Have Dog, Will Travel Read online

  On my side of the room things were more scientific. A tall medical student put a piece of meat on a string down my throat. He told me they were testing my digestive enzymes. Was I mad or was I a gastrointestinal freak? As with most psychiatric mysteries the good doctors couldn’t find a physical answer. They sent me home.

  I shook from cold, slept badly. Then one morning, against all odds, I decided to go to church. No one in our family ever went to church.

  Skinny. Shaking. Navigating through light and fog. I walked approximately five hundred yards to the Episcopal chapel at Hobart and William Smith Colleges.

  I’d never been there. I went in.

  There were perhaps twenty professors and their wives sitting in the pews. I knew some of them vaguely from faculty events at our home. They were peculiar adults, slightly troubling, as they knew who I was. Appearing alone in the chapel would I be remarked upon?

  I sat. Closed my eyes. I was dizzy. Hunger does that of course, but being in public, in a church, sitting in a sunbeam, that also makes you spin. I was killing myself. I knew it, somehow, in the clotted way teenagers know things. I both did and did not want to go on.

  My blindness was a problem. Certainly I was the reason my mother drank and took pills. Surely my ruined eyes were the source of her despair. Surely if I was just a better child, less defective, or more successful at covering up my deficiencies, why then all would be better.

  My frail shoulders carried that weight. I was seventeen and already an old man.

  An Episcopal bishop from Rochester spoke. He was kindly and had the same warmth as the sunlight, which my face was absorbing rather desperately.

  Next came a bell. We’d entered the Eucharist, about which I knew nothing. I was shivering in a church pew.

  I went to the altar rail, got down on my knees, reached out and took the bread. “Take and eat, for this is my body.” It was the sacrament of Christ’s flesh and blood. My fingers were anemic as I took the bread, and my hands shook. “Come, risen Lord, and deign to be our guest . . .” “My God, thy table now is spread . . .” “I am the bread of life . . .”

  “Do this in remembrance of me . . .” How could I explain . . . certainly I was a starving blind adolescent, chilled in April light, one foot from death; who felt a heat inside, who felt his own blood and flesh kissed from somewhere deep and still. Do this in remembrance of me. Eat, consecrate your mortal flesh.

  I decided to live from that day forward. I never mentioned the experience to anyone.

  Maybe I didn’t know how to talk about the death of a guide dog but I’d been schooled in losing and gaining hope. I put the old house keys in the “kept things box”—the keys that once hung from a lanyard. I knew the boy who once was me was evermore part of the grown man who came late to walking free.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Traveling the country talking about guide dogs brought both the austerities and dignities of disability into focus. Meeting each month’s class of guide-dog students taught me innumerable and astonishing things. I hadn’t known diabetes was the number one cause of blindness in the United States. As soon as I started working at Guiding Eyes I met a woman named Janice who, owing to diabetes, had lost all feeling in both her feet and was fighting to stay alive. Trainers paired her with a petite yellow Lab named Maisie who was exceedingly careful when observing and reacting to terrain—Maisie helped compensate for Janice’s inability to feel the ground. They were so artful together.

  Janice went home with Maisie only to die from diabetes a few months later. I wrote in my journal: live now; Lord, don’t let us forget to live now . . .

  Every day I saw no two blind people are alike. I met a deaf-blind college student named Eric who lost both his sight and hearing from Usher syndrome. He communicated by typing and typed for me his assessment of Braille. “Braille saved my life,” he said. “It’s the number one communication tool for deaf-blind people; but man, you spend your life reading it and it’s like you’re always rubbing a plucked chicken.”

  People faced depression, PTSD, high blood pressure, anxiety, balance problems, multiple sclerosis, brain injuries, and traumas without names. In the disability-rights community many hate the word inspiration since it hearkens back to Charles Dickens’s Tiny Tim or Jerry Lewis. We hope to live without being inspirational. But I watched Ronald, who was both legally blind and had cerebral palsy, working his dog, swaying and pivoting with each step, his black Labrador adjusting, actually dancing alongside him. Several guide-dog schools told Ronald he couldn’t get a dog but Guiding Eyes said yes. Seeing him work his sleek black Labrador was “righteous”—something better than inspiration.

  I saw students fight step by step, not merely for mobility but for the tenor of life, the reason we live. As one of my favorite poets, William Stafford, said: “From human loss, from gravel, from stone, after years, one holds what one can.”

  Hannah was from Boston and had a wonderful, hard laugh. She also had an environmental disability. She was severely allergic to chemicals. Everyone in the training class had to avoid using aftershaves and perfumes. The custodial staff had to find chemical-free products. Talking daily with her I saw how precarious her situation was. “I’m like a tightrope walker,” she said, “but who’d pay to see my circus?”

  “Well, I don’t know,” I said, “but you should patent the idea of a chemical-free circus right away. Its day will come.”

  “The only animals would be hypoallergenic poodles,” she said. We imagined poodles jumping through flaming hoops. But joking aside, Hannah could turn scarlet and fight for breath if she encountered the wrong environment. Entering the perfume section in a department store was terrifying for her. But she could laugh—it was one of her talents. “I’m the world’s greatest respiratory diva,” she said.

