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“I am his highness’s dog at Kew; / Pray tell me, sir, whose dog are you?”

—Alexander Pope

If you’re like me and travel with a trained guide dog you’ve likely heard about the steady and alarming appearance of false service dogs in public. You don’t have to be blind or deaf or experience PTSD or diabetes or balance issues and navigate with the  assistance of a professional canine to have seen this story. Incidents of faux service dogs are everywhere in the news.

My guide dogs have been expertly trained to work in midtown Manhattan traffic, locate the edges of railway platforms and stop, disobey unwise commands, watch out for low hanging branches or storefront awnings, avoid holes in sidewalks, find ways around construction obstacles, locate stairs and elevators, and yes, be good citizens in shops, restaurants, movie theaters, ball parks, or when riding public transportation.

One of the finest compliments a guide dog user can receive is when departing a restaurant someone says: “Oh, I’d no idea a dog was under that table!” The surprise of others reflects the serious training our dogs have received and our commitment as dog handlers to keep that training sharp. The latter is as important as the former.

Yes. Real service dog users have skill. Not only that, we’ve studied it. In my memoir Have Dog, Will Travel: A Poet’s Journey (due out from Simon & Schuster in March, 2018) I describe what it was like to learn how little I knew about myself and about dogs when I trained with my first guide, “Corky” a yellow Labrador. Here, a trainer I’ve called “Linda” addresses a dozen blind people and their new dogs:

“Our new dogs require praise—lots of praise,” said Linda. “It’s all in the voice. Nowadays a guide dog loves it when you say, ‘Good dog’ with a tone of true joy. Try it!” And we all said, “Good dog” just as Linda had shown us. 

Corky raised her face to look at me, her big yellow snout pointing straight up. And every dog in the room did the same. Something palpable went around our circle—the star of praise that only dogs can see was re- leased by our voices. “Good dog!” We said it again and again. Our overdramatized tones were like stylized laughter in an opera. All tails were wagging. 

“We say, ‘Good dog’ because Guiding Eyes dogs really want to work,” said Linda. “They have been through many months of training. These dogs enjoy their jobs. But just like you, they require praise. From this moment on you will be saying ‘Good dog’ as much as a hundred times a day.” 

Who affirms good things even a dozen times a day? Who makes “talking goodness” a habit of her or his minutes? I sat with my Corky’s head on my shoe and thought about the “talking blues”—as a literary guy I’d studied vocal sorrow—but never had I considered a running, day long practice of spoken good. “Good dog” would become my hourly practice and over time (though I didn’t yet know it), dog-praise would change many of my habits of thought.

One of the surest giveaways you’re not seeing a real service dog is its owner’s obvious lack of control and his or her concomitant lack of praise. Not long ago on an airline flight from Dallas to New York I heard a woman loudly berating her dog because it was barking and it obviously had the jitters. It was obvious the dog wasn’t professionally trained to do anything other than follow its owner everywhere.

My own dog was curled up under my feet and entirely quiet.

I felt terrible for that dog much in the way I often feel sorry for children being scolded in supermarkets by unfit parents.

The fake service dog people are ungenerous both to dogs and to disabled folks. It takes profound commitment to train with a guide dog or a PTSD canine—or any other genuine service dog. The disabled who train with professional dogs know more about dogs than almost anyone. Moreover they know a great deal about themselves and their hopes and aspirations.

The shouting woman on that plane insisted that she had a disability and her dog was a service dog. “Look!” She said, “It has a vest!”

That dog barked and scrabbled all through the flight.

The Americans with Disabilities Act asserts that as far as service dogs are concerned authorities cannot ask the disabled for papers, a safeguard is designed to protect a person’s privacy. It’s nobody’s business if you have an invisible disability, or so the thinking goes. I agree with this position. Invisible conditions should in general be your own business. Why must someone with a traumatic brain injury have to disclose their disability to the general public?

Predictably enough unscrupulous vendors have been taking full advantage of the ADA’s guarantees of privacy. A considerable online industry caters to able bodied people who want to take their pets everywhere. All you have to do is get a doctor’s note saying you need of a service dog, send it in, and voila, you receive a vest that says “Service Dog” and no one can ask you a thing about it. You can take your untrained “Barky Boy” anywhere you like.

