I’m in Chicago at the national conference of the Associated Writing Programs which is the big jamboree of all the college and university creative writing types and shortly after checking into the Michigan Avenue Hilton I took my dog Nira outsideand while Nira was sniffing a stone urn that surely once belonged to Conrad Hilton himself a stranger approached out of the gloom and asked me if I’ve ever heard of a Conure. I was with my friend, the writer Ralph Savarese who stood to one side dressed in a body length down coat that he’s justifiably proud to own for the man lives in Iowa and who wouldn’t want a down body closet after all? The stranger was preternaturally happy, filled with urgency, the kind of excitement one remembers from certain school chums who couldn’t wait to tell you what they saw in the woods. But the stranger last evening who was clearly “my stranger” had seen my guide dog and was enraptured not by the dog but by the ancient human village of totem animals and their place in our souls. He talked about his minature parrot who rides his shoulders, cleans his ears, talks to him with child-like affection and sleeps under a tiny counterpane of Kleenex tissues which the man lovingly arranges around the bird’s sleeping body. Apparently the conure sleeps on its side like we do. This fellow was like a certain kind of man they still speak of in Finland–a kind of forest lunatic who has found himself in the city and can’t figure out how to talk to people. City people are in a hurry. They are pushing through the fuses of getting and spending. But this man was in love with something unambiguously good and for a brief and unforseen moment he had by the grace of guide dog Nira a small tribe of animus friendly types outside the monolithic, even Czarist Hilton in a cold city in winter. The whole thing felt to me, brief as it was, for we smiled and thanked him and walked briskly into the wind–the whole thing felt like Chekov meets Carl Jung.
Planet of the Blind 