The sun comes out from behind the clouds. I’m in love. I tell Connie about the red-winged blackbirds. My dog’s dog-friend’s owner is beautiful.
* * *
Yes, red was an important color. So was morning blue. We walked beside a lake and I don’t remember the name of it now, but we were laughing like hell. Laughing just because one can. Because I told Connie she looked like a Phrygian goddess and then was forced to admit all women look like goddesses when you’re blind and so what? Yes, we laughed. We agreed: if everyone looks good there’s no need for praise. What a relief! And then no need for heroes! Laugh more. Run in circles like Roscoe who has a five-foot-long stick in his mouth. It’s more than a stick, it’s a branch, and he knows it’s the most important thing in the world, a birch limb tasting of yeast and don’t you wish you had one? And you should talk less, really, and just chase me.
* * *
I didn’t know much. Not just about love. I was still coming into the world in a late rebirth having decided to cross streets, kick up dust the way the sighted do—a phrase I’d stolen from a national advocacy group which was always saying the blind could do customary things, read newspapers, for instance, “just like visual people do.” Now I was making my forays into Manhattan or a hundred other precincts just as the sighted did, and yet, hell, I didn’t know much. I had no idea how to be in love. Did you enter it with a processional march as in Verdi’s Aida, or was it just an earnest little tune picked out on a homely banjo? Was there a song at all? Did you make up your mind to be in love?
No, you didn’t. You didn’t make up your mind at all. Not if the dogs were right.
* * *
I’d imagined no love was going to be my lot. I simply knew I was defective. The nondefective people held parties, danced, made plans. Space opened for them. They didn’t have to question it. Every place was theirs and all that American materiality was theirs—their cars with rag tops; trips to the beach. That’s how it felt, anyway. The no-love narrative was basically stupid. It was no better than thinking the man in the moon was a beggar who collects sticks on Sundays—a mythology people long believed—yes, stupid, but if you live a provincial life you can be convinced of anything.
Sudden love is to be unconvinced. And the irony, the loveliest of them, the most statuesque irony of them all, is I got there by walking, thrilling to moments, trusting open air, taking Connie and my dog to the opera. During intermission, as we sipped champagne and Corky sat trimly beside us, a woman said: “Who’s your dog’s favorite composer?” and I said, “Puccini, of course.”
How long can you say you know nothing about love? I had to give it away just as dogs give small things away throughout the day. “Oh for Chrissake,” say the dogs, “let’s run over here. Let’s together put our noses in these leaves.”
* * *
Connie and I were in love rather quickly and I’ll never not believe it was Roscoe and Corky’s doing. We didn’t take a chance. We didn’t have to. We knew we could trust our dogs. Not because it made for a story. But because there it was, we fit.
This “fit” involved a man, a woman, two dogs, and two children. Connie was a single mom and along came Tara, age eight, and Ross, six. We sang Pete Seeger’s song, “All Around the Kitchen” and hurtled around Connie’s house shouting “cocka-doodle-doo” while the dogs approved and crockery rattled.
Sometimes we lay on the floor, Tara, Ross, Connie, and I, and the dogs took up the business of washing our faces as their ropy tails knocked knickknacks off tables.
* * *
Labradors are not fast runners but Roscoe was very quick. He was an acrobat and a superb Frisbee catcher. No matter the falling angle, no matter how bad the throw, he’d yank a Frisbee out of the air, sometimes with a shoestring catch just before it hit the ground. And Corky, who was slow, would turn to her boy and bounce around him. If Roscoe wasn’t alert Corky would grab his prize and tug-of-war would ensue. Many a Frisbee met an early demise.
Corky and Roscoe were in love, that red, warm-blooded enthrallment of dogs in each other’s company.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Corky and I hit the road over the next five years. My primary goal was to talk about dogs for the blind. I spoke at state fairs, union halls, schools, rehab agencies, conferences, and various charity galas. We would visit forty-seven states and three foreign countries. Some weeks it seemed as if we were in perpetual motion. Arriving in each city, Corky went bounding up the Jetway as if eager to explore the unknown (in reality she was thrilled to get off the plane where she’d had to curl up under my feet.)
