For us, that place was now anywhere . . .
Chapter Seventeen
Corky was changing me into someone who could think more clearly. Being more engaged in public helped me see some of my mental mistakes. For instance, if I wasn’t alone anymore, what was sadness but a posture?
The silver birches outside my apartment in Ithaca were brilliant. The day was as glossy and brilliant as an old Kodachrome. Corky sat at a tall window while I wrote. She kept her privacies and watched the world go by. Because of her stoic happiness I started asking questions. What exactly did Corky radiate? She loved me; saved me from cars; but she also rested entirely in affirming, companionable silences. She was the first creature to teach me such a thing. Better I thought than a shelf full of poetry. Better than my family.
When I was very small I didn’t know I’d meet people who wouldn’t like me until one afternoon, climbing stairs with my father, my hand in his, we met an elderly Swedish woman who lived just below us and who said “Tsk, tsk” because I was blind. I was only four and it was winter in Helsinki. This had been a foundational moment for me as such moments are for all sensitive children—it’s the very second we sense we’re not who we’ve met in the mirror, or having no mirror, we’re not who our parents say we are. Cruelty is one way we arrive. It comes without warning like branches tapping a window. “She’s a fool,” my father said, as if that solved the riddle of human embarrassment.
Maybe it wasn’t ridiculous at all to imagine a more optimistic life. I began thinking such things. “I’ll be damned,” I thought. “With Corky I could now feel sorry for the gray Swedish matron.”
I saw she was a picture of absolute loneliness. I was patting Corky on the head. Who hurt the old Swedish woman who lived downstairs? Was it her White Russian husband who beat her and her children and then died at fifty having drunk away her dowry?
* * *
Discovering that with a dog I was a figure of more than passing interest called for gumption and patience but I was getting it. In a convenience store, late at night, where Corky and I had stopped for a bottle of milk, a man pushing a mop shouted: “Hey, there’s a service dog!” Then another man suddenly appeared from the back and asked if I knew the story of the Prophet Muhammad and the hero dog. “No,” I said. “Well the dog Kitmir is in paradise!” he said. “He was a hero like your dog!” “Hero dog! Hero dog!” said the first man, waving the mop. I had no name for my emotion. It was a weird transport, half affirming, half embarrassing. What was I to make of this? In one store I might be a problem, in another a mythology.
The two of us were unconditionally stirring to strangers. Sometimes we were approached by doe-eyed holy-roller types—people who’d grown up watching Jerry Lewis telethons, who’d absorbed a thousand sermons about the blind, who need the grace of God—wanting to touch us, pray for us, or at the very least, tell us how uplifting we were. Riding a bus from Ithaca to Geneva, and feeling good, Corky tucked under the seat, a woman seated across from us said: “You and your dog just gave me some Jesus!” I was crippled Tim, a vision of Christ’s mercy.
These benedictions occurred so often I started worrying about it. When would it occur? On a bus in Ithaca a woman said loudly: “Can I pray for you?” I couldn’t help myself and replied: “Yes, madam, you may pray for me, but only if together, you and I, raise our prayers for all the good people on this bus who have trouble brewing inside, their cancers aborning even as we speak, whose children have gone astray through substance abuse, people who even now feel lost in a sea of troubles, let us pray, all together, for our universal salvation.” I clutched her arm with feverish intensity. The bus pulled to a routine stop and she jumped out the door. Passengers applauded. “Don’t take it personally,” a woman said to me then. I smiled. But how else to take it?
I asked Edward, an Episcopal priest whom I met in a coffee shop, what he thought of the “public Jesus complex,” as I’d come to call it. We sat on a park bench drinking coffee out of paper cups, Corky chewing on a bone at our feet.
“Many Christians don’t like the body,” he said. “That’s how they understand the Crucifixion. They think the body is the throwaway part of Christ. And of course that’s entirely wrong: the body of Jesus is, as Dietrich Bonhoeffer said: the living temple of God and of the new humanity.
