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Last night my teeth fell out. I mean my real teeth. Well, not really, but a temporary “bridge” popped into my pumpkin bread during a ceremonial dinner honoring Chancellor Nancy Cantor of Syracuse University who is leaving us. I am one of the hundreds of faculty who love her. I’m sorry she’s departing. And I sat there at Table 18 with my mangled bridge and thought, “how hard it is to be human, fully fully human, comprehensive, engaged in community, caring about those who do not have our advantages.” That’s what I thought while holding my teeth. And then I quietly left.
Corky and I rode home on the train, headed for Syracuse, then Ithaca. After three days in the city my dog seemed larger. She sat with her head on my knee and stared at me. Blind people know when their dogs are staring—it feels like visual cinnamon—a thing both soft and memorable. We sat a long time like that in a rocking railway car—the two of us taking in each other’s growth. We’d had a superb journey.
I’d seen Art Blakey. Corky had seen three super sized rats under the fountain at the Plaza Hotel. I’d seen—no, felt, how it really was to take the subway without a human partner—she saw the lightning of underground trains and didn’t flinch. And so we really were larger, together. It’s this largeness that makes a guide dog team—invisible, rich, made all the richer by experience—like love itself. And like survival. I saw that if you survive the unknown without bitterness you grow. You grow when your name has taken on new progressive meanings. This is why tribal people have always had spirit journeys for their young people. Corky and I had gone into the woods and come had home again with stronger identities. I’d followed my dog; had stopped when she told me to; and she’d trusted me to make the right directional choices. There are two streets for guide dogs and their partners—the visible one, the one with the traffic—then there’s the hidden one, the one seen only by dog and man—the road of moonbeams and faith. “Jesus,” I thought. “No wonder we feel accomplished. We’ve just walked all over New York on a net of moonbeams.”
Baltimore, Maryland (November 6, 2013): The National Federation of the Blind, the oldest and largest nationwide organization of blind people, today expressed severe disappointment in the Department of Transportation (DOT) for its final rule purporting to extend Air Carrier Access Act requirements to airline Web sites and automated kiosks. The long-awaited rule, released November 4 on DOT’s Web site, gives air carriers an overly generous two years to make select portions of their online services accessible to blind and otherwise disabled customers, allows three years for carriers to make their Web sites compliant, and grants carriers and airports a lavish ten years to make only a quarter of their fleet of kiosks accessible. The rule intends to update the law and improve the travel experience of disabled passengers, but it is far too weak to achieve this goal.
Dr. Marc Maurer, president of the National Federation of the Blind, said: “The Department of Transportation’s final rule on airline Web sites and kiosks falls profoundly short of its objective. Technology offers an opportunity for a mainstream, expedited experience for all travelers, but for far too long, blind people have been needlessly relegated to lengthy fare searches over the phone, higher rates for flights, and segregation in long check-in lines because airlines have failed to embrace readily available accessibility solutions for their Web sites and kiosks. After years of anticipation, we expected the rule released November 4 to be significantly stronger. Instead, the rule sets an appalling time frame of an entire decade for airlines to make only a portion of their kiosks accessible, allowing ten more years of discrimination and ten more years of missed opportunities for innovators. Access delayed is access denied, so we strongly urge the Department of Transportation to amend the rule to be consistent with the department’s original commitment to ensure equal access for disabled travelers.”
In the 1970’s when I was in college in provincial Geneva, New York, I felt myself to be too blind to go alone to New York City. I wanted so much to visit CBGB and Max’s Kansas City—to hear Lou Reed and Patti Smith; to attend poetry readings on the lower east side at St. Mark’s Place. But in those days I didn’t know how to go. And suddenly in 1994 there we were—guide dog Corky and I just noodling along, talking with almost anyone.
We went to Bradley’s, now gone, a great little jazz bar on University Place just opposite the old offices of the Village Voice. I listened to John Hicks at the piano. I shook hands with Art Blakey. I discussed the work of Larry Rivers with the bar tender. I was having spontaneous conversation. Stan Getz said: “as far as playing jazz, no other art form, other than conversation, can give the satisfaction of spontaneous interaction.” And that was the thing: we were taking jazz steps.
“What’s your guide dog’s name?” people would ask at street corners. “Jazz,” I said.
It will start poorly with a trip to the dentist for a new bridge.
It will end well presuming my dentist is competent, as I will be having dinner with writers James Wolcott and Lance Mannion.
In between—hasty arrangements of the quotidian with a numb mouth.
In situ, as we’re venerating the late Lou Reed, the following passage from Wolcott’s memoir “Lucking Out” (in which he describes seeing Reed for the first time at CBGB) is instructive:
“disgruntlement being the little parasol he carried wherever he went. The first time I saw Lou at CBGB’s he parked himself at a table in the back; at the table directly in front of him were a couple of rock chicks who were acting a trifle feisty. One of them, the more lubricated of the duo, began clapping along to whatever song was being played with the floppy enthusiasm of the temporarily uncoordinated. It was mildly annoying but also amusing, as so many things are in life, but Lou was not amused, his public amusement expressed mostly by a smile on a tight leash, easily mistaken for a sneer. “You’re clapping off the beat,” he told the girl, who paid him no never-mind, too far gone into the woolly interior to register a reprimand, even one from one of the founders of our country. “Clap on the beat, cunt,” Lou said, as she persisted in clapping as if trying to kill a fly in midair. Curiously, “cunt” didn’t come across as an offensive slur when Lou said it; it had the flat tone of an impersonal insult, just another nail he happened to be hammering. And CBGB’s wasn’t[…]”
Excerpt From: James Wolcott. “Lucking Out.” iBooks. https://itun.es/us/XA4lz.l
Me? I tend to think of situations like this from a disability perspective. What if that woman wasn’t clueless or beat-less, but had MS or autism?
I like Lou Reed. But I’m not confused about his generalized and shriveled super-ego. I feel the same about John Lennon. Smug, short tempered, puffed like a blow fish—the signs you’ve been behind a microphone too long…
Off now for cathected mouthy tortures…
Have a nice day, or don’t but please, choose your rock star carefully…
I wake early but I’m still covered with night. You know the feeling—a dream book fans its pages while you drink coffee or bend to tie your shoes. I dreamt last night about my first guide dog Corky who has been gone now for many years. She was telling me something. She was saying its okay. I feel the dream still fanning me and I grieve. Its okay. Everything is okay. Loss is okay.
I don’t grieve because of disability. I feel sorrow because of the narrow doorways facing the disabled across the world.
Because someone made up the word “disability” do I have to distinguish it from “life”?
Its morning, blind body, wake up! Climb in the air! Follow the dream-trail of rubies on the autumn road.
I care for no other story than this: disability life is true life—the rest is fantasy. No wonder the “normal” people are so sad.
The United States Senate Committee on Foreign Relations scheduled a hearing to discuss the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) for November 5th. We encourage you to contact your U.S. Senator today if you haven’t already and help by asking a friend or two to do the same.
We encourage you to attend the hearing to show your support if you can. For more information, please click here.
To learn more about the CRPD and what you can do to take action, please click here.
I wanted to write a poem Dr. Williams, but not on the page—nor on the bark of trees, not on clouds, not graffiti, nothing so much as the river itself. Let the green edge of yesterday be its ink. Let the interior speech of the Passaic slide backwards into history, a river’s promise unfouled by greed. Present tense. Sit. Beside. The water.
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