Our flights were sometimes beautiful and periodically strange. Disabled people never know how a plane flight is going to go. Not all flight attendants are trained to serve disabled passengers. Cabin personnel are like the rest of us—overtaxed, working to their limit. For some the sight of a Labrador boarding a plane brightens everything. After settling Corky at my feet I’d listen to their stories—told quickly—of the dogs they’d left behind and couldn’t wait to see. Corky made a lot of airline employees smile.
But things could quickly turn strange. Boarding a flight to Wisconsin, where I was to speak at a conference on blindness and rehabilitation, the flight attendant said: “That dog doesn’t have a blue blanket, it can’t come on the plane.” Standing in the aircraft’s doorway I was momentarily flummoxed.
“Guide dogs don’t have blue blankets,” I said. “I’m not sure what you mean.”
“Oh no,” she said. “That dog has to have a blue blanket or it can’t come on the plane.”
“You know,” I said, “when guide dogs are in training as puppies they wear blue blankets, maybe that’s what you’re thinking of?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “But you can’t come on this plane.”
Civil rights veterans know the next trick. You just sit down. I sat in the nearest seat. I tucked Corky under my feet.
“You’ll have to get a supervisor,” I said.
She stormed off the plane and up the Jetway. Civilization had stopped. People with oversize bags piled onto the aircraft without a flight attendant.
When the attendant reappeared she said nothing. Someone had obviously told her it was okay. Her silence suggested she’d been humiliated or patronized by a superior.
This lack of training was something we faced consistently. We never knew when we’d have a blue-blanket moment. On a flight from Portland, Oregon, to New York I was given an inaccessible seat. It was in the middle of a three-seat row, where I discovered metal stanchions, which, in turn, made it impossible to get Corky safely under the seat. Then the attendant put two people on either side of me. She asked me to get up so a passenger could get to the window seat. I had to get Corky back into the aisle. Boarding passengers wouldn’t make way for us in the aisle. That’s when my dog decided she wouldn’t go back to our designated spot. I told the attendant she should reseat us where we could actually sit. She looked at me as if I might be half human. The plane was a Boeing 757, which meant the bulkhead seats were in an exit row. “People with disabilities are barred from sitting in an exit row, sir!” she said. “And first class is full, sir!” she added. I told her under the Air Carrier Access Act our right to fly safely and in comfort is not up for grabs and she stomped off, leaving us in the aisle, only to return with the captain, who wisely moved us to the front of the plane where there was more room. The dismissiveness of the flight attendant was hard to fathom.
* * *
I never knew what would happen while traveling but I was doing what I’d said I wanted—going to unknown cities. Poor treatment from airlines meant little compared to the surprises and new friendships that happened. Soon after joining Guiding Eyes I took a trip to Monterey, California, to speak about guide dogs at a regional conference. There I met Michael Meteyer, one of America’s most highly regarded orientation-and-mobility specialists. I was making my way down the street with Corky, searching for coffee, when Michael called out, having recognized me from a poster. Thou
gh we’d never met it quickly seemed we’d always known each other: his mother was blind and he helped her while growing up. He saw early that blindness is ordinary. He went on to attend the University of Rochester, just an hour west of Geneva. Like me he was a student of poetry and had taken courses with one of my favorite poets, Anthony Hecht. When he left college he met Lawrence Ferlinghetti and rode horses with him daily. We sat in a café not far from John Steinbeck’s “Cannery Row” and talked about poetry, disability, and animals.
It didn’t take long before we were speculating about animal souls. Are dogs meant to bring us together? The café smelled of bread and coffee. The moment was poignant. Michael had played football for the University of Rochester while I was in the psychiatric hospital just five miles away. After college he’d gone far, helping the blind in Africa, traveling in America’s Deep South, ultimately moving to California. His life was about travel and affirmation—especially where the blind are concerned. Had I been destined to meet him? Was this Corky’s plan?
