Reading lessons

Illiterate no more

His childhood was probably Dickensian.  I picture Greenberg as Oliver Twist,  an  orphan scrounging for every morsel, desperate for a sip of water to quench his thirst.  Abandoned by his parents and forced at an early age to give up educational endeavors, his schoolroom was the streets. 

 Given his brain power, he might have been top of his class at M.I.T. or Wharton, but fate had denied him a lucrative career in tech or on Wall Street. Instead, he was an autodidact, his self-taught lessons practical skills.  He knew that sipping  from the low basin of the public water fountain should be followed always by peeing in it, so as to make it unpalatable from others who might be thirsty, and to keep it for himself.  This wasn’t greed; it was survival.

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This, based on the evidence,  is what I imagine.   He can’t describe it to me himself,  because he’s a dog.  Of course  you know that dogs can’t talk. 

 What this one has learned to do, however, is read.

We got Greenberg in September of 2019, three months after I’d left my newspaper job and at least six months before the pandemic sent everyone shopping on websites for designer poodle mixes.  We wanted to rescue a medium-size brown female dog; we wound up with a small white male lapdog.   He’d been found as a  stray, wandering around without  a chip that might have reunited him with his owner.  

He was four or five years old, judging from his teeth. He barked too much; had the personality, said another dog-owner the first time I took him to a dog park, of a little Napoleon.  When he joined our family, “sit” was the only command he knew.   I changed that to “have a seat,” wanting to indicate to the dog that in our relationship, there would be more invitations than there would be  commands.  

Every piece of literature about having a dog – including a thick packet of papers I received from the Peninsula Humane Society, whence we’d adopted him – stressed that it was the owner’s responsibility  to prevent the animal from being bored.  Nobody so much as wags a finger when people’s lives and brains are wasting away when they spend their afternoons watching “Judge Judy.”   But dog -trainers warn of dire consequences if our canine companions spend too much time lounging on the sofa and eating bonbons.  Without enough stimulation, shameful habits, such as chewing on paws,  are likely to set in.  And it’s all the dog-owner’s fault.

In the first month, Greenberg learned some basic commands, which it seemed essential for his well-being and ours: Have a seat, down, stay, come (well, more or less, if he feels like it).  If he was bored, he never said so.  The specific lessons were successful.  If there were statewide standards for testing, he’d probably pass, unless, of course, a pigeon was walking by. Or a skateboarder was skating by.

The basics more or less mastered, we were on to more complicated lessons.  Very easily, Greenberg learned to jump through a hoop, to spin around on his hind legs, to give me five, to roll over and to thread his way between my legs when I was walking, a movement I called his “doe-si-doe.” 

As an egalitarian who respects the dignity of he who is being fed and sheltered, my instinct is to disapprove of teaching a dog to sit up and beg.  I did not teach him that.  But he seemed to be basking in the attention that his many feats attracted.  Greenberg was lapping up the lessons, lapping up the treats he got during the lessons, and lapping up the approval his performances received from awestruck grandchildren.

Then one day a few months ago, at the public library branch in our neighborhood, my glance was flitting from one shelf of  books to another.   I like the serendipity of letting whimsey determine what I’m going to read next.  There, in a section of books having to do with science and medical matters,  was   “Teach Your Dog to Read,” a book by Bonnie Brogan with Sharon Hogan. Brogan, said the cover, was an experienced trainer of guide dogs. “Oh, so she can’t be crazy,” I thought.

I took the book home, rifled and skimmed my way through its pages, and began lessons that night.  First, I needed to gather some school supplies.  I tore a page out of a wirebound  notebook and  used a thick black Sharpie to write “SIT” on it.  I got Greenberg a piece of string cheese, tore it into tiny pieces and then held up the sign while saying “sit.”  (In this case, I suspended my “have a seat” instead of “sit” policy, because I wanted to him to respond to one simple word. Kids don’t read, “Look over here, because the dog has decided to move from one place to another”; they read “See Spot run.”)

We had worked for a week or two  on “sit,” when I decided that the responsible thing would be to have read the book – which would have to be returned to the library in two weeks – more closely.  I turned back to the printed word again, actually beginning at the beginning.  Brogan  said one should start with “down,” logically a more distinct command to perform than “sit,” which he would accomplish naturally when he got up from his prone position. But it was too late.   We were already on our way to mastering “sit,” the reading of which I was sure was one small step on the road to reading  “Moby Dick.”

Brogan also said that dog-owners  needed to use a certain size of paper, which wasn’t the one I’d been using.  Well, I was tailoring his education to the individual (that is me, not the dog), and what I felt like doing was just using whatever supplies I had on hand.

After a few nights of this – we most always did it upon returning from the late night walk, when he was alert and looking for a treat  – he would go down at the sight of the paper, or even the sound of the closing of the refrigerator door, which I had opened to get him a treat. But he wasn’t yet ready for prime time.

 I told friends about this experiment and skeptic disbelievers said that the proof of the pudding would be if he could distinguish the “down” piece of paper from the “sit” piece of paper.  I had full confidence in Greenberg’s ability to master this.  In a few more weeks, we were making progress. 

  It took all my self-control to hold up the papers without saying “sit” or “down” aloud, and not to hold them high or low,  especially if he didn’t immediately follow the direction.   When he seemed to have mastered the two words, I added a “5” on a slip of paper, to stand for “gimme five.”  Again, in this case, it was hard for me not to give him a hand-paw-shake  cue by sticking out my hand.

But in a short time, he did do it, reliably when we were alone in the house, and a bit less reliably if there were visitors or  other irresistible action in the house. His demonstration of the skill engenders such delight and awe  in visitors, especially young ones, that I can’t help but think that it’s good for Greenberg.  He has never demonstrated a lack of self-confidence, but a little more couldn’t hurt.  

As to older visitors, that is,  adults,  they are sometimes less than entranced with this canine tour de force. “Do you want to see Greenberg do something incredible?” I asked one friend (still a friend).  “No!” he said, rolling his eyes.  There are other nay-sayers who feel they must point out that responding to a written word is not the same as “reading.”  It’s true, I can’t discuss the nuances of fiction with Greenberg.  As I said earlier,  I know that dogs can’t talk.   And just bringing up the subject of teaching him to read causes new acquaintances to flee.  But I know that some of them, no matter how disdainful, couldn’t match Greenberg’s skill at sitting upon being shown the word “sit,” or flopping down on the floor at the word “down.” .  

I never did get back to reading Brogan’s book in full, because many other obligations have kept me and Greenberg busy.   Ballet is challenging for the four-legged, but his grand jete is high enough for him to land on the bed, and he looks kind of cute in tights.  

He is not bored.