Once at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York a friend, a writer, described for me the intricate pencil sketches of Honore Daumier. When she came to a drawing of a rough looking man being followed by a small dog she stopped talking for a moment. Then she said: “The dog is so delicate—he’s a curlicue, he looks like he’s bouncing on tiny springs.”
“Its as though the dog is the principle of life itself; the old man—he looks like a judge—he’s the opprobrium of public life. And its like Daumier is saying the two should be together though they aren’t. The dog’s just dancing along. He doesn’t belong to the man.”
I walked the hills of Ithaca with Corky and was flooded with reveries. The dog in Daumier’s sketch didn’t belong to the man. If only he’d turned around. A better life is sometimes that simple. And then again, of course, it isn’t. Honore Daumier died penniless and blind, and I imagine he had no dog. I felt a oneness with his ghost. I appreciated my own luck and good fortune.
We went to the gym and I ran on a treadmill, Corky lying beside me on a towel. Spring was coming on and the trees outside the windows were like green smoke. The winter people were all hitting the exercise machines and there was joviality in the air. Maybe it was just that I was feeling good so, in turn, I noticed other people who were happy. Again strangers wanted to talk. One guy said in passing: “You better get into shape to keep up with that dog! You can tell that’s a fast one!” A woman said: “That dog’s so beautiful you ought to get someone to paint her!” Then she added: “Its her face. She’s an angel!”
“Everyone here is trying to reclaim his or her body,” I thought. “Everyone in this gym is still naively fond of life.”
That was the thing—I was unaffectedly fond of everything. This is what Corky was doing for me.
**
In the Moosewood vegetarian restaurant, a well known Ithaca haunt, I ate curried potato soup and felt a wobbly splendor—I thought, “What will happen if I cry for joy at this table?” I broke a guide dog training rule and slipped Corky a torn piece of French bread. “Deep inside every man or woman is a seed,” I thought. “It grows and determines how we will love or fail to love.” I was opening. I’d never been so happy. Corky put her paw on my knee. My friend “W” who worked at the Moosewood came and sat with us. “Can we make Corky our mascot?” she asked.
It seemed as if the moment, just there, sitting in a sunbeam, made up for all the cruelties of grade school looks and childhood snickers. Who knew that soup, a dog, and easeful conversation were the ingredients of alchemy?
**
Walking in the long April afternoons I started rewriting Pablo Neruda’s poem “Walking Around”—turning the famous surreal cry of despair into an anthem of joy…
It so happens I’m walking with a dog and singing in a key of softness,
No longer afraid of the precipitating fashions
Proud to be blind with a rich animal,
An unclasped necklace swinging from my fingertips,
A long sequence of memories I no longer require…
“I can give things away,” I thought. “Italicized emotions, dark ones—just let them go.”
I had no idea what a talent for happiness might look like or how it might feel, but I was in that place—a zone as sports writers call it—a place of spirited aptitude and dog feet. Corky and I walked all over Ithaca with our heads up. I’d bought a ridiculous CD—“Vienna, City of My Dreams” by by the tenor Placido Domingo—the album was filled entirely with Viennese love songs by Franz Lehar with cream puff orchestral arrangements. The opening song, from the operetta “Paganini” was titled “Girls Were Made to Love and Kiss”—the entire piece was so sappy and lush I had to give in to it. I was in a boat, a gypsy with wine and a handsome woman. I was a Frohliche Wanderer. Corky noticed and often turned her face to me, her dog smile like something out of a reverie. Almost forty, I was wandering for the first time. I saw that wandering is to walking as whims are to stated plans. I was following whims.
Who says dogs don’t understand the most delicate feelings? Before I could say, “Let’s go,” Corky was at the door. Even at midnight she was at the door, anticipating my move. I felt the lure of the all night drugstore and we left our cozy apartment and headed to the half sinister streets in search of vitamins, Mars bars, bubble bath, a styptic pencil. Yes we were walking for the sake of walking. There really were no goods we needed to buy. Down on the dark sidewalk we moved with muscularity, like movie a cowboy and his horse—honestly I thought for a moment of Roy Rogers and Trigger as we pounded down the sidewalk, crossing the prairie of night.
Frohliche Wanderer entered the 24 hour pharmacy.The little bell rang as I opened the door. I swiveled my hips, turning my back to the opened door, assuring it wouldn’t close on Corky’s tail, performing the technique just as the guide dog school had taught me. Always protect the tail. Then we were across the threshold, standing in the unforgiving light of the average drug store amid the soaps and ten thousand plastic bottles; pastel shades assaulted me; there was the odor of newsprint and nail polish. We went up and down the aisles. I didn’t want anything. And yet what a curious thing to realize I liked doing this. Just being in a common public spot with its useless products was a kind of empiricism. I was in love with wakefulness in a vulgar commercial space. I couldn’t properly see the products but toured every corner of the store praising Corky and smiling the dazed smile of a night time walker. No one spoke to me. There were three or four other customers and one cashier. I circled and left.
“You see?” I said to my dog. “you’ve taught me to relish the easy things—Daumier’s lesson…”
Planet of the Blind 