June 28, 2010. Monday.
Situation: Again, the morning chores. I take Mway out a little after 8. I think about putting a leash on her to avoid any encounters with the raccoons, but she’s not wearing her collar, so I don’t bother with it. I have to work this afternoon.
State of the Path: I survey the lawn and see that it hasn’t grown much in the past week: no need to mow it tonight. I spot the fallen purple plums under the plum tree, but I don’t see any ripened plums in the tree itself. Out on the side path, I see something has dug into one of the anthills; some sort of carnivore must be resorting to insects for food, and I think of the possibility that it might be the raccoons. I don’t see any ants in the newly disturbed dirt, and I wonder if whatever dug it up might have been disappointed in its search. As I look at the poor state of the jewelweed, I note that just past the cedar tree and just before the thickest area of goldenrod, there’s a stand of jewelweed that seems to be doing well. Otherwise, most of the jewelweed all over the place looks bedraggled. Down by the creek, much of the grass is brown, particularly beneath the giant locust tree with the oaks growing beside it.
State of the Creek: Mway passes me on the path by the wigwams, and as we approach the creek, I hold my breath. But we don’t encounter any raccoons. Under the tree stand, I see that I’ve misremembered yesterday. The water that remains of the pool there is all under the maple tree, not as I said last night. There’s a bunch of birds in the trees at the hedgerow, but I can’t tell what they are. I don’t take the side path, but I do check on the rest of the pools of the creek. Most of them should now be called puddles.
The Fetch: I realize that my muscles are just not awake this early in the morning, as I bend down slowly to pick up the stick after each fetch. After a number of fetches with the “pro-quality” stick, Mway starts to play “Put it down.” She wants to play it a couple times, but I only play it once. On the path past the sumacs, I’m happy that I clipped many of the briars back the other day.
Addendum: My work in the afternoon doesn’t take long, and I’m back by 2. Moi says she’s coming home later this afternoon, without Atlas, and needs my help to siphon off some beer brewing in the basement that she and the Boy had made. I take a nap, during which it rains, briefly, but hard. When Moi arrives, I take Mway out again for a walk, about 5. The rain has affected the plants: the weeds are leaning over onto the path, especially the grass down at the seeps at bug land, where it feels I have to wade through it. The jewelweed seems more vibrant – it’s amazing to me how quickly they imbibe a little water. And down at the creek, there’s a little more water in the pools of water, though there’s hardly been enough rain to restore the whole creek. Up at the clearing, after Mway fetches the “pro-quality” stick a number of times, we play “Put it down” about five times.
2 comments:
We’ve been conducting this interview since – what? -- about April 24, and your whole Development of Literacy in the Family Dog has been going on since March 20, counting the week or so when you simply posted the title every day. I think I get the gist of what you wanted to say in Part ?, your encounter with “symbols in combination” -- how you learned where the front of a book is, learned the meanings of words from pictures, searched out simple nouns and verbs in various children’s books and started to see them clustered around each other, with an action and two participants, Subject-Verb-Object, and with other words around them further describing the action and those involved. I can see how you started understanding phrases and clauses, how you began to understand that pronouns were a different way of referring to the participants, how you perceived that word orders could be inverted so the subject appeared last. I can see how you began comprehending the verb “to be,” the present tense “is” and the past tense “was, as well as other verbs and tenses and negation. I can see how you used the dictionary, the encyclopedia, and glossaries to learn the meanings of more difficult and abstract terms. I can see how you scrupulously scrutinized all of the children’s books we had lying about the house, and from what you have – I might say—very well described, I can extrapolate and see fairly clearly how you eventually went on and apparently read every book in Moi’s and my libraries, although admittedly it is incredible that you learned to do in just a few years what it takes a human decades. But never mind that. Let’s assume that eventually you mastered “The Adventures of Taxi Dog,” “The Butter Battle Book,” “Doctor De Soto,” the Teen Beat issue for October 1996, and so on, and by an evolutionary process of accumulative learning, which hardly needs to be set forth in great detail, you went on to read all of Moi’s books (Charles Fort’s Lo! and so on) and then all of my books (Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal and so on) – why, to return to the very purported reason you have been explaining the development of your literacy to me in the first place, why, of all these hundreds of books, have you fastened upon one written by an author who feared and hated dogs as your favorite and as the standard by which you have been judging (rather unfairly and inappropriately, I might add) the writing of this journal?
First of all, I think it’s a gross oversimplification to characterize Joyce’s feeling toward dogs as “fear and hatred.” Second, I’ve hardly read all of your and Moi’s books – many I just couldn’t reach. Third, I feel I’ve hardly touched upon phrases, clauses, verb tenses, interrogatives. I haven’t even mentioned punctuation or, aside from articles, much about adjectives and adverbs. What about gerunds and participles? Don’t you want to hear about how I finally read something all the way through without looking at any of the pictures? Or how I would leap high in the hallway, as high as I do at the transom window, to try to pull down a volume of the World Book Encyclopedia from its place on the high shelf? Or how I would spend hours, days, even a week sometimes, looking up a word in the dictionary? M
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