ETHEL & CASSIE
Some of you might know that I live with a little Yorkie
called Cassie. She’s maybe seven inches tall, eighteen inches long and weighs
about seven pounds. I bought her for my Ethel something over seven years ago
and the two of them finally got along famously until Ethel went away. She
didn’t want to go; she just couldn’t stay. Cassie—we called her after my
mother—well, actually, my mother’s name was Catherine and only her peers called
her “Cassie”. We called her nothing but “mother”. Well, that’s not exactly what
we called her. Our working class speech conventions helped, no doubt, by
phonetic laziness, had shortened it to “mor”. Fathers were called “far”. (As in, "Where duz your far work?" or, "I saw your mor at the shop a wee while ago.")
In any case my little dog Cassie—I call her “my” little
dog not in the sense of “ownership” for
if either of us owns the other she owns me. She’s bi-lingual, fluent in Dogese
and English. Her proficiency in English has grown exponentially in the last
four years; her vocabulary is massive and she has mastered the idioms while I’m
still a complete dunce in Dogese, despite Cassie’s patient instruction, which I
notice has fallen off over this past year and more. I can speak a few Dogese
words that I can’t spell—that’s it. Of course I don’t even know if Dogese has
an alphabet. As best I can determine, Dogese is only a spoken language. I
don't know, maybe that’s a good thing.
I need hardly tell
you that it gobsmacked me when I first heard her speak to
me. “Do you think we’ll be eating any time soon?” the voice said, “I’m
close to
starvin’. My ribs are starin’ at each other.” It was a small voice,
clear enough but anything but booming and since I don't hear very well I
often doubt what I hear or think I hear. In any case, I looked around
(I live with our
daughter Linda and her family in their basement—she calls it the “first
floor,”
her husband, Stan, calls it “the dungeon”)—as I said, I looked around
and there
was no one but Cassie and me. I stared at her for a minute and she
finally nodded, “Yes, I know, a bit
of a shock. It’s me. So now you know.”
I sat down stunned, she let me chew on it even while I
spluttered things like “but…” or “This must be a…” But just then my mind leaped
back several years to puzzling experiences that might have made me suspicious
if the truth hadn’t seemed so preposterous. Like several times when I walked
into the bedroom and Ethel was talking earnestly to Cassie. (Ethel had to spend
a lot of time in bed in the last years.) I thought I’d heard two voices and
once when I was opening the door I was close to convinced that I heard Ethel
say, “Shush, here’s Jim.” Then there was the time when I heard the two of them
laughing (I now know it must have been the two of them) at the antics of
some characters on the Andy Griffiths Show. By the time I got the door
open, though Ethel was still laughing, Cassie had burrowed under the blanket. I
ran over, pulled back the blanket and Cassie had that happy but ordinary dog
look—you know, tongue out, bright eyes, button black nose and…ordinary.
I looked at the two of them, they glanced at each other,
Ethel giggled and Cassie buried her head under Ethel’s arms, her wee body
shaking. I now know it wasn’t from effort at snuggling in close to Ethel—the
little rascal was muffling her laughter. What a dope I was. As soon as I left
the room Ethel began to squeal with laughter, I ducked my head back in and she
pointed at the TV—or was it at me since the TV sat right inside beside the
door? But how could I have known? As the days went by they must have taken more
care and, anyway, the months became more sobering and it was getting near time
for Ethel to leave.
The last time I caught a glimpse of anything of that sort
was one day I came home, Ethel was in the wheelchair and tearful, Cassie was up
on her hind legs on the wee tabletop, front paws on Ethel’s shoulders with her
head snuggled into her neck. Perhaps I should have known there was something
between them that was beyond special.
It took me several months to come to terms with Cassie’s
giftedness that was way beyond just being able to speak, and speak English. To
do that she must be able to—well, never mind—there’s more to speaking English
than speaking English.
I tried to tell Linda and our younger son George that
Cassie spoke English but how can you get people to take you seriously when you
say things like that? I brought them in to see Cassie and I asked her to say
something, anything, but she’d just put on that ordinary-dog act and scratch
her ear or jump up on to their laps, some such thing. Linda and George were
only there because I insisted that they come down and listen to her but the
humor soon wore off—In her silence Cassie triumphed.
Maybe I'll continue this. I'm not sure.
©2004 Jim McGuiggan. All materials are free to be copied and used as long as money is not being made.
Many thanks to brother Ed Healy, for allowing me to post from his website, theabidingword.com