The Comedy Dog

Here is how it began: I fell in love with a dog who could see. I imagine I may some day fall in love with a blind dog, that blind dogs are lovable–one reads about them from time to time. I even read about a blind dog who had a sighted dog as a pal. Of dogs and empathy there may be no end of stories. 

But I fell in love with a dog who could see and I could not and so all at once I discovered empathy and eyes. 

People don’t actually fathom the phrase “all at once”–it gets ruined for most by early fairy tales. 

All at once Prince Charming kissed Snow White and thereafter she was Lazarus and little people danced about in the town square.  

Corky entered my life like a sloppy clown. I was in a straight backed chair in a sunlit room and they told me to call and damned if she didn’t run full steam into my arms. 

She was the clown who leaps into the seats and sits on someone’s grandfather. 

She placed her front paws on my shoulders and washed my face and then, as if she knew the job would require comedy, she nibbled my nose but ever so gently like a horse who checks his owner’s hand for a peppermint. 

She gave me just the slightest touch of her teeth. Later I would learn from the family that raised her that she was famous for the “nosey nibble” but God I felt special just then and I laughed as if for the first time–it was one of those true laughs from childhood. It’s the laughing we have before cruelty has found us. As a small boy in Finland I laughed once at a reindeer wearing clothes. It was just standing on the street all dressed up. Oh Corky that was a good laugh, but not as good as the nosey nibble because, dear dog, I wasn’t lonely on the day I saw that reindeer, but on the day I met you I was lonesome as a dead man’s comb. 

Corky I thought I’d cry when the guide dog trainers gently said I should call you and I swear I was just on the verge of blubbering when you stole my nose. We left that room together walking side by side for the first time and you had “all at once” changed my relationship with two hard abstractions: the fear of going places alone and my depressed and solitary imagination. You, who already had ample training in guiding blind people through the streets; you who knew how to stop a blind person from stepping into harm’s way; you, dear, had comedy in your veins. 

Author: stevekuusisto

Poet, Essayist, Blogger, Journalist, Memoirist, Disability Rights Advocate, Public Speaker, Professor, Syracuse University View all posts by stevekuusisto