  * * *

  Working at a guide-dog school required a role reversal for me. Teaching courses in college had meant I was an authority. Now I was learning things that were entirely new. I was in the process of admitting all the things about blindness and guide dogs that I didn’t know. For instance, I never knew there were advocacy groups by and for the blind that didn’t agree with each other; one group argued for tactile warning strips in subway stations while another thought this was demeaning to the blind. One organization preferred white-cane travel over guide dogs. Blind politics could be intense. I had difficulty understanding some of this—not from a partisan perspective—but because I’d always understood individualism depends on personal choice. Some blind activists liked talking street signs. Others believed they were unnecessary. “If they’re unnecessary,” I thought, “how could they be harmful to those who don’t like them?” The anti-talking-street-sign contingent felt that the public, seeing such a thing, might perceive the blind as vaguely helpless. Orientation and mobility skills should obviate the need for any assistive device. I discovered that factions evinced the same passions one sees among football fans. I made some notes. I really wanted to resist puritanism whenever possible.

  * * *

  Mostly I learned by listening. Some evenings I sat with students and we’d talk about disability in America. I met people with graduate degrees who couldn’t get past initial job interviews. “Once they discover you’re blind they don’t call you back for a second interview,” said Jack, who had two Ivy League degrees. Another student described the miserable state of public transportation in his town. If you live outside a major city the chances are excellent the blind can’t even get to a job. “It’s hard enough being disabled,” he said, “but then they stack everything else against you. At least with my dog I can take good walks to relieve the frustration.”

  “You’re only as independent as the infrastructure allows,” said Jason, a playwright from Manhattan. “If trains run on time; if the taxi stops for you; if a bus driver calls out the stops. Without these things you can be erased.”

  * * *

  Some students had attended schools for the blind, at least for a time, and had advantages over th
ose who’d gone to public schools without proper support. The blind-school graduates were crackerjack Braille readers. Many also had a far better sense that blindness is an element of life and nothing very special. Regardless of our respective backgrounds we found we hadn’t met enough other blind people. If you came from a small town chances were good you’d never met a blind person. Talking offered proof that we were quick, true, patient, and bold.

  * * *

  The ADA makes it clear what the term “disability” means with respect to an individual: (A) a physical or mental impairment that substantially limits one or more major life activities of such individual, (B) a record of such an impairment or (C) being regarded as having such an impairment.

  Major life activities include but are not limited to: caring for oneself, performing manual tasks, seeing, hearing, eating, sleeping, walking, standing, lifting, bending, speaking, breathing, learning, reading, concentrating, thinking, communicating, and working.

  Major bodily functions means: functions of the immune system, normal cell growth, digestive, bowel, bladder, neurological, brain, respiratory, circulatory, endocrine, and reproductive functions.

  The range of disability is wide. Talking about obstacles, especially where jobs were concerned, I understood Americans confuse the ability to perform major life functions with accomplishment. In turn the disabled are thought to lack every kind of competency. This I thought must be why some believe guide dogs make decisions for the blind. People think the dogs do everything since obviously blindness means we can’t think.

  “This function disjunction affects all the disabled,” I thought. “Wheelchair users and the deaf are also thought to be helpless.”

  “It’s a tough world. There are plenty of bad ideas still circulating,” I said to Jason one night over pizza.

  “The trick is,” said Jason, “to grow out of them. I mean you were a blind kid yourself, and even so, with all your personal experience you had tons of shitty ideas about disability.”

  “No question,” I said.

  * * *

  Older dog handlers—students returning to school for their fifth or sixth dog—had lived much of their lives before the ADA, when the blind and their allies fought for inclusion state by state. Between the 1940s and the 1970s blind activists fought vigorously for the rights of white-cane users and guide-dog teams. Marjorie, a student training with her fifth dog, told me that when she received her first dog in the early 1960s the white cane and the guide dog were still not fully understood.

  She explained that the white cane was introduced in the US by the Lions Club in Peoria in the 1930s. The art of sweeping the cane from side to side for detection didn’t come until a pioneering orientation specialist named Richard Hoover introduced the technique almost ten years later, in the mid 1940s. The cane began to have wide use. It became universally white to alert motorists its owner was blind. With this breakthrough the cane was transformed into an effective mobility device.

  She explained that just as white-cane laws mandating drivers yield to the blind were being adopted, guide-dog accessibility also became a matter of law.

  “Finally in October of 1964,” Marjorie said, “Lyndon Johnson signed a proclamation declaring White Cane Safety Day.”

  “So if you think about it,” said Marjorie, “our nation’s recognition of blind independence is still in its infancy.” Then she laughed. “And to think I got my first dog in the era of Patty Duke and The Miracle Worker. No one thought blind people were supposed to leave the asylum,” she said. “And there I’d go, a young woman, just a girl really, with a German shepherd, and we were in Woolworths, and all hell would break loose. Miss, you can’t come in here with that animal . . . you know, the manager . . . and then Darlene, the woman who worked the luncheonette, said . . . Oh Carl shut up, can’t you see that’s one of those blind-dogs? And they argued for a minute or two but I just went to the back of the store where they kept the dog toys. That was always a good technique, to keep moving and let them argue about the dog.”

