Yesteryear's "Lectio" recaptured

November 20, 2013

     Beau gets me up at about a quarter of seven each morning: I have taken to lolling in bed for about fifteen minutes after he shakes himself awake, the sound of which is my new alarm clock.

     I march around the bed, in my nightshirt and slippers, pulling back the curtains to let the light in, opening one of the windows to let the fresh air enter the bedroom.  After that, I open the door to the crate Beau sleeps in on the bed and he steps out of the crate and sits on the end of the bed.  I pick him up, put him on the floor and start for the kitchen to make breakfast for both of us.

     I don't go a foot before Beau has grabbed the tail of my nightshirt, holding on to it so that I can drag him a few feet before he lets go his grip and tries to grab the shirttail again.  I walk very slowly so as not to jostle the puppy, approaching the sink, where I pick up his food and water bowls.  Within a few minutes of drinking, eating and "doing his numbers", Beau is sprightly and needs to be entertained.

     I pick up the dog whistle and the sock ball I made him, Beau's eyes on the yellow shape.  I blow the whistle, throw the sock ball and cry "Fetch!" --and Beau goes for it, picking up the soft shape, then bringing it back.  I do this only a few times, so as not to tax his attention span.

     After that, he plays "tug-of-war" with the sock ball, or an old leather belt.  An empty plastic shampoo bottle has become another toy: he likes to try to get his mouth around it, and as it slips from his maw, pounce again.  Most demanding of all, a blue hard-rubber racquet ball tests his patience: it will bounce a few times after I first drop it, but the residual momentum makes it roll erratically, as if it were being moved by an unseen hand.  Beau lies down watching its tergiversations before finally seizing it in his paws, after which he bites down on it the way a seven-year old boy might an enormous apple.

     His burst of energy exhausted, Beau lies down at my feet and bites at my shoes until, finally quiescent, he closes his eyes again and goes to sleep.

     This is conducive to such reading as I have not done since I was a college student.

     The habit of reading is deeply ingrained and my collection of books amounts to a library, but frequently, my best intentions to read deeply are frustrated by an inner restlessness.  I read very interesting books swiftly, but I haven't been reading the books I want to read --because I am curious about the history of a particular period, because I want to delve into a particular author.

     Yet that was what I did in college:  I wanted to know Tolstoy's works, so I read all of them for a course.  I wanted to know more about Russia and the U.S.S.R., so I took a course with Richard Pipes, one of the country's leading experts, reading his Russia Under The Old Regime, a history of the police state there.  I wanted to know some English history, so I took a course that covered Georgian England to the Reform Bill, taught by John Clive, whose Macaulay: The Shaping of the Historian, won the National Book Award in 1974.  Those hours of reading were not work, they were pure pleasure.  Those were the years when I discovered how much I could teach myself: that is to say that I learned that what I could learn was not circumscribed by the first language I spoke, or that my parents never spoke English well, or that they were not American, or that I was from Manhattan.  I could study anything!

     In the end I couldn't study everything well --I had no aptitude for mathematics, or chemistry, both subjects I had learned relatively easily in high school-- but I did gain confidence in my faculties, and I realized pure curiosity is without prejudice  --that which is implanted in a person at birth does not necessarily have any correlation to race, national origin or socio-economic status, provided it is never squelched in the name of any of these.

     I lost that pure curiosity I had in my first three years of college as the need to make a living loomed larger.  I have never lost it entirely (as my library will attest), but until the need to sit still in my apartment so as to watch Beau imposed itself, moments when I could read in peace were few.

     Now I find that, with Beau at my feet, I can sit in my best chair and sink into a book.  Currently, I am reading Napoleon: The Path To Power 1769-1799, a great, big doorstopper of a book by Philip Dwyer.   Has the "little brown dog" brought me back to my earlier self?