“In effect,” he said, “every body is the body of Jesus. Which means each body, broken or not, is a true body, imbued with spirit, and not a sign of want. There’s a beauty to the diversity in the body of Christ.”
“So why do I meet so many predatory prayer slingers who want to mumble over me?” I asked.
“The insecure ye will always have with ye . . .” Edward said.
* * *
With a service dog you become a “sacred/profane wandering totem” and there’s no help for it. After half a year with Corky I started seeing this as hopscotch: jump—you’re in a beautiful, even magical space; jump—you’re in a profane spot. Jump again—you’re like the dog Kitmir in paradise. Jump. You’re fighting with a connoisseur of hate who you’ll find almost anywhere and without warning.
“What if a warm reception is always conditional?” I asked Corky.
She answered by looking up me. She demanded I be honest. Our acceptance rate was nearly 90 percent.
If I wanted to feel persecuted I’d have to recognize the impulse and weigh it. Eleanor Roosevelt once said no one can make you feel bad about yourself without your permission. Something to that effect.
Still you have to be tough. It’s a jungle out there.
I was guarded when a woman wearing what I thought was a raccoon coat approached us in the cereal aisle of a Manhattan supermarket and said: “Oh I just love guide dogs!”
“Me too,” I said.
“I mean,” she said, “I really love them!”
“Remember you’re not in a terrible hurry,” I thought. I reminded myself that chance conversations inevitably reflect shy fascinations—this is where culture comes from.
Beside a mountain of corn flakes she told me about her cousin who raised guide-dog puppies. She said her husband had a blind roommate in college who’d had a dog. She described her own dog, a German shorthaired pointer.
Dogs make blindness approachable. “Approachable” blindness means “easy to talk to” blindness.
But the motives of strangers have many origins.
In LaGuardia Airport, waiting for a flight, an elderly woman turned up suddenly and said: “I had a dog like that once.”
“Oh yes,” I said.
“Yeah, someone poisoned it,” she said.
“Oh dear,” I said.
She regarded us for a few seconds and then turned away.
In a diner on lower Broadway, a man, disheveled and clattering, someone the locals seemed to know, wandered from table to table interrupting breakfasters, pressing into each person’s space, piercing the brains of strangers. He called a cop “Porky” and an elderly woman “Grandma” as he lurched steadily toward me. “Oh doggy!” he said. “Doggy doggy doggy!”
Then he said, “What kind of fucking person are you?”
I tried my best Robert De Niro impression: “Are you talking to ME?”
He wasn’t amused.
“A prisoner!” he shouted, for the whole diner was his stage. “This dog’s a prisoner!”
For a moment I felt the rising heat of embarrassment and rejection. Then, as he repeated my dog was a slave, I softened. In a moment of probable combat I stepped far back inside myself, not because I had to, but how to say it? Corky was unruffled. She actually nuzzled my leg. The nuzzle went up my torso, passed through my neck, went straight for the amygdala.
I smiled then. I said, “You’re right. And I’m a prisoner too.”
I don’t know if it was my smile or my agreement that did the trick, but he backed up, turned, and walked out the door. Strangers applauded.
I’d beaten a lifetime of bad habits. I hadn’t fallen into panic, or rage, or felt a demand to flee.
When I was eleven years old I fell onto a pricker bush. It’s hard to say how I did it, but I was impaled by hundreds of thorns. My sister, who was six at the time, and my cousin Jim, who was maybe nine, fell to the ground laughing as if they might die. I begged them for help, which of course only made them laugh all the harder. I remember tears welling in my eyes and their insensible joy. I also knew in that moment they were right to laugh—that I was the older kid, was a bit bossy, disability be damned. I was the one who told my sister and cousin what to do. Now I was getting mine. My just deserts. In the end I tore myself from the monster shrub and stormed into the house. I sulked while they continued laughing outside.
Perhaps I thought, there in the diner, I could live in a new and more flexible way.
“Is it as simple as this?” I thought. “One simply decides to breathe differently.”
I saw, in a way, it was that simple.
Saw also how a dog can be your teacher. And while eating wheat toast I thought of the Buddha’s words from the Dhammapada:
Live in Joy, In love,
Even among those who hate.
