Dr. Doolittle

I don't think I ever read "Doctor Doolittle" and may have seen the movie, but I'm not sure.  But throughout my life I have read enough animal books about the relationship between humans and their animals, relationships that have almost an esp about them, that I always dreamed of having an animal I could communicate with, the way Alec and The Black understood each other, or the way The Master and his collies understood each other.

Polly and I have probably the closest thing to a non-verbal communication.  She works harder at it than I do, spending every waking moment studying me trying to figure out if I'm getting ready to go out, going into the kitchen for a snack or for some other reason, whether I'm going to sit in the recliner or Walt's chair.  She bases or own actions on which she decides she thinks I'm going to do.  If I'm going to the kitchen for a snack, she's right on my heels, but if I'm going to get a glass of water, she doesn't bother to get up.  If I stand up, ready to go out, she's dancing around the family room waiting for the snack she knows I will give her, but if I'm just going into my office, she barely lifts her head.

For my part, I have the luxury of studying her body language, trying to decipher what is going on in that little head.  Sometimes I get it right, sometimes I don't.

But I watched a Nova special last night (What are Animals Saying?), when I was trying to get back to sleep, and it was so fascinating it kept me awake.  It was on how animals communicate, non-verbally, with each other.  I have such admiration for people who spend literally decades observing a certain species of animals.  One woman, for example, spent so much time over 10+ years living on the outskirts of a tribe of chimpanzees that she almost felt like part of the family.  She observed the subtle ways in which they interact with each other.

The scratches of chimps aren't simply random gestures, but part of a secret language.  It can be a signal to a child that can either mean "grooming" or "let's travel together."  A mother who is walking with her baby and quietly lifts her back foot a bit, is telling the baby to get on her back so she can carry him.

They studied primates who have learned how to communicate with humans and how many words or symbols they learned, but I think they gave short shrift to KoKo, the gorilla who not only has a large vocabulary of American Sign language, but is able to use her vocabulary to express her desires and her feelings and even create her own language, based on compounds of the words she knows.

Whales are vocal learners, as opposed to primates who learn by watching other primates  Their songs are some of the most complicated forms of communication.  A single song can be anywhere from 5 minutes to half an hour and, like our songs, consist of repeated phrases and themes.  There are more than 30 sound types that can be recognized, within the repertoire, which include such things as grunts, shrieks, etc.  They record the sounds and chart them and over years are able to make some sense--they think--of them. The important thing is that they recognize the sounds, and communicate that way.  (Whoever said that "dumb animals" have no language?)

Only the males do the singing and the scientists decided to try to map them.  There are tens of thousands of whales living in separate groups and they were able to arrange the songs into types like the blue song type or the red song type

It ended up being like a game of "telephone" where a song originated in, say, Australia in one year and the next year it had moved on to the next island group, while Australia group was singing a different song.  The original song then moves on to the next island group and the second group takes up the new song from Australia until over several years all groups in all locations sing the same songs, just not at the same time.

This kind of stuff is endlessly fascinating to me (and I never even got to bats, spiders, birds, dolphins and mice). Needless to say, it did not put me to sleep.  The most amazing thing I learned was Zipf's law, which is so complicated I can't begin to explain it, but if you're interested, check Wikipedia.  It's described as  an empirical law formulated using mathematical statistics that refers to the fact that many types of data studied in the physical and social sciences can be approximated with a Zipfian distribution, one of a family of related discrete power law probability distributions. Zipf distribution is related to the zeta distribution, but is not identical.  Yeah a mouthful, but if you are able to make your way through the math of it all, it's fascinating to learn that our human language has the exact same structure as that of animals.

But for sleep, I had to turn on the news and find out what outrageous things our glorious leader had done or said today.  I don't know where that would all be on a map scale of language, but it did finally knock me out.

The Guns of August

Turner Classic Movies had a great program on last night. It was an evening with Gregory Peck, Delightful program, directed by his daughter, which interspersed home movies, and movie clips with long bits of his one-man show, where he just sat on stage and answered questions from the audience (the most asked question seemed to be "which was your favorite role" and not surprisingly, the answer was Atticus Finch).

