Planet of the Blind

Each day the university disables itself. Note, the university does not “crip” itself. Systematic conceptual alienation requires a ruling class. And no irony please.  

Let those with disabilities who labor in higher education not acidulate the drink. Thomas Paine wrote: “Independence is my happiness, and I view things as they are, without regard to place or person; my country is the world, and my religion is to do good.” 

The disabled university is ubiquitous. I’ve traveled to hundreds of schools. Here are the things I’ve seen (and recently):

Segregation of disability. “Specialized” offices of disability services where the tainted students must appear like scofflaws. (The environment matters: at the University of Iowa the disability services center is in the basement of a dormitory. If it’s hard to find maybe people won’t use it. Oh. There’s no way out from the basement in case of a fire. Hmm. Let’s have a seven year committee. 

At Syracuse the disability services office is on the top of a building. At least they have windows up there.

The academy disables itself. Failed architectures and insufficiency of imagination always speak the tacit unspoken phrase: “your body is a problem.” 

Never will you hear the phrase “our bodies” for the aim of the disabling university is to commit and recommit the Benthamite claim that crippled bodies are a drain on resources. In this way the disabling academy repackages the reveries of Fascism.

Do not make the mistake of subsituting “outlier” bodies for “disabled bodies” for universities spend hundreds of millions of dollars to attract superior athletes whose physiques are more uncommon to the experiences of general humanity than any person with a learning disability. Even though athletic bodies are invariably the greatest embodied resource drain in American higher education you won’t hear objections from administrators. But you will hear grousing about the crippled students and the resources they hoover up. Here are things I’ve actually heard on campuses:

Disability is an unfunded mandate. (For disability substitute disabled students.)
If we admit too many learning disabled students our academic ranking will decline. 
It costs too much to have an ADA Coordinator. Can’t the Title IX person handle this?
I think these LD students are looking for an easy way to take the test.
I don’t have to teach differently because there’s a disabled student in my class.
Do we really have to put accessible bathrooms in the library? 
These people are often mentally ill—they might be dangerous.
College wouldn’t cost so much if we didn’t have to have “these services”.
If they can’t keep up they shouldn’t be here. 

Note these utterances are contemporay and not recollections from twenty five years ago. 

When the university disables itself it is engaging in social fraud. Illusions are OK in Romantic poetry or marketing classes but they’re destructive where the body politic is concerned. Let’s do some simple arithmetic. 

There are 60 million disabled people in the United States. That’s one fifth of the general population. Taken alone the statistic isn’t generative—that is, it doesn’t suggest much. One may say: “Well, that means there are 260 million people who don’t have disabilities.” (This is the general subconscious reaction by able bodied exceptionalists.) 

But each disabled person has relatives and friends. Even a sophomore marketing student will grasp the implications of this. 

Some years ago my wife and I ran a series of workshops for employees at Sandals and Beaches vacation resorts in Jamaica. We said you should never view a disabled person as a singularity. We pointed out disabled people have discretionary spending. They may choose to take vacations. When they do they’ll bring friends. The point was, and is: there are no outlier disabled bodies.  

Higher education continues to imagine disability as liability. Students, staff, and faculty with disabilities experience this in hundreds of ways but the most singular effect is the “us vs. you” motif of grudging and systematic alienation. Disability is not a sub-set of culture. If 1/5 of America is disabled and that fifth has relatives and friends then 3/5 of America is touched by disability and the final fifth is probable.

The academy disables itself. 

Us is all of us. We don’t need specialized offices and special tickets. Dare I say it? That stuff belongs in the last century. 

I have loved you with my whole heart. 

I have touched your eye lashes with my finger.

Rubbed the cracked pads of your yeasty paws. 

Have said everything would get better. 

Have lain down beside you on hot limestone, insects drowsing around us. 

Have followed you to the door as you barked. 

Have seen with you through the rain and stillness. 

Have felt the sweetness in your shoulders. 

Have wanted to wake you out of love. 

Have imagined the world of dog democracy.

Have seen how your eyes do not overlook anyone’s happiness. 

Have seen how you’re more elastic than any rubber band. 

Have seen how you leave claw marks instead of poems on our door.

Know you hear stars fall with a bell clap.

Oh my dog you who live in the water shine museum where no light ever disappears.

