The Dogs of Babel by Carolyn Parkhurst

Author:Carolyn Parkhurst [PARKHURST, CAROLYN]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780759528062
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2003-06-01T04:00:00+00:00

I Had a Dream: The Civil Rights Movement and Real Life (Mine.)

796 Ways to Say “I Love You” (Mine. I always wanted to be as spontaneous and romantic as Lexy, to be able to surprise her the way she always surprised me. So I bought this book to help plan my spontaneity. I didn’t know she knew about it.)

Things I Wish I’d Known (Hers. A book of poetry.)

Strange but True: Aliens in Our Midst (Hers. She bought this book for the illustrations after a customer of hers requested an alien mask for a play.)

Forget About Yesterday and Make the Most of Today (Hers.)

You’d Better Believe It! The World’s Most Famous Hoaxes and Practical Jokes (Mine.)

How to Be a Success While Doing What You Love (Hers.)

And No Pets Step on DNA (Mine. A rather silly collection of palindromes. The cover shows a laboratory full of dogs in lab coats. A sign on the wall shows a cat standing on a double helix, with a line drawn through it.)

More 10-Minute Recipes (Hers, though I often used it. It contains some surprisingly good recipes, although they seldom live up to the ten-minute promise.)

My Ántonia (Mine from college. I never read it.)

A Room of One’s Own (Hers from college. I don’t know if she read it or not.)

Places I’d Never Dreamed Of (Mine. A collection of travel writing.)

As I type, I’m attempting at the same time to eat a ham and cheese sandwich. It’s rather awkward, and at one point, as I take a bite out of the sandwich, a morsel of cheese and a drop of mustard fall onto the letters K and L on my keyboard. I set the computer down on the floor and go to the kitchen to get a sponge, and when I return, I find Lorelei standing in front of the computer, her head bent to the keys, lapping at the space where the cheese had been. I shoo her away—who knows what damage dog saliva might do to an expensive computer?—but when I bend to wipe off the keys, I see that something quite wonderful has happened. Beneath the title of the last book I listed, Lorelei has typed a string of letters with her tongue. KKKLKLLKIKKLMLK, she has written. And that’s when it hits me, this marvelous idea, that’s when it breaks on me like day: I am going to teach Lorelei to type.

It seems to me a perfect solution. Several weeks have gone by since the wa incident, with no further breakthroughs. Perhaps, I think, Lorelei’s vocal cords are not suited to speech per se, but that doesn’t mean communication isn’t possible.

I begin to devise a plan. I am not expecting her to type words, of course, but it occurs to me that if I can teach her to associate the words she already knows—“ball,” “out,” “treat,” “Lexy”—with specific visual symbols, I can then devise a special keyboard with those same symbols, and Lorelei can type an entire word with a single touch of her nose.

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