Category: Uncategorized

I wrote over the weekend on Facebook and on this blog about my guide dog’s surgery and was astonished by the kindness she and I received. The response belies the notion (most recently proposed in The Atlantic) that social media is deleterious to community life. The words of support mattered a great deal to me and hence to Nira Dog. (I am, after all, her translator.) 

 

My friend Bill Peace (known as Bad Cripple in the blogosphere) called me via the old fashioned telephone and helped me laugh–he arranged for a Mass to be said in Nira’s honor though Bill is a non-believer. Why not? 

 

Nira is home now and sporting a purple, wrap around compression bandage and by god she’s wagging her tail. I think Labrador Retrievers would wag their tails in Hell. 

 

Helen Keller said: “What we have once enjoyed deeply we can never lose. All that we love deeply becomes a part of us.” I’ve always liked this and yet I’m too edgy to fully agree. My life has been profoundly influenced by three guide dogs and I keep mementoes of the first two beside me in my study. Yes my dogs are part of me–in fact I’m alive today because of them–but we do lose, oh boy do we lose. And as the poet Lorca says: “the heart feels it is a little island in the infinite.”

 

When my first guide dog Corky died I managed to hold her in my arms and sing. I’d always sung to her and I knew that her last moments should be good, that I couldn’t blubber and weep before her–she needed to know that everything was okay. And I managed it. And as her spirit passed I came apart. 

 

I am learning. I walk with apples for the horses. I cry when I have to. I stand up and sing when it counts. 

 

But something in the world of grief, perhaps grief itself, turns it shoulders, and notices us. The Labrador knows to wag her tail. I stand up and sing when it counts but my dog is wiser than I am. All my dogs have been wiser. 

 

I’m walking around my grief the long way and hoping for the best. How is that Helen Keller? 

   

 

 

(USA Today)
July 22, 2013

WASHINGTON, DC– [Excerpt provided by Inclusion Daily Express] Last year I met Dan Berschinski, a retired U.S. Armycaptain, Afghanistan War veteran and a double amputee. Eight months after he was severely wounded, he visited South Africa to watch theWorld Cup. Most fans were sizing up the teams, but Dan was sizing up other questions: Would his wheelchair fit through the hotel doorway? Would the bathrooms be accessible? Would the buildings have ramps?

As Dan told me, “Those are the kinds of questions we take for granted here in America, but, unfortunately, the accessibility measures that we enjoy here simply aren’t present in many other countries.”

Too many countries haven’t done what the United States did 23 years ago this week when we passed the Americans with Disabilities Act. In too many countries, what we take for granted hasn’t been granted at all.

We need to change that — and we can. But it requires American leadership in the world so that our wounded warriors and Americans with disabilities can travel, serve, study and work anywhere in the world with the same dignity and respect they enjoy here at home.

Entire article:
John Kerry: Our disabled deserve access abroad
http://tinyurl.com/ide0722134

“No one ever told me that grief felt so much like fear.”

 

–C.S. Lewis

My guide dog Nira has cancer, or “had it”. She underwent surgery this morning and along with the known tumor the vet found another. I don’t know if they got all of it. So grief and fear are driven by not knowing. In turn I add up the things I know. This is one of the tricks of poetry. Another trick of poetry is waiting. The elements of attention will fascinate us again.

 

Nira had a mast cell tumor and a second unidentified thing which may or may not be cancer. The trick is waiting. May her luck be excellent. I’m doing my best to be her poet. The lab results should be back in a few days.

 

 

 

 

(Seattle Weekly)
July 19, 2013

SEATTLE, WASHINGTON– [Excerpt provided by Inclusion Daily Express] It’s 5:45 on a Friday afternoon, and members of the Autistic Self Advocacy Network’s Washington chapter are gathering cross-legged in a basement hallway on the University of Washington campus.

Normally they would hold their monthly meeting inside the campus’ Disability Center, outside whose door they are now sprawled. But a keycard isn’t working and the maintenance staff has started the weekend, leaving the members to digest the biggest week of their group’s existence on the linoleum floors of Mary Gates Hall.

The previous Friday, Seattle Children’s Hospital had agreed, at the group’s urging, to pull a bus ad that called for “wiping out” autism (along with cancer and diabetes). ASAN’s argument: “Wipe out autism, wipe out us.”

The ad’s removal was a huge victory, but perhaps more important was the press the episode received, as Seattle reporters bombarded the chapter with interview requests, all curious about what could be America’s next big equal-rights campaign: the right to be autistic. After years of strategizing on how to get Seattle to accept autism — the developmental disability that now affects an estimated one in 88 children in the U.S. — the group’s message was going mainstream.

