was telling me that “the boy” was doing something in front of the stove. And in every passage where the Gingerbread Man appears, just before the “I” sentences and before a picture which showed him pointing to himself and making an utterance directed at another creature, there was a sentence like “The gingerbread man ran on.” When I saw that “the…man,” on the one hand, and “I,” on the other hand, referred to the same thing, it suddenly dawned on me: the “I” always only appeared when the Gingerbread Man was speaking. M.
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