My particular favorite moments were when his grandson (named for Harper Lee) was being born, watching the nervous grandpa sitting in the waiting room and then being there with his daughter and son-in-law and the new baby, the wonder of that just-born experience. Brought tears to my eyes. Perhaps moreso than it would have beforehand, now that Brianna is in our lives.

At some point during one of the clips about his one-man show, he mentioned the film The Guns of August. I turned to Walt and said whenever I hear "the guns of August," the only thing I think of is "go boom!"

He laughed. He didn't need me to explain that perhaps incongrous statement.

Years and years and years ago...we were either just married, or not married yet...we went to a performance by The Committee, an improvisational satirical review which played in San Francisco for many years. One of their bits was to ask for book titles from the audience and they would make up...I don't know--a song? a poem? a skit?--about the title.

This particular night, someone in the audience suggested "The Guns of August." I can still see Scott Beach draw himself up, imperiously, and say, in that deep, sonorous voice of his: "The guns of August.......go BOOM!"

Funny, but in that whole night's show, that is all that, 40-50 years later, I come away with. But its was enough. All I had to say was "go boom" and Walt was laughing with me.

It's a strange thing, when you've shared a life with someone for nearly 50 years, how you develop your own verbal shorthand, things that nobody really understands.

All Walt has to do is look at me in a certain way and say "Isabella....?" and I know what he means. (Bozoette Mary may too!)

In Stan Freberg's "History of the United States of America" there is a scene with Isabella, Christopher Columbus, and King Ferdinand. Columbus and Ferdinand argue over whether the world is round or not. When Chris leaves, Ferdinand turns to his wife and says "Isabella....? When are you going to stop fooling around with these nuts?"

Any time I'm going through a rough or weird patch with any of the colorful characters in the cast of our life, all Walt has to do is look at me and say "Isabella....?" and I know what he means.

There was a time, when the kids were living at home, when I swore that we didn't have a single original thought among us. It seemed that we spoke in quotes from shows we all knew. It was kind of one gigantic "groupthink."

The nice thing about being together nearly 50 years is that life doesn't need any explanation. A word or two makes us both think of the same joke, the same TV show, the same movie, the same experience. (Of course it does make for shorter conversations that way!)

So there was no need to say anything about how I was feeling when I came out of my office after talking with someone from Davis High School who was updating contact records and wanted to know David's current address.

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Cell phone report

There is no resolution yet. I went to Verizon today, pulled out my phone (which is in a shocking green cloth bag) and said "there's something wrong with my phone." He naturally asked what and I had the dramatic moment of pulling the mangled instrument out and saying "the dog ate it."

It sounded like it was going to be so easy. He gave me a number to call, said to ask for their LG division, gave me the model number of the phone, told me what to say, that that was that. Nothing easier.

The phone number ends up being the main Verizon number, which puts you in voice mail hell. And there is no option for "what to do when the dog eats your phone." I finally decided that it best sounded like "technical assistance," so I went for that. Only the options there didn't come NEAR anything with "equipment replacement," so I punched my way through back to the main menu.

Then I decided to be clever and punch zero and see if it got me to an operator (most companies are onto that little trick by us sneaky customers and now to get an operator you have to punch an esoteric number or number combination, but Verizon still works with zero). I was told I would be directed to the next available operator.

Only then I got a recording saying that before they could put me through they needed the last four digits of the social security number of the holder of the account. Well, I was in the car parked across from the Verizon store and the holder of the account was at home, and his social security number was on my computer, so I had to wait until I got home.

But before that, there was a $200+ trip to Costco, putting groceries away, taking a nap, and by the time I remembered, it was too late to call Verizon, so I'll try again tomorrow and see what kind of luck I have.

Keeping in Touch

Someone told me lately that she has no telephone land line and uses only her cell phone. She added that her main source of communication was either by cell phone or by e-mail and if old friends didn't use e-mail, she rarely thought to communicate with them.

