I try to be good. My dog deserves my attention to respectability, or at least the pursuit of it. I imagine I should be Siddhartha of the guide dog world. I tell myself I must be as good as my dog. But I fail. I feed Corky a strawberry while sitting in a Manhattan hotel lobby. I say ungentlemanly things to people I don’t like, much in the manner of Groucho Marx. “I’d horsewhip you if I had a horse,” I say to a pompous academic at a conference. I’m certain Corky would not approve. This is a problem. I mustn’t let her canine decency represent my own sad, Lutheran conscience. Nor should she be an impossible “master” in a Buddhist temple. “No projections, please,” she says, looking me over as we ride the subway to Grand Central Station. “You be you,” she says, “and I’ll be me.” “In this way we’re perfect.”
But I’m a rascal—I’ve always been a rascal. Perhaps not in a hysterical way, but with a steady irreverence. As a boy I used to feed caramels to the squirrels just to see them chew with developing terror. That was the extent of my animal cruelty. But I should be clear, I’ve had trouble holding things sacred. I once stole a bishop’s mitre from a church and wore it to a party.
Oh yes my dog is good. She’s probably too good for me. But the great thing is she doesn’t think so. She doesn’t think so at all.
At the MacDowell Colony for the Arts in New Hampshire, Corky climbs on my bed and licks my ear just when I’m feeling like a failure. Most writers will tell you they feel like failures at least once a day. There you are, in the unlighted alley of your depressive imagination, and voila, a canine tongue enters your ear. “To hell with Siddhartha,” she says.
Planet of the Blind 