Dishonest? You bet. But for my money the worst thing about it is the insult to my dog’s ardor, faithfulness, and intelligence. And yes, the further insult to guide dog trainers and puppy raisers who devote a whole year of their lives to raising future guide dogs. And yes, the insult to the work that true service dog users must undertake to become successful.

Another way to say this is, there’s no love in it. Fake service dog people don’t love their dogs or anyone else.

 

 

As I was walking under apple trees.

As my dog was with me.

 

Yes my father had died not long before.

Yes Fall had come without him.

 

I said, “insufficiencies of the living.”

I said, “living…”

 

What cheer to be alive in an orchard.

That was what I thought.

 

The apples, golden,

Were suspended

 

Like nothing I’d known

When my old man was alive….

‘Tis from the dictionary

My boyhood companion

 

Brought to this world

Already lost, having come

 

From Mithraic light

Sun that falls on pages

 

The words unable to save us.

On my shelf, not archeology,
Palm sized, upright,
Sun going down outside
So that he seems to cross
The long plain of my library,
Steady in primal snow…

“When the Dead Man splays his arms and legs, he is a kind of Medusa”

—Marvin Bell

1.

It’s axiomatic: the blind are fruitless dead people. I know about this as I was born blind and I had a twin brother born dead. His name was Bill. In Western religions it is assumed Bill can now see because Heaven offers sight without glasses. (The blind who are left behind offer living proof that something’s genuinely wrong with them—many things actually—blindness is imagined by the sighted as standing for dishonesty, unbridled temper, malfeasance, and various monstrosities.)

In other words, the blind get to be “popularly dead” and the dead get to throw away their glasses when they pass through the pearly gates.

2.

I’ve worked among sighted people all my life. How else should it be? The sighted run planet Earth. As a blind employee I have been verbally disparaged, denied full access to events and to reasonable accommodations and have been humiliated for sticking up for myself and others. These experiences have been consistent no matter where I’ve been employed.

3.

Because I regard myself as an imaginative being I invent scenarios wherein the events mentioned above turn out differently. For instance, the college president who, behind closed doors, told me he had a roommate as an undergrad who was a blind Olympic rower and that I wasn’t competitive enough—really this happened—I like to think of him taking a sudden warm interest in my life. After all, once upon a time the man must have taken a warm interest in “something” unfamiliar to him, his future wife perhaps, or a runny foreign cheese, Lord knows, so this exercise isn’t entirely impossible.

Instead of hitting me with his Olympic rower “inspiration porn” what if the prez had said: “I understand blindness isn’t an obstacle and that no two people experience it in the same way. What’s it like for you?”

4.

One would think it’s simple, taking an interest in a blind man or woman or child but you see, they’re already dead. With luck they’ll be on life support, work in a sheltered workshop or in a place of sufferance where their difference won’t complicate a thing—they’ll answer the phone or sell you a magazine. In highly structured sighted people environments the blind are faulty, stiff, wholly problematic, like weird totem poles, which of course gets us back to deadness. What else is lack of sight but a figure for pre-death? “Those blind people sure do make me uncomfortable Larry!” “Yeah,” says Larry, an IT professional at Wiz University, “And they keep messing up our perfectly lovely websites by demanding access and shit.” And the first guy, “Norm” says, “You’d think there’s be a special college for them, you know like that school for the deaf in DC.”

5.

Of course the Deaf, big D, little D, variegated “d” are not thought of as being dead. Let’s be clear: discrimination against the Deaf is relentless. Period. But discrimination against the blind is relentless because they’re already dead.

6.

“How dead are you?”

“I’m so dead woodpeckers ignore me…”

7.

Blindness is the number one metaphor for death. Number two is still blindness.

8.

In Helsinki, Finland, during my childhood I first understood people can be ill tempered. I was a small boy and climbing stairs in the old apartment building near the harbor–holding my dad’s hand, climbing, the steps curved like inside a lighthouse, my blindness talking to my feet. You understand–this is an early memory, 1958 most likely. An old woman approached us coming down from above and seeing me said in blue blood Swedish (for she was a member of Finland’s small Swedish speaking minority): “Tsk, Tsk, barna blind…” Tsk, tisk needs no translation, even to a boy. I was a blind child, and there, on that stairwell, in the curving darkness, I received my brand–was branded. My father ignored her by shrugging and we kept climbing.