* * *
In one of his notebooks Leonardo da Vinci wrote: “Man has great power of speech, but the greater part thereof is empty and deceitful. The animals have little, but that little is useful and true; and better is a small and certain thing than a great falsehood.” Da Vinci was correct about human speech and deceit, and nearly right about animals having a truer language, but he couldn’t have guessed how much truth and courage the animals have. I was living it.
In San Francisco, down by Fisherman’s Wharf, it sank in—bonding with a guide was a walking prayer without the need for nonsecular miracles. Two years prior I’d said the words “I need to walk.” I thought, “Truth, faith . . .” Script and scripture. The little that is useful and true on my dog.
I sat with Corky and listened to sea lions. The sea lions were haughty and loud. The boy still inside me wanted to run down the wharf waving his arms. The blind boy had always been good at running wildly. The grown man understood this joy. The man and dog understood. The man and dog and boy got up together and covered the long wharf with very fast footfalls.
* * *
The cities were lovely.
Early on the street. Name the city. Houston.
We walked in a neighborhood of Victorian houses. The morning was quiet. Then, through an open window, I heard someone playing Franz Liszt’s “Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2.” It was better for being clumsy—sweet in the strangeness of a city where we were foreign.
Visiting the Highbanks Metro Park in Columbus, Ohio, where cliffs overlook the Olentangy River, Corky scented muskrats and I smelled wet shale.
In the Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden in Miami, Florida, we walked through the rare plant house smelling cycads, ferns, orchids, aroids, bromeliads, fruit trees, and vines thick as legs.
We walked the Packery Channel Park in Corpus Christi, Texas, where the ocean smelled of brine and, oddly, of pineapple. I was convinced the bay was filled with fruit juice. I was certain that Corky could smell the sandhill cranes.
Particulate odors. Shambling in space.
Fences, trees, oleander, stray hedgehogs.
The poems of her nose!
Mice; synthetic dyes; odors of human wrists . . .
Five a.m. in Jackson, Mississippi. Corky did her morning business and I heard two men, far off, laughing in mutual, unvexed joy. It was the best two-man laugh I’d ever heard.
In my notebook I wrote: Think of a dog’s language. It’s ours of course—ball, rope, shoe. But for dogs there are proto-signs, dog signs, liquid, quick as sparrows in grass. I think dogs had words before they met us. For “grouse” they may have something damp, for dogs feel their words.
* * *
Boarding a plane I wondered what her nouns signified. On the commuter Dash 8 aircraft flying to Buffalo did she sense the odors of fish bladders and wet feathers? Did she smell human fear? What did she understand of the upright figures staring at magazines with their stink of linens and apples? She lay at my feet and I thought while dogs don’t have preceptive nouns they’ve a canine genome—which in turn means they’ve a long, hieratic dictionary of meanings. Many a flight was more interesting for this.
* * *
I had many odd excursions. At a conference in Ohio, as I was wrapping up a speech about the benefits of guide dogs, a woman handed me an envelope. “Have someone read this to you,” she whispered.
Later in the parking lot I showed the letter to Connie. She read it. The woman wanted to bequeath me her son’s eyes.
“You’ll know what to do with them,” she wrote.
Her son was twenty. He had a developmental disability. He couldn’t speak.
“He won’t be long for this world,” she said. “I want his eyes to go to you.
“I’ve been watching you. I think you’re worthy,” she said.
It gave me “the fantods,” as Huck Finn would say. I was chilled to my core.
My speech had been about dignity. Our wishes for others may or may not be received as we hope. “Maybe I’d be less surprised if I’d been more of a traveler in my teens and twenties,” I said to Connie. One characteristic of my new worldiness was my easy bewilderment meeting peculiar people. The world isn’t what we think it is.
