How Embawassing!

When one talks to the dog all day in baby talk ("Muzzy! Who's dah cyootest, tiny bunny wabbit? Is dat your widdle tummy?"), one often forgets to  to speak like a grown-up, educated person to fellow humans. I had that problem the other day. I was signing off with Sarah, after we had agreed to take Muzzy and Tony to Turkey Creek. I told her I'd see her in a little while. Sarah paused slightly, then said "okay" and hung up. A few moments later, as I was horsing around with Muzzy, spouting baby talk and getting her all riled up for her big outing, it occurred to me that what I had actually said to Sarah was, "See you in a widdle bit!" D'oh! How embawassing! Later, Sarah claimed, diplomatically, not to have noticed. Clearly, I need to spend more time among bipeds, although that may not help.

I can remember taking on accents as a child and then finding them hard to shake. For a while, when I was young, perhaps third grade, I decided that I needed to talk like a New Yorker, like Archie Bunker. I am certain that I was never allowed to watch All in the Family, but for some reason, I could only pronounce this, these, and that as dis, dese,  and dat. Oh, also third was terd. And toilet was terlet. I remember sitting in the way-back of our enormous Chrysler station wagon on my way to church one Sunday deprogramming myself. "Dis," I'd say. "No, this!" What a mixed up child. In fixing my speech patterns, though, I must have gone too far in the other direction of refinement. By the time I went to college in New Jersey and later, when I moved to Texas, people often asked me if I were British.

Perhaps the solution to my baby-talk lapses is to speak to my dog in a British accent. I think Muzzy would go for that as long as she still got fed. I'll just channel the voice of the first TV dog trainer, the formidable Brit, Barbara Woodhouse. She really did sound like a Monty Python parody. "Walkies!" she would bellow. I never met anyone or any dog that responded to walkies, until my favorite moment in the film The Queen. Helen Mirren, as Queen Elizabeth II, brakes the royal Land Rover she is driving, flings open the door, and crows to the half dozen Labs and Corgies inside, "Walkies!" They weally do say dat over dere! Aw, jeez!

See you at walkies. Ta. -z