Some colleagues at Syracuse University recently characterized me as a bully—a nomination as false as it is offensive. Calling an outspoken or forceful disabled person a “bully” is like naming a person of color “uppity” or a woman the “b” word. But this is how discrimination works—first by lingo, then by the politics of spoiled identity. “He’s too hot to handle.” “She’s unreliable.” “He’s disruptive.” This should be clear enough. But what do I mean by “preoccupation”?

Preoccupation equals privilege and protection—the “P” words are practical. Able bodied people are diverse and range widely in their temperaments and capacities. But we don’t say able bodied people are “uppity” since they occupy their proper station in our nation’s embodied politics. Now they might need accommodations: beauty aids, Calvin Klein, or, as used to be the case, elocution lessons, but such things are reasonable. What is unreasonable, what’s tacitly enjoined, is imagining—conceiving of—the corrollary interplay between inaccessible environments and the embodied privilege of ableism. Thus preoccupation is both justification for inaccessibility and obfuscation.  It appears in various idiomatic expressions: “doesn’t someone else handle this?”; “I knew a crippled person once and she didn’t have these problems.”; “We put a Braille sign on the bathroom door—what more do you want?”.  The latter is so commonplace I wish I had a nickel for every time I’ve heard it. “What more do you want?” 

I remember a colleague, a professor of art, who once told a student he wanted a trip to Paris in response to the anticipated question about an assignment—“what do you want”—and yes, let’s throw Joni Mitchell in too—to be a free man in Paris, unfettered and alive. Preoccupation is all about the fetters. Idiomatically: “Let’s not think about this today.” “Look Mr. Wheelchair. We got you into the building. Now you want to use the bathroom?”

It takes a lot of muscle to be preoccupied in this way. Freud called it “reaction formation”—a psychological defense mechanism wherein anxiety is masked by compensatory exaggeration. The overly solicitous person is actually cruel; the fuddy duddy is really a sadist. Ableism takes energy. But it’s easy on the idioms.

One useful way to think of able bodied preoccupation is to understand it as a social lie. The poet Kenneth Rexroth put it this way:

“The masters, whether they be priests or kings or capitalists, when they want to exploit you, the first thing they have to do is demoralize you, and they demoralize you very simply by kicking you in the nuts. This is how it’s done.” 

There is something wrong with you my Dear. Since there’s nothing overtly classifiable about your defect we will sell you night repair cream; whitening toothpaste; lifts for your shoes; depilatories. 

Preoccupation depends on selling the transience of physical well being. Against this the cripples are arrayed. And in this way they’re frightening.

If my colleagues wanted they could call me outspoken; passionate; even tiresome. Bully means I’m predatory and defective, which is not the case, unless one thinks a blind man is terribly terribly scary.   

  

Some colleagues at Syracuse University recently characterized me as a bully—a nomination as false as it is offensive. Calling an outspoken or forceful disabled person a “bully” is like naming a person of color “uppity” or a woman the “b” word. But this is how discrimination works—first by lingo, then by the politics of spoiled identity. “He’s too hot to handle.” “She’s unreliable.” “He’s disruptive.” This should be clear enough. But what do I mean by “preoccupation”?

Preoccupation equals privilege and protection—the “P” words are practical. Able bodied people are diverse and range widely in their temperaments and capacities. But we don’t say able bodied people are “uppity” since they occupy their proper station in our nation’s embodied politics. Now they might need accommodations: beauty aids, Calvin Kelin, or, as used to be the case, elocution lessons, but such things are reasonable. What is unreasonable, what’s tacitly enjoined, is imagining—conceiving of—the corrollary interplay between inaccessible environments and the embodied privilege of ableism. Thus preoccupation is both justification for inaccessibility and obfuscation.  It appears in various idiomatic expressions: “doesn’t someone else handle this?”; “I knew a crippled person once and she didn’t have these problems.”; “We put a Braille sign on the bathroom door—what more do you want?”.  The latter is so commonplace I wish I had a nickel for every time I’ve heard it. “What more do you want?” 

I remember a colleague, a professor of art, who once told a student he wanted a trip to Paris in response to the anticipated question about an assignment—“what do you want”—and yes, let’s throw Joni Mitchell in too—to be a free man in Paris, unfettered and alive. Preoccupation is all about the fetters. Idiomatically: “Let’s not think about this today.” “Look Mr. Wheelchair. We got you into the building. Now you want to use the bathroom?”

It takes a lot of muscle to be preoccupied in this way. Freud called it “reaction formation”—a psychological defense mechanism wherein anxiety is masked by compensatory exaggeration. The overly solicitous person is actually cruel; the fuddy duddy is really a sadist. Ableism takes energy. But it’s easy on the idioms.

