But on the dog front, things couldn’t be going better. I’ve had the most wonderful idea, an idea that I think may be the key to the success of my project with Lorelei. The idea comes to me quite accidentally. I’m sitting in my study, working on my laptop—I’m cataloging the contents of the third shelf of books, the ones Lexy arranged on the day of her death—and I’ve typed in the following titles:
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. The keys would need to be a bit bigger than usual, to allow for the wideness of her nose as well as to provide room to display symbols large enough for Lorelei to be able to “read” them. I get to work with the flash cards. I show Lorelei a card with a single wavy line. “Water,” I say. “Water.” Then a card with a childlike lollipop drawing of a tree. “Tree,” I say. And so on. I draw Lexy as a smiling face with a curl of hair coming down each side of her head. I draw “out” with an arrow. I draw “treat” with a bone.
But this isn’t enough. I have to teach her “sad.” I have to teach her “fall.” And “jump.” I have to make her understand the difference.
In the end, I just create symbols for every word I think I might need. I can always teach her the meanings later.
For the keyboard, I decide to go see an acquaintance of mine, a man named Mike Wolfe who works in the electrical engineering department at the university. Mike has an interest in linguistics, so I think he might be willing to help me out. A former student of mine once asked Mike to help him write a program that would put together random sounds to create nonsense words for a project the student was doing on language formation. It was a rather meaningless project—in fact, as I recall, the student left the department soon afterward without receiving his degree—but I was impressed with what Mike came up with.
So I go to see Mike, and I tell him what I’m looking for. I don’t tell him it’s for a dog; I tell him I’m working with severely disabled children. I emphasize that several of them will need to hit the buttons with their noses. He nods respectfully and seems to believe me, but when I return to pick up the machine two weeks later, I see a cartoon, clearly cut from the campus newspaper, posted to the office door of one of Mike’s colleagues in the department. It shows a dog sitting in front of a computer, tongue hanging out, with a goofy look on its face. Its paws are resting on the keyboard, and a string of nonsense words are visible on the screen. Behind the dog stands a man, looking nothing like me, I must say, peering over the dog’s shoulder. “Brilliant!” the man is saying. “Don’t stop now!” The cartoon’s caption reads, “Arguments Against Tenure.”