Entire article:
Who Should Define Autism?
http://tinyurl.com/ide0719136

(Washington Post)
July 19, 2013

FREDERICK, MARYLAND– [Excerpt provided by Inclusion Daily Express] Moments before off-duty Frederick County sheriff’s deputies tried to force a young man with Down syndrome out of a movie theater — a move that eventually led to his death — Robert Ethan Saylor’s 18-year-old aide warned them that he would “freak out” if they touched him.

“Next thing I know, there are I think three or four cops holding Ethan, trying to put him in handcuffs,” the aide told authorities, according to documents from the Frederick County Sheriff’s Department obtained Monday by the Associated Press. “I heard Ethan screaming, saying ‘ouch,’ ‘don’t touch me,’ ‘get off’ and crying. Next thing I hear is nothing.”

The aide’s statement about what happened the day Saylor died is among a package of documents released to the Saylor family’s attorney and the Associated Press by the sheriff’s department detailing its criminal investigation. The 98-page incident report and handwritten statements from 22 witnesses provide the most detailed account yet of how Saylor, 26, went from wanting to watch a movie he liked twice to dead from asphyxiation within minutes.

“I don’t understand why it has taken this long to produce,” Joseph Espo, an attorney for the family, said of the report Monday night. “We’re happy that we finally have it.”

Entire article:
Aide to man with Down syndrome who died in theater had warned police, report says
http://tinyurl.com/ide0719133

(New York Times)
July 19, 2013

NEW YORK, NEW YORK– [Excerpt provided by Inclusion Daily Express] There was a painful moment on Capitol Hill in December when former Senator Bob Dole, seated in a wheelchair, was greeted warmly by old Republican colleagues but then rebuffed by some of those very same members after he had urged Senate ratification of a United Nations treaty defending the rights of people with disabilities.

The treaty drew a 61-to-38 vote that fell five votes short of the needed two-thirds majority after skittish Republicans bought into a nonsensical attack by right-wing critics that it would undermine national sovereignty.

Senator Robert Menendez, a New Jersey Democrat and the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, is now negotiating with the ranking committee Republican, Bob Corker of Tennessee, to arrange another vote.

Should Mr. Corker agree, it is essential that Senate Democrats vote as one to approve the treaty and that Republicans rise above the hackneyed politicking that undermined the vote last year.

With the social-issue pandering of the 2012 campaign behind us, the treaty can be seen for what it is: a singular opportunity to apply the principles of the highly effective Americans With Disabilities Act to the world at large.

Entire editorial:
A Second Chance for the World’s Disabled
http://tinyurl.com/ide0719131

 

 

Now they are calling us in, the old ones. They wrote the great symphonies; bound the Lindisfarne Gospel. The willow leaves are out for rain. 

 

It’s time for the children to come in. The summer flags are pointing west. The coming storm has no heart. 

 

A fritillary dances in circles beside the horses’ graves. 

 

In the apple orchard it is already dark,

though down by the road the last stem of day flares.

I walk the dogs in the Janus-faced shadows.

The moon rises from mankind’s doubts. 

You can live with sorrow 

If you walk with your face open and your hair light. 

 

When your guide dog is sick your heart stops and you have to talk softly to both your heart and your dog. I feel a heavy frost though its summer. I know in rational terms that a mast cell tumor on her belly is probably not going to kill her–but we won’t know whether the tumor has progressed into her lymph system or what kind of tumor it is until after the surgery which will be on Monday. Meanwhile I go from room to room rubbing my eyes. I love my girl Nira so much. She’s also the half sister of my first guide dog Corky. We’re a team–a heart team. I’m frightened. 

 

Sometimes all the particles of the human body shout together. “I don’t believe it,” cry the particles. “I don’t believe in unfairness!” And the mind, that inveterate slow mill, tries to sound like the autocrat at the breakfast table: “You kids stop arguing! Life is hard. Eat your porridge!” The scattered and sensate body parts cry out how unfair the mind is. Everyone sulks. Meanwhile your beloved dog goes on wagging her tail and looking at you with her deep admiring eyes and pretty face because she knows you’re a worthy part of her pack and heart. 

 

I’ve lost two guide dogs and many beloved pets. I’m tired of losing, you fates, do you hear? But the fates don’t hear a thing.

 

Like my autistic friend’s hand–soft move

Of clouds, stars appear and disappear. 

No exact words for this,

Waving in the dark…

 

 

–for D.J. Savarese