One useful way to think of able bodied preoccupation is to understand it as a social lie. The poet Kenneth Rexroth put it this way:

“The masters, whether they be priests or kings or capitalists, when they want to exploit you, the first thing they have to do is demoralize you, and they demoralize you very simply by kicking you in the nuts. This is how it’s done.” 

There is something wrong with you my Dear. Since there’s nothing overtly classifiable about your defect we will sell you night repair cream; whitening toothpaste; lifts for your shoes; depilatories. 

Preoccupation depends on selling the transience of physical well being. Against this the cripples are arrayed. And in this way they’re frightening.

If my colleagues wanted they could call me outspoken; passionate; even tiresome. Bully means I’m predatory and defective, which is not the case, unless one thinks a blind man is terribly terribly scary.   

  

Inside a man or woman who owns a service dog is a hidden dog; inside that dog is another and another—dogs reaching all the way back to the Basenji and the Shar-Pei. Further in is a wolf and inside that wolf a soul of spine and desire. 

Who has time for Groucho Mark? “Inside of a dog it’s too dark to read.” Funny old man. But inside a dog is where reality weights itself. 

Inside a dog is where whatever passes for instinct has its last chance. 

Walk uphill in the rain as Guiding Eyes Corky and I did one afternoon in late March 1995. We were in Northern California walking the grounds of an old estate. The woods smelled like bay leaves. Somewhere before us among the trees were many peacocks. Sometimes they screamed—a scream that drew a circle around us mammals. We stopped in our tracks. Corky scented the air and I listened to my heart beating. “Who has time for church or science?” I thought. The peacock made a sound so prehistoric my body wanted only to run. 

My body wanted to run but the dog inside the dog stayed put. The dog beside me had immeasurable and uncountable hearts. Corky said with her whole being, “let’s keep going.” And we did. We walked up a hill and a warm rain fell and from somewhere not too far off I heard the peacocks running in dead leaves. 

The dog inside us is all former dogs—old survivors. Call this epigenetics. Call me romantic. But by a year “in” with Corky I saw how inherited security belongs to us. 

You may be in love with the dog beside you, but I swear you’re in love with ten thousand dogs who have weathered countless storms and heard a million human cries. 

 

  

     

Billy was inspiring because he smiled all the time.
Billy was inspirational because he neer frowned.
Because he was grateful for everything.
The thing Billy couldn’t understand was why all the able bodied people were so miserable. Why did they need him (with his crutches, his chair, his white cane, his smile smile smile…didn’t they already have everything?) It was Billy’s service dog, a Labrador named Gus who knew the answer but Gus couldn’t talk. Still, our narrator is omniscient. Gus saw able bodied people were missing a soul ingredient—something essential to life like Vitamin B12. Gus the Labrador knew without B12 people or dogs develop rickets. 
The able bodied people had spirit rickets because they were missing an element called “here and now”. Gus the Labrador knew Billy didn’t need to smile so much. Being disabled he already had the prize. 

I decided to believe in God. There, that took care of it. 

In the open air market I bought a salmon and carried it home.

The kitchen was a room of souls—my grandmother, long dead, 

whispered about the fish; about baking it in paper, 

I heard the word “shroud” and it seemed right. 

In life she warned everybody against vanity.

This is how you cook a fish—perhaps you bed it in dill—

but it’s the soul, the shadow, the minutes of a life

you’re arranging in a yellow electric kitchen 

with your moist insensible hands. 

American poets who do not identify as being disabled have long used crippling and crippled tropes to signify everything from abjection and spiritual despair to picaresque comedy. My view has always been that since no one is lower on the rungs in America than her poets, and since poetry is often a relatively adolescent art, glib objectification of the disabled is an easy and juvenile matter. Here is a well known poem by James Tate that goes a long way toward illustrating my contention about callow tropism:

