Day 53: Rain

Fortunately, Gracie and I mowed the front yard this morning before the rain started.  I clipped Gracie's leash to my belt and she walked up and down with me while I pushed our non-power mower.  I am also glad we tended to the garden yesterday afternoon, trimming and restaking plants.  The current downpour is of torrential proportions!

Now, having exercised--pushing a push mower is great exercise!--Gracie and I are content to do what we like best.  For Gracie, that is napping, and for me, that is reading.  I have so much I want to read before I have to go back to planning classes and grading student  work that getting it all read will be a challenge.  Today, I'm starting with Now You See It: how the brain science of attention will transfrom the way we live, work, and learn by Cathy N. Davidson, an English professor at Duke University.  The early pages of this interesting book hit on the subject of my own Day 52 post.  Davidson writes: "In the end, distraction is one of the best tools for innovation we have at our disposal--for changing out of one pattern of attention and beginning the process of learning new patterns.  Without distraction, without being forced into an awareness of disruption and difference....[w]e might think we're simply experiencing all the world there is.  We learn our patterns of attention so efficiently that we don't even know they are patterns."  Certainly, living with a creature with acute hearing--Gracie the hearing dog--has forced me to attend to some sources of sound that I have been missing...not all of them with regret I have to add.  At the same time, her presence is a distraction for some people.  I'm just starting the chapter of the book titled "Project Classroom Makeover," which should be very interesting.  I am also rereading The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman. In this novel classified as a young adult or children's book (very adult worthy, however, and there are two more books in the series should you become engrossed in the tale and want to read more), author Pullman has created a universe parallel to our own.  As one might expect, there are some similarities, but it is the differences that are the most interesting (distractions, Davidson would call them) because they help us reassess the shortcomings of our own seemingly less exciting world. 

For anyone wondering what living with a service animal might be like, The Golden Compass would make interesting reading because everyone in that world has a daemon (their soul in animal form) that is with them constantly and that others can clearly see.  The deamon can move away the person but both become nervous if the distance is too great or if separated too long. (Sounds like Gracie and me all ready.)  A child's daemon changes into different shapes as the child experientments with who he or she is.  At puberty, however, the daemon becomes fixed.  Servents have dogs for daemons...always.  Hmmmm.  One rather evil character in the story has a golden monkey that is definitely not of the Curious George variety.  When I first read this book, I wished for a daemon of my own.  Now, I have one...Gracie.  How can one creature be both a distraction and a comfort?  Though this sounds contradictory, that's just what Gracie is!