9.

“Even a minor event in the life of a child is an event of that child’s world and thus a world event.” The words are Gaston Bachelard’s and I’ve puzzled over them for years. My minor event, the naming of my blindness took place in the Scandinavian winter on a dark stairwell and I absorbed some very unrefined ideas about physical difference and human worth–knew them instantly–but how could this ever be a world event? As I see it after all these years there are two ways Bachelard can be right. The first is that the old woman’s contempt becomes a cathected and insupportable incitement, the seed of what Carl Jung would call a “complex” thereby draining my life of self-esteem, maybe even stealing my curiosity. The second is this small, nearly infinitesimal occasion turns me to making things. In both scenarios Bachelard is correct. In both cases a child’s world grows upward and outward and influences many people over a lifetime.

10.

How else to be, but a Blind Medusa? If I’m so dead, I’ll freeze you too.

Or I can loan you some snakes for your own unconscious.

And I’m taking a warm interest in you sighted people.

What’s your dream life like, what’s it really like for you?

Talking to myself in a library

Upriver in a town largely unvisited

Ain’t got a letter in I don’t know when

Lonely the name of this book

“Big deal…Always

Been this way…”

 

Laughing under the skin

Appearing to strangers

Like a mad man

Whispering

Over Selma Lagerlof’s pages….

Of or pertaining to wish—

My mother’s alcohol,

Bright flags only she could see

In every cup—what

A fairy tale!

 

If time loved us

Properly

We’d drink water.

After gun massacres happen in the US there’s a predictable media response, always the same, with headlines like: “What was the gunman’s motive?” 

Americans like the idea that the violence their society spawns by means of unrestricted gun sales, poor schools, and mediocre social services can be explained away by occultism—“what was the secret in the mind of Joe Blow who transformed from a quiet guy next door to a mass murderer? Surely he must have been mentally ill (unlikely); or he collected Nazi paraphernalia (horrid to be sure but not generally a direct cause of actual brutality); he must have had a barbaric ideology (almost never the case)…oh, what was in Blow’s mind?”

Truth is, people will murder people when the ways and means are easy. And truth is, they needn’t have a motive at all. It’s the banality of utility—easy peasy to pull the trigger; simple to express pent up rage in a berserk fit, a fit without ideology, minus clear provocation, a story that’s unremarkable in its sinister ordinariness. Don’t get me wrong: Dylan Roof was a junior Nazi—the little boy next door can indeed be radicalized by hate groups. But as is so often the case, America’s mass killers are people who can’t imagine living anymore and want to use their guns on their way out. What was the gunman’s motive? Most of them can’t figure out how to live. America is increasingly a soulless place. We don’t have enough social workers and psychiatric outreach centers to meet the needs of a vast population of stricken humans. But we have guns.

Motive: “I am too tired to live. You shouldn’t be able to live either.”

The sooner Americans understand this, the quicker we can find a resolution. People experiencing despair are not necessarily mentally ill. But when their only vocabulary is a stream of bullets, we’re not engaging with the problem as it currently stands.

 

The children are delicate and must be kept away from sunlight. Visit any playground and you’ll find the fields empty. It’s not daylight that’s dangerous, it’s the prospects it might bring. All the adults have guns. The adults are a bad group. I’m certain the National Rifle Association has a plan to fix this—baseball gloves with six shooters built in; double barreled hockey sticks. How hard could it be to turn a basketball into a Gatling gun? Hooray for the NRA! Hooray for militarized innocence!

Meanwhile the grownups in America—which means anyone over eleven—go about their business slaughtering each other. And the police go about their business, slaughtering the slaughterers even though some aren’t really all that dangerous, you know, like Tamir Rice for or Philando Castillo but heck they got what they deserved, they made the mistake of going outdoors. What’s that? People can get killed sitting in their houses? Well they ought to live in gated communities. As the faux president of the United States likes to say, “they expect everything to be done for them.”

Here’s the good thing: if your child is killed by gunfire and you can’t afford to bury her most cities still have pauper’s graves. Cheaper than health care. Burying grownups costs extra but mostly it’s still cheaper than health insurance.

The NRA’s website has the slogan: “freedom’s safest place”—better than any playground or happy musical event, really….