Deaf Girl Playing

This is where I once saw a deaf girl playing in a field.
Because I did not know how to approach her without startling
her, or how I would explain my presence, I hid. I felt
so disgusting, I might as well have raped the child, a grown
man on his belly in a field watching a deaf girl play.
My suit was stained by the grass and I was an hour late
for dinner. I was forced to discard my suit for lack of
a reasonable explanation to my wife, a hundred dollar suit!
We’re not rich people, not at all. So there I was, left
to my wool suit in the heat of summer, soaked through by
noon each day. I was an embarrassment to the entire firm:
it is not good for the morale of the fellow worker to flaunt
one’s poverty. After several weeks of crippling tension,
my superior finally called me into his office. Rather than
humiliate myself by telling him the truth, I told him I
would wear whatever damned suit pleased, a suit of armor
if I fancied. It was the first time I had challenged his
authority. And it was the last. I was dismissed. Given
my pay. On the way home I thought, I’ll tell her the truth,
yes, why not! Tell her the simple truth, she’ll love me
for it. What a touching story. Well, I didn’t. I don’t
know what happened, a loss of courage, I suppose, I told
her a mistake I had made had cost the company several
thousand dollars, and that, not only was I dismissed, I
would also somehow have to find the money to repay them
the sum of my error. She wept, she beat me, she accused
me of everything from malice to impotency. I helped her
pack and drove her to the bus station. It was too late to
explain. She would never believe me now. How cold the
house was without her. How silent. Each plate I dropped
was like tearing the very flesh from a living animal. When
all were shattered, I knelt in a corner and tried to imagine
what I would say to her, the girl in the field. What could
I say! No utterance could ever reach her. Like a thief
I move through the velvet darkness, nailing my sign
on tree and fence and billboard, DEAF GIRL PLAYING. It is
having its effect. Listen. In slippers and housecoats
more and more men will leave their sleeping wives’ sides:
tac tac tac: DEAF GIRL PLAYING: tac tac tac: another
DEAF GIRL PLAYING. No one speaks to anything but nails
and her amazing linen.

Deafness, the real nature of deafness exists nowhere in this poem. Moreover, deafness morphs into blindness and a figurative representation of ur-childhood—innocence and simplicity so refined it becomes victimhood. Forget that living flesh and blood deaf girls (or deaf boys) are alert, sentient, far sighted, and entirely in the world. For the purposes of Tate’s poem a deaf girl is a succubus in a petticoat, Lolita without language. 

And we’re meant to read the poem as an inccubus/succubus dream, a vignette all sparkly and nearly hallucinogenic. A play on Blake’s innocence/experience. Tate’s narrator is both repulsed and turned on by weakness and feminine simplicity. Accordingly he’s disabled himself by the experience, robbed of his own capacity for self-narration. Disability is catching, as we always knew. In fact deafness becomes a contagion. A hetero-normative wet dream plague. 

In the hands of able bodied male poets, disability is almost always presented as abjection or lost innocence. It is overtly or vaguely sexualized. Sometimes disability stands for the imagination itself as in this poem by Robert Bly:

A Dream of Retarded Children

That afternoon I had been fishing alone.
Strong wind, some water slopping in the back of the boat.
I was far from home.
Later I woke up several times hearing geese.
I dreamt I saw retarded children playing, and one came near,
and her teacher, face open, hair light.
For the first time I forgot my distance;

I took her in my arms and held her.

Waking up, I felt how alone I was.
I walked on the dock,
fishing alone in the far north.

In Bly’s poem a retarded girl and her teacher are angels straight out of the Romantic imagination. In Jungian terms they are his “anima” his inner feminine spirit. Just as women are angels or whores in the masculinist imagination, the disabled are sacred or profane. Disability as figuration is not only adolescent as I said above, its also a reaffirmation of ableist taxonomies. Presumably when Bly wakes up and feels alone, his retarded children have gone back to the asylum. 

In Charles Simic’s poem “The Initiate” disability functions as both spiritual and political stigma:

The Initiate

St. John of the Cross wore dark glasses
As he passed me on the street.
St. Theresa of Avila, beautiful and grave,
Turned her back on me.

“Soulmate,” they hissed. “It’s high time.”

I was a blind child, a wind-up toy . . .
I was one of death’s juggling red balls
On a certain street corner
Where they peddle things out of suitcases.

The city like a huge cinema
With lights dimmed.
The performance already started.

So many blurred faces in a complicated plot.

The great secret which kept eluding me: knowing who I am . . .

The Redeemer and the Virgin,
Their eyes wide open in the empty church
Where the killer came to hide himself . . .

The new snow on the sidewalk bore footprints
That could have been made by bare feet.
Some unknown penitent guiding me.
In truth, I didn’t know where I was going.
My feet were frozen,
My stomach growled.

Four young hoods blocking my way.
Three deadpan, one smiling crazily.

I let them have my black raincoat.

Thinking constantly of the Divine Love 
and the Absolute had disfigured me.
People mistook me for someone else.
I heard voices after me calling out unknown names.
“I’m searching for someone to sell my soul to,”
The drunk who followed me whispered,
While appraising me from head to foot.