Live in joy, In health,
Even among the afflicted.
Live in joy, In peace,
Even among the troubled.
Look within. Be still.
Free from fear and attachment,
Know the sweet joy of living in the way.
Chapter Eighteen
I needed to find a job. I wanted an engaged life. Notice: blind poet seeks employment. I licked envelopes and stuffed them in the mail. Was it my imagination or did rejections come as fast as I posted the letters? Certainly the odds were steep. I applied for government assistance: section 8 housing, food stamps, social security disability. I took a steep financial penalty and cashed in my modest retirement savings from a decade of adjunct teaching. I applied to arts colonies where writers and artists are housed while they work. I wore a path in the pavement between my apartment and the Ithaca post office. The postmaster loved seeing Corky and gave her biscuits. She started turning automatically toward the federal building whether we were headed there or not.
Yes, when we’re in love we admire everything. I was more optimistic than I’d ever been. I suspected this made very little difference where fate was concerned. But persistence changes us. Acceptances arrived. Though I didn’t get any job interviews I was admitted to three arts retreats. It was now time to leave home. What’s the premise of living? That life wants us? Silly. Maybe. But I packed two oversize duffel bags—one for me, one for Cork.
Our first stop was the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, New Hampshire. Though MacDowell was founded in 1907 and had been supporting artists for nearly a century, I learned Corky would be their first guide dog. We’d be pioneers. We’d be like Morris Frank among the artists. I thought, quite self-consciously, we’d have to be exceptional guests. Meanwhile I imagined us walking in the woods where Aaron Copland, Leonard Bernstein, and James Baldwin had wandered. “It’s a place for ambling,” I told Corky.
* * *
The MacDowell Colony was the perfect place for a new guide-dog team. The colony gives fortunate artists individual studios in the woods where they’re free to work in solitude. Twice daily people gather for breakfast and dinner in Colony Hall, a building that was once a hay barn. The rest of the time you’re on your own. There are almost no cars. You can walk in the woods and think. The place offers creative people a paradise.
Our visit to MacDowell signaled the start of my blended life with Corky—that is, it provided a first glimpse of how we’d be perceived in group space. Mingling with artists I found I was quite often in disability-centric situations, even over something as simple as a meal. This had nothing to do with MacDowell. The staff couldn’t have been kinder or more receptive. But I learned quickly that artists, many of them academics, had very little understanding of physical difference.
As we were queuing up for dinner a woman shouted: “Oh my God, a DOG! A DOG! A DOG!”
“This is Corky,” I said.
“Are you blind?” the woman asked.
“Yes, Corky is an actual guide dog,” I said.
“You wanna touch my face?” the woman asked.
“I’m too inhibited for that,” I said.
“Can I touch your face?” she asked.
“I might be too inhibited for that too,” I said.
“C’mon, touch my face,” she said.
I was saved by a staff member who guided us to a table with three classical composers.
“I think he’s blind,” said a woman. She said it under her breath. Presumably for the edification of the man immediately to her left.
“Evidently,” said the man. “That’s a guide dog.”
“The man is blind but he can hear rather well,” I said.
“Oh yes, that’s right!” said the man who introduced himself as Charles.
The whisper woman said her name was Wendy.
“I’m Dolores,” said a second woman.
Each was a musician and composer.
“This is Corky,” I said, “she’s a multimedia artist.” This got a laugh. “She’s from New York,” I said. “She has a tattoo and dresses in leather.”
“Can we pet her?” asked Dolores.
“The thing is, she’s not a house pet,” I said.
“When she’s wearing her harness she doesn’t want you to address her. She’s trained to ignore people while wearing her gear—even when lying quietly under a table.”
“But she’s not working now,” said Dolores.
“Yes, she is,” I said. “Staying quiet is work.”
“But it can’t ruin her to just have a little petting?” said Dolores.
“Well yes it can,” I said. “She has to go to restaurants and be completely inconspicuous. This is her professionalism. All service dogs must have this capacity to focus—that’s why guide dogs won the right to travel in public.”