I was a "mail junkie" from an early age, as early as grammar school. I wrote volumes to friends when I went on vacation. I had a succession of pen pals in England that I got from a woman with the improbable name of Mrs. Chegwidden. People used to cringe because if they sent me a letter, they would get a lengthy reply back by return mail. I wrote at least one letter a day to a friend for 3 or 4 years, sometimes more than one letter a day.

I always assured people know that I really didn't expect the same speedy or voluminous response from them, but was that I was just happy to hear from them whenever they had the time to write.

I now keep copies of all the letters I write (because I use the computer, of course). I just checked, and in the entire year of 2007, I sent a total EIGHT letters, only three of which were actually personal notes. Two were thank yous for gifts I had received, and one in October was in response to a form letter I'd been sent from someone I hadn't heard from in many years (she did not respond). The other five were letters to businesses complimenting service or complaining about service, and one letter to the editor.

Yesterday I came across an interesting blog entry by a guy who had examined the whole issue of communication in depth and actually had charted the progression of methods of communication.

(He left out Utterz, which I've started to use at least once a day.)

I realized how my method of communication has changed. The bulk of my communication with people now is by blogging and e-mail. (I am always surprised at how many people that I know in real life read this journal, so it becomes almost another way of writing a daily letter to all my friends and acquaintances, I guess. In fact, my mother told me once that people never call me because they already know what I'm doing because of reading Funny the World, so my journal was actively distancing me from people that I care about.)

I use Twitter (and Utterz) a decent amount of time, but 99% of the people with whom I may be exchanging information are strangers, or at best, people I've known on line for varying lengths of time, but have never met in person (with very few exceptions).

Jeri and I text message quite a bit. I occasionally receive a text message from Ned or from a friend, but that is rare. Mostly if a text message comes onto my cell phone, it's from Jeri. Jeri and I used to exchange e-mail more, but when texting came in (and especially after she explained that whole T-9 thing), we could communicate more often, using fewer words.

While most of the new electronic methods of communication have the advantage of satisfying my constant need for instant gratification, there is a real down side to all these new ways of communicating and our dependence on them.

I've lost friends. A couple of good friends don't really use their computers for communication at all and I just never think to sit down and write a real letter-on-paper (I'd have to buy stamps, for one thing--and have you priced stamps lately?). So I just never hear from them and I miss that one-on-one that we used to have. (It can be said that I could make the effort, but the rift has grown so wide that even if I do try, I don't get a response).

Sometimes even people who are comfortable in the use electronic communication just kind of fade away. They don't answer e-mail and don't call back when you leave voice messages. They get busy about other things and newer friends, and staying in touch with the old ones gets lost in the shuffle. I am guilty of that myself.

(Not only is making friends on line easier and faster than the old fashioned way, dropping them is also easier and faster, unfortunately.)

There has been such an explosion in technology when it comes to communication that it seems to underscore our need to be in constant touch with people, but it also seems to point out that it may be more difficult to sustain deep friendships as people branch off in excitement over the next thing to come down the pike, and forget the old friends who aren't up to speed with it all yet.

Charlotte and I went drove up to Colfax yesterday to have lunch with Richard, Michele's husband. It was a lovely afternoon and we spoke at length of Michele and how much she was loved by so many. Michele was, I fear, one of those people I let slip through the cracks. She sent e-mail, but not very often and we had only recently revived regular communication among all of us in that group. I didn't keep up my own end of the friendship by continuing to contact her, even without a response. I didn't follow through on the chance to go into the mountains to see her.

As we walked through the property that they own there, watching the trees change color, watching Kofi, the dog (yes, his last name is Annan -- these are the people who once had a dog named Milhous, after all) chasing balls, the cat batting at leaves, and Richard raking the worms he keeps in containers behind the house, I saw the peaceful, quiet almost technology-free life that Michele led and I realized that in putting off a visit and not keeping up correspondence, I had missed an important part of my friend's life.

I hope that in the future, as I get busy about many things, and enjoy all the new technology, I don't let other friends slip through the cracks. We always think that there is time for all that stuff later. "Later" didn't happen for Michele and me, and I am the poorer for it.