At the address I had been given.
The building had large X’s over its windows.
I knocked but no one came to open.
By and by a black girl joined me on the steps.
She banged at the door till her fist hurt.

Her name was Alma, a propitious sign.
She knew someone who solved life’s riddles
In a voice of an ancient Sumerian queen.
We had a long talk about that
While shivering and stamping our wet feet.

It was necessary to stay calm, I explained,
Even with the earth trembling,
And to continue to watch oneself
As if one were a complete stranger.

Once in Chicago, for instance,
I caught sight of a man in a shaving mirror
Who had my naked shoulders and face,
But whose eyes terrified me!
Two hard staring, all-knowing eyes!

After we parted, the night, the cold, and the endless walking
Brought on a kind of ecstasy.
I went as if pursued, trying to warm myself.

There was the East River; there was the Hudson.
Their waters shone like oil in sanctuary lamps.

Something supreme was occurring
For which there will never be any words.

The sky was full of racing clouds and tall buildings,
Whirling and whirling silently.

In that whole city you could hear a pin drop.
Believe me.
I thought I heard a pin drop and I went looking for it. 

Presumably Simic’s narrator, searching for the pin does so on his hands and knees, groping, for we’ve already been told he’s a blind child:

I was a blind child, a wind-up toy . . .
I was one of death’s juggling red balls
On a certain street corner
Where they peddle things out of suitcases.

The city like a huge cinema
With lights dimmed.
The performance already started.

So many blurred faces in a complicated plot.

 

Of course Simic doesn’t mean blindness as blindness. He means it as abjection and stigma. He means it as a dark force from on high. The narrator catches his blindness from St. John of the Cross who’s wearing the signature dark glasses of all blind beggars. The entire city becomes a mise en scene where blindness and disfigurament are played out against the horrors of modernism. In the end our man who is blind in spirit is left reading the pavement with his fingers in search of a pin. In his essay “In Praise of Pins from Tool to Metaphor” Jaap Harskamp suggests that the pin is:

“a constituent part of Adam Smith’s capitalist theory on productivity and the division of labour, a sharp symbol of European social criticism on the degradation of industrial life (the production of pins and the promise of progress became a hotly debated issue), a literary metaphor for female oppression and subordination and, last but not least, a weapon in the campaign for women’s liberation. In French literature of the later nineteenth century in particular, female insubordination became intertwined with references to needlework. There are of course many examples of virtuously stitching women, but allusions to pins and needles, sewing and knitting, tended to bear a negative relationship to the picture of domestic bliss which they appear to evoke. At the same time, the story of the pin points to some complex patterns in the embroidery of European, i.e. Anglo-Dutch and Franco-Scottish interaction and communication.” 
 
Simic’s poem leaves its narrator wholly in the grip of helplessness and horror—but these circumstances are filtered through blindness and disfigurement as metaphor. One wants to say: sometimes a pin is just a pin. 

In his canonical book Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity, Erving Goffman observed that the disabled are managed by the non-disabled with “phantom acceptance”–a dance of sorts where the disabled must replicate with every gesture the provisional codes of acceptance that “stigma management” has offered. Goffman puts it elegantly:

 

“The stigmatized individual is asked to act so as to imply neither that his burden is heavy nor that bearing it has made him different from us; at the same time he must keep himself at that remove from us which assures our painlessly being able to confirm this belief about him. Put differently, he is advised to reciprocate naturally with an acceptance of himself and us, an acceptance of him that we have not quite extended to him in the first place. A PHANTOM ACCEPTANCE is thus allowed to provide the base for a PHANTOM NORMALCY.”

 

People of color, LGBT folks, women, all those who hail from historically marginalized positions know this dance and fully understand their precarious position where phantom acceptance and phantom normalcy are concerned. The unspoken but implicit rules of discourse are famous: your phantom acceptance is conditional. Speak too passionately and you're “uppity”; a bitch; or a “bad cripple”. Contrarian opinions will disrupt the expectations that go with false acceptance. The burden borne by the uppity cripple is two-fold: (s)he must perform or conduct “identity management” at all costs; (s)he must negotiate the limits of the false acceptance that's been extended to her. But above all else (s)he must never raise her voice.

 

I've had a career teaching at 4 universities and have worked in the non-profit world as well. I've watched the disabled struggle with phantom acceptance and identity management in hundreds of settings. Over time I've come to believe the single biggest reason the disabled are unemployed at staggering levels has everything to do with the hoary circumstances Goffman outlined over fifty years ago. It seems some books just don't wear out.