And so it began—explaining things. Dolores sniffed that casual petting couldn’t possibly ruin my dog. It was the start of a routine, outlining the dos and don’ts of interacting with service dogs. In the years to come I’d meet many people like Dolores, dog lovers who believe their special connection with animals means the rules don’t apply to them. I even discovered a word for this—biophilia. The term was coined by Edward O. Wilson, the famed Harvard entomologist who wrote: “Humanity is exalted not because we are so far above other living creatures, but because knowing them well elevates the very concept of life.” This is true and one may think of this as ecopsychology. We’re healthiest when we’re in deep and productive relations with all beings. But what I found was how few people understand working dogs in general and blindness in particular. The concept that a dog might enjoy her work was foreign to many. Some pet owners are quite opinionated. Guiding Eyes hadn’t prepared me for interactions with this kind of vanity—what I’d eventually call auto-biophilia—a Romantic belief that because you think you’re special you have a unique bond with animals. Guide-dog users often meet people who are spiritually unfulfilled and who overcompensate with dogs. They’re the Doctor Dolittles; the PETA propagandists; the New Age types. They’re put out when you insist on following working-dog etiquette. Some even try to slip your dog dinner rolls under the table.
Just as Corky was the subject of conversation, so was blindness. I didn’t want to talk about blindness. I’d have preferred discussing Henry James.
Instead we talked about being blind. I understood why. I discovered at Guiding Eyes that there aren’t many blind people in the United States. The blind are always outliers, and strangers are curious. They ask: Can you see anything? What can you see? Can you tell how many fingers I’m holding up? How can you write? How can you describe the world? Do you have dreams?
I was in the dining room at a prestigious arts retreat, in a room wher
e Yoko Ono once ate spaghetti and instead of discussing the arts I was describing light—that the blind can often see it, that many see colors. And that those who don’t see anything at all still understand the world richly.
* * *
After dinner Corky and I walked on dirt roads under the stars. Fireflies sparkled in the hedges. We were not quite in heaven and not precisely on earth. When our path turned into the woods Corky guided me without a hitch—pulling me forward in the spicy air, the two of us liberated from dinnertime sociology.
In the dark I found I was in an expansive state of mind. We walked a long time in the night. I wondered how many things at once she could smell. The moon was out and the wood anemones, the white buttercups of New England, were shining like little moons. I knew this because I got down on my hands and knees and peered closely. “She must smell them,” I thought. What about the bottle gentians in the wet thickets? Tiny blue flowers. What might they smell like? Every dog has three hundred million olfactory receptors in its nose. By contrast humans have only six million. A dog’s brain has forty times our capacity for analyzing scents. Corky knew what was on the wind. Her world was entirely distinct from mine. We sat a long time in the woods and I let her scent deeply.
Our pauses, whether alone in the woods or on a street, occurred because we were safe. If contentment meant one thing it was this: our mutual security meant I could live in full measure.
* * *
In the mornings I wrote in my cabin. We had a nice rhythm. Corky lay on the daybed beside the desk while I worked on fragments of poems. Sometimes I’d stop and pace. I wondered self-consciously, elaborately, about the symbolism of blindness—not for the first time, but in a closed community like MacDowell I suspected some of the other artists perceived me in emblematic terms. I was a little sensitive, maybe paranoid. Did they see me as someone who’s only effectual because of his dog? A student at Guiding Eyes told me many sighted people believe the blind are merely being pulled along by their dogs—that we’re simply attached and follow in lockstep obedience. Did the others at MacDowell see us as competent? Should it matter? I picked up a vague discomfort evinced by some of the residents. When I joined a table of artists at dinner, sometimes conversation stopped. The man with the dog was there. One could fairly imagine them saying, “He isn’t one of us.” No one said it. But I’d have to restart the dinner talk. “Who wrote the most notes today?” I’d say if I was among composers. Mostly the talk turned to Corky. “What does she do for you exactly?” “How many commands does she know?” “How does she know when to cross the street?” “How does she find places for you?”
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