Its hard to say when the bond with a guide dog occurs. Does it happen during the training month at guide dog school as she directs you around obstacles or takes evasive action during street crossings? I suppose its possible to bond instantly with a dog just as people may fall immediately in love. Yet even “love at first sight” has to survive its honeymoon. With a guide the first year is your honeymoon–but its a honeymoon of streets and airplanes; of subways and escalators; of planned and unplanned days.
When you depart guide dog school for the first time you’re instructed to stay in your home neighborhood for six months. In those days I lived in downtown Ithaca, New York, right above the famous “Moosewood” vegetarian restaurant. Staying home was hardly onerous–we’d take the old caged elevator downstairs for afternoon bread, soup, and salad, and Corky, the most lion headed yellow Labrador one could imagine would sit proudly beside me, smiling the way dogs do, and pretty soon I knew everyone in Ithaca from the socialist mayor to the chief of police. It was a fairy tale. I’d been an isolated disabled person. Now I was meeting people–good people, the people who find you when your life has shifted imperceptibly and you’re happy at last. Love waits for no reminding from the beauty of our world–it is there. You know it. We talked philosophy with a local professor over Polish potato soup.
Authentic beauty is filled with the life of the true said Plotinus. Corky and I were quivering with “true” and I saw–felt–the business of walking the world’s stage with a guide dog really was a lover’s holiday. In turn everything was new, the local art museum was a grand place to visit–Corky and I walked through galleries where I’d absorb blues and reds without definition and the light of Cayuga valley poured through tall windows.
Planet of the Blind 