 

Not long ago someone in a committee meeting called me a bully. I was speaking passionately but without vulgarity, ad hominem attacks, or meanness. But there it was: I'd stepped over the phantom acceptance identity management line–the invisible but ever present stigma trip wire of Goffmanism. I was officially uppity.

 

I was badly bullied as a child. I've written about it in two of my memoirs. I was a blind kid attending public school long before the Americans with Disabilities Act. I was beaten on the playground, taunted in the hallways, ostracized by both teachers and children. I've never forgotten what it felt like to be red faced and weeping alone in the woods. Someone who calls me a bully is of course outing my phantom acceptance but also demonstrates a failure of empathy. As a disabled person who teaches I always feel the implicit connection with my colleagues and students who negotiate daily around the Goffman wire. Bully is a synonym for uppity, which means something more than arrogance–in its original usage it meant a woman who presumed to climb beyond her proper station. I'm no bully. But just try saying it out loud under the great phantom circus tent.

If you have been watching NBC’s Today Show recently you know about “Wrangler” the guide dog puppy from Guiding Eyes for the Blind. In an unprecedented TV event, the cast and crew of  Today is raising a puppy who may one day become a guide dog for a blind person. I have more than passing interest in this because I’m a graduate of Guiding Eyes and I’ve traveled around the world with three remarkable yellow Labrador Retrievers. I’m alive today because of the intelligence and loyalty of my guides. Watching Today I’m heartened by the cast and crew’s enthusiasm for the guide dog movement and I’m reminded that it really does take a village to breed, raise, and train every single service dog.

The village is filled with astonishing people. Not everyone can deeply love a puppy for over a year and then give it back to the guide dog school. Not everyone can martial the discipline to train a puppy to have manners and fully understand a range of commands. And while puppy raisers don’t actually train future guide dogs in the intricacies of traffic work, they do prepare the pups by exposing them to the hustle and bustle of the world, giving them a foundation of confidence. When the puppies return to Guiding Eyes they’re ready to learn. And ready to rely on their own assurance and motivation.

When I travel with my guide people often ask me questions. Though many folks know guide dogs exist, few have ever seen one in person. This is because blindness is a low incidence disability. In truth there aren’t many guide dog users in the US. We’re a minority’s minority. There are roughly 12 guide dog schools in America and approximately 15,000 guide dog teams. Though the sight of a blind person and guide dog walking confidently in traffic is inspiring and holds a place in the public’s imagination, there aren’t as many of us as you’d think. Given that working with a professionally trained dog gives blind people an edge in traffic, and owing to the fact guide dogs are offered free of charge (despite the hefty cost of their training) I think the partnership between Guiding Eyes and Today is truly significant. More people, blind and otherwise need to know about the guide dog movement.

As I say, people ask me questions. “How does your dog know when to cross the street?” Guide dogs don’t make that decision, their blind handler does. What a guide dog does is remarkable: she evaluates the wisdom of the command. If it’s not safe to cross she won’t budge. This is called “intelligent disobedience” and it represents the marriage of a dog’s instinct for self-preservation with sophisticated training. It takes a dog with oodles of confidence to make life or death decisions.

“When your dog gets old what happens to it?” (This is a frequent question and it can happen anywhere—in an airport, riding in a taxi.) You can keep your guide dog as a family pet when it grows old. If your circumstances don’t allow for this, the guide dog school has a list of loyal puppy raisers and volunteers who will lovingly look after a retired guide. They are doted on.

“Is your dog trained to protect you?” (People think blindness means you’re especially vulnerable. This question has more to do with imaginary fear than reality.) No. Guide dogs aren’t trained to attack people. On the other hand, once, about ten years ago, while I was waiting for a bus rather late at night, a drunk lunged toward me making exaggerated Frankenstein noises. My guide dog at the time was “Vidal” and he stood up on his hind legs and let out a ferocious bark.

Vidal wasn’t having any of that nonsense. The drunk shrank into himself. And just then the bus pulled up. The driver had seen it all. “Give that dog a steak when you get home!” he said.

I became a guide dog convert long ago. I believe a confident and tireless canine companion offers advantages to navigating with a white cane. I think more blind and visually impaired people need to know about the services offered free of charge by America’s best guide dog schools. I’m heartened to see NBC and Guiding Eyes team up to share a guide dog puppy’s story. Go get ‘em Wrangler!