My guide dog knows more than I about this moment. I’m trapped in the solo gravitation of my thoughts, seeing the day to come. I’m pondering a business suit–how I have to don it–and wear disagreeable shoes–and then I will pose as an alert grownup all day.
All moments are elastic and un-cinctured. Dogs know. Just now its tug of war time. And what a relief! My blue, pin-striped suit disappears in the fog of memory and I hold a wet rope and a Labrador drags me three feet across the floor. I growl because that’s what you do when you’re being dragged. There’s joy down here in the lizard brain. We were in danger of forgetting it.
Well, not “we” of course. I was in danger. I was thinking of the future perfect with ablative nuance. My dog was swinging a rope.
“Before you get too comfy,” she says, “Let’s tear something apart!”
**
Everyone knows dogs bring us joy. I think they’re transmission engines. They push us from customary thinking into liminal space if you let them. You must see in your dog an intelligence equal to your own, though its more selective. Dogs are superbly critical and discerning. People tend to think of them as cartoon-ish “will-o-the-wisp” happy wanderers, drawn by smells, motions and appetites. But dogs read us. I think they read us in a Hebraic way, from right to left and from the back of the book. Dogs think of us as creation mysteries. They scrutinize the delicate motions and little frowns and sidelong glances of their human partners and see that its time once more to rejoice in the garden and the two-leggeds need to be dragged into the light.
Planet of the Blind 