Bonding means talking. I told Corky she was my familiar. It was just for fun. I got to be the old blind shaman who spoke with animals. I amused myself. I amused her. I made up little songs. Most of them were ridiculous–old show tunes with her name–but she liked it, for as she guided she heard how I loved her. And best of all, we got to do this all day. All day we gloried in the shifting energies and hopes of our combined spirit.
Who gets to do this? Just go along all day singing and trusting? I remembered a visit I once paid to the poet Robert Bly–I took a Greyhound all the way to Moose Lake, Minnesota. I arrived at Bly’s house but no one was home. The whole thing felt like a fairy tale. Then I heard the poet, coming up the street, all alone, bundled in a black coat, singing loudly as if the squirrels were part of his tribe. Later I’d learn the physicist Richard Feinman sang the same way–sang whatever struck him, sang to a glass of orange juice if it suited him. And there we were, Corky-dog and her soppy man, singing our way down Varick Street in Greenwich Village.
Picasso said, “to draw you must close your eyes and sing.” Bonding with a guide means just that–we draw a new landscape with our motion, our tune; one of us with eyes closed, the other watching as we fly down the street.
The first thing I had to understand was we’d be flying instead of walking.
Sometimes this was comical. In Grand Central Station people scattered before us. Corky made her way deftly around inattentive people and loiterers, but would open the jets in a clear space. People who saw us coming darted out of the way. I saw that Corky liked this game. Her song back to me was this delight. I could hear her: “Watch me make this man jump!”
Occasionally she’d stop and stare a man down. Slow man noticed; got out of the way.
Bonding had its amusements.
“You see,” I said to her, “I’ve never been amused by my blindness before.”
Planet of the Blind 