When a guide dog enters your life you become aware of things you’d forgotten. Memory rushes in when terror lifts. On a crowded street in White Plains, New York my impressive Corky, my first guide, known by her puppy raising family as “Miss Thing” as in “Ain’t I the thing?” once took evasive action, pulled me back from a Jeep cutting the curb–its teen driver was doing some urban offroading, probably changing the radio and he looked down, lost control of the wheel for only a few seconds, but really, death loves the second hand the most, and Miss Thing was totally hip to the Rorschach of death and jeep and 16 year old and then I was alive again. Corky had saved me but she’d also returned me, as having your life preserved isn’t a simple thing, and while you’re swallowing the flavor of your fear and breathing anew, memory floods in, all topsy turvey, or as my Finnish grandmother would say, “all nurin kurin” and you can hardly go forward because of the visions.
On Mamaroneck Avenue I saw a man in a black rubber suit, a German tourist who once upon a time some twenty years earlier I’d seen in Lapland as winter was coming and the Nordic world was turning dark. When I saw him in Finland he was searching for psychedelic mushrooms in the boggy twilight. He sat beside me in a little hut and shared the news–for that’s what it was–that ancient shamans of the Iron Age used to drink the urine of reindeer that grazed on mushrooms, and he offered me some but I didn’t accept them as I was fighting what would later prove to be walking pneumonia and the prospect of Lappish hallucinations wasn’t attractive just then. But there he was outside Macy’s in White Plains and he was still smiling his impish German hippie’s smile, still sporting his diver’s suit, waving as Corky and I resumed our walk.
I like to call such visioned figures “tutelary angels” but I have no doubt they’re the spun phantasmagoria of the carbon in my brain. No matter. You’re back in the world because your guide did her or his job and memory, sensing the hole in the dike of daily consciousness pours in its strangenesses–as the Swedish poet Tomas Transtromer would say: “Friends, you drank some darkness.”
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Planet of the Blind 
Ah, some fine writing once again…rich!
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