Harmony implies equality, humility and humanness.  In harmony, I forgive others their mistakes as I forgive my own. Harmony equals acceptance.  Disharmony accentuates differences, separating victor from victim, us from them, haves from have nots.  Victims forfeit, then resent power, control and choice.

For me, blindness comes with anger.  Anger at the gods who single me out and anger at people who disrespect me.  As victim, I display the arrogance that my trials are more arduous than yours.  Arrogance borne out of self-pity is the victim’s revolt.  It is reactionary to the nth degree.  It is disharmony of first believing I am less than, then greater than, my fellows.

Back on the street, I realize that when power brokers jostle me, it is my own sense of inadequacy that triggers my resentment. Now a jogger hurdles my white cane and a motorist crowds me in the crosswalk.  How dare they?  I take it personally.  How easily I forget that what others think of me has less to do with me and more to do with them.  Insinuating myself as injured party in their life drama is so egotistical as to be laughable. If I need to inflate my importance, I’ll consult my dog.  Yes, I grumble at the incautious, then dig deep in my harmony bag. Today’s mantra?  Things happen through me not to me.  I am the source rather than the object.  Repeat as needed. 

For years, I blamed blindness for my shortcomings.  “If I weren’t blind, I’d do this.  If not for blindness, I’d be that.”  It was more convenient to blame than to take responsibility, safer to look outside than inward.  I see now that blindness is an inside job. 

Life is 10% what happens to me and 90% what I make of it.  These proportions have reversed over the years, even as my eyesight dwindled.  Way back when, I thought happiness was proportionate to eyesight.  Now I am less fearful and anxious.  I’m beginning to see what it is to love life. This remarkable change came not from a momentous event.  Rather it came from an invisible change in perception. 

Way back when, I thought blindness was the end of the world.  I was a different person back then.  I still carry some remnants, but I have changed and I am changing.   I can deal with it today.  True, blindness is no Sunday picnic.  But I don’t need to lug around twenty-seven years of baggage.

A crucible is a vessel in which elements change when heated.  It symbolizes trial by fire.  My crucible now contains patience, tolerance and acceptance, perhaps in relatively small proportions, but they are present nonetheless.   

To a wise friend, I expressed dismay that it had taken me so long to wise up, to come to terms with blindness.  She said, “Perhaps your difficulty was more with life and less