  We talked about how there’s a service dog for almost any disability now . . . dogs assist wheelchair users, open cupboards, hand money to cashiers or help people with balance . . . or they detect the onset of seizures. They alert the deaf to critical sounds . . . They even assist diabetics by sensing changes in blood sugar.

  We talked about how all those skills reflect the limitless talents of dogs and the pioneering work of the guide-dog movement, which began the service-dog industry so many years ago.

  “But here’s what I think,” I said to Marjorie. “Despite the advantages of working dogs, many who rely on them still experience problems—just as you did in 1963 . . .”

  Lately stories had been piling up on my desk—a veteran and his service dog had been recently booted out of a fast food restaurant; another vet was denied access on a public bus. A legally blind woman was hassled in a movie theater by a customer who said that she and her dog were fakes.

  Marjorie had worked for years in the rehabilitation field. I asked her what she thought could be done.

  “Some argue these problems could be prevented by requiring service-dog users to carry identification cards,” she said, “but there’s a good reason we don’t want to do this—my disability is my business and not yours.”

  “Yes,” I said, “the easiest way to tell if a dog is working is by its professionalism. And business owners are not forced to admit or endure misbehaving dogs. In fact it’s the performance of a service dog that really matters—not just in traffic or in crowds, but everywhere.”

  Inevitably we began to talk about nondisabled people who pretend to have disabilities just to take their dogs anywhere they go.

  “Then you come along with your authentic guide dog and they want you to prove you’re blind,” Marjorie said.

  “Nowadays people imagine there are disability advantages like better parking or early boarding on airplanes. Did you ever think you’d live to see disability as a preferred lifestyle?” I asked.

  “Nope,” she said, “but the current scene is a whole lot better than the old one.”

  “Which old one?” I said.

  “Well, there were the ugly laws in the United States,” she told me. “In the nineteenth and even the early twentieth century people with disabilities were outlawed from appearing on the streets in many municipalities.”

  Thinking about this was chilling.

  * * *

  Problems aside, every month’s class was really about love. Nothing in my college experience prepared me for this. What do you call a love collective featuring dogs and blind people? Did it matter if there was no term for it? Sometimes walking a hallway with Corky I’d hear singing from a dorm room. Women sang to their dogs and so did men. Love was palpable. Dogs were deciding to accept new people in room after room. The dogs weren’t merely giving their new owners the benefit of the doubt, they were giving them their faith. Dogs can tell when your heart is open—can tell when you’re dignifying them with your trust. Dogs smell trust.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  What I knew about love I could put in a thimble. It was akin to my knowledge of “red,” for what did I know about it? I knew it was an important color.

  “Love,” I thought, “is for other people.”

  I’d lived a long time thinking this way.

  In 1961 my mother constructed a bomb shelter under our house and filled it with canned goods and jars of water. I went there whenever I was roughed up by neighboring children. I lay on cool cement and whispered stories to no one. That’s how my stories unfolded, talking in the dark, breathing the odor of army blankets. Who loves you, who doesn’t, where’s a lucky window, how high the sun, my lips moving. Yes, love was for others until I met Connie and I met Connie because of her dog, Roscoe, who was absolutely wild about Corky.

  One morning I followed Corky up a flight of stairs to see what it was she wanted. And up those stairs where the admissions office of the guide-dog school was located was a black
dog, a hilarious dog. Some dogs are genuinely funnier than others and some are smart about it, and Roscoe was a Labrador comedian. And like all comics he was a dropout. He’d flunked out of guide-dog school as a puppy. He’d been bred to be a working dog but he ran off at the sound of shaken coins in a can. This meant he was sound-shy, which automatically disqualified him from guide-dog work. But he made up for it with a remarkable fun index. He bounced at the sight of Corky and whirled and said, “I’m here, I’m here!” He was tall, loose jointed, his big tongue out, tail wagging, and Corky jumped as if a door had opened right before her.

  That’s how it is when you fall in love—dogs know it without waffling. Corky was in love and since fathomless things happen against expectation soon I was in love.

  * * *

  I was forty and walking straight into a love story written by Labradors. I met Connie, a former guide-dog trainer who ran the admissions office, who had one of the loveliest voices I’d ever heard, who I’d find by and by was very beautiful—for I require scientific closeness to see anything, perhaps one may say indecently close, or better yet, lovingly near. But I wasn’t there yet—still, yes, she had a voice and a love of dogs and curiosity about both animals and people, and that ain’t ipso facto, not customary, though we wish it would be, for it’s an ancient sensibility. Soon Connie and I and Roscoe and Corky were taking walks.

  I wondered how one might tell this tale.

  Dear X:

  I could be falling in love with my dog’s best friend-dog’s owner. I’m middle-aged and holding hands with Connie. I’m laughing. I tell her about birdcalls. Tell her grackles sound like reeds. I’ve fallen in love with my dog’s best friend-dog’s owner . . . We walk on a long, abandoned rail line. The dogs say “this this this” and run the curves of a tree line; the dogs say we’ve all come perfectly together . . .