In Raleigh, North Carolina, I spoke about the role wounded warriors have played advancing the rights of the disabled. Troops return from every war to change the world by insisting on inclusion. Somehow a man in the audience heard something different. He approached me. He shouted. He’d heard me talking about Vietnam vets and decided I was a war protestor. He was not to be dissuaded. As he yelled Corky stood and got between us. She wasn’t trained to protect me. But she inserted her big body and stood tall. A hotel security officer appeared and gently led the man away saying: “It’s okay, how about a cup of coffee? Let’s go get a cup.” Maybe he was a veteran with PTSD. I’d never know. I was half dazed and felt the urge to cry in the foyer of the Marriott Hotel.
* * *
We traveled because guide-dog schools are not as well known as they should be. There are approximately a dozen guide schools in the United States. All the schools are nonprofit organizations. They receive no federal or state money and rely exclusively on donations. While American guide-dog schools aren’t staggeringly wealthy, they are able, by and large, with the help of their donors, to provide expensive services to a clientele that’s not generally well-off. Guide dogs are provided free of charge. Despite this, many people don’t know about their programs. One reason for this is the sheer size of America. Not only is the United States a vast country, it’s decentralized and largely rural. Learning about disability services is hit or miss. “A patient comes in for an eye exam,” an ophthalmologist at the University of Iowa once told me, “and the doctor says, ‘Well, you’re losing your sight and there’s nothing more we can do for you. You better hand over your car keys.’ And the patient goes home to Ottumwa and never comes back. He lives in a trailer behind the family farmhouse. People don’t learn there are opportunities for the blind.”
Talking about dogs was an almost evangelical thing for me. I’d go almost anywhere. One evening I spoke to a 4H club in a small town near Buffalo, New York. My audience was mostly teenagers. Their parents wore feed caps and drank coffee. I quoted the poet Mark Van Doren: “There is one thing we can do, and the happiest people are those who can do it to the limit of their ability. We can be completely present. We can be all here. We can give all our attention to the opportunity before us.” “This is the thing,” I said, “you give everything to raising a guide-dog puppy, but the everything comes from your spirit—it’s your happiness, your wakefulness, your love of life itself. Puppies take this into their hearts like vitamins.
“Then one day a blind person goes into the world and your puppy, now a guide dog, shares your happiness, wakefulness, love—shares it by being completely present.
“I know,” I told them, “I sound a little like my Finnish grandfather who was a Lutheran minister.
“We can
be all here,” I said again. I let Corky out of her harness and she went all around the room visiting each person one by one. (She’d actually do that.)
After the warmth of my grange-hall visit I woke later that night in our motel room—a motel that was just down the road from a prison—and I heard weeping through the heat ducts. Corky and I lay in bed and listened to an inconsolable woman crying just a room away. She wept all night. Lying awake, hearing her grief, this too was being present. There are many hard places in America. Could a person from this town reliably find her way to a guide dog? Or any kind of social services? “It’s nice to feel loved,” I said to Corky. “It’s nice to insist on it for others.”
Chapter Twenty-Four
Connie had been a guide-dog trainer before taking over the admissions program at Guiding Eyes. We talked a lot about dogs—about what they know and how sharp they are. Dogs never forget a thing. She told me about how she and some other trainers used to stop every day while training dogs to get coffee at a place that was primarily a dirty bookstore. Later when the dogs were paired with students, one Labrador in particular insisted on dragging her blind owner into the shop. “Every day,” Connie said, “we’d have to stop and I’d say, I don’t know why he likes it here . . . really . . . I swear . . .”
She told me about training a dog and needing to use a restroom. She was in Manhattan working a Labrador named John. They went together into a bathroom stall. Connie kept saying: “Down, John, John no! Stay John . . .” There was a woman in the next toilet, she said, “who was flabbergasted.”
I wanted Connie’s take on the public—that is, when training a guide dog you’re essentially a sighted person playing at being blind. Often the public doesn’t know the difference.
“Sometimes,” I said, “I’m walking and I know someone is staring at me. It’s palpable. Did you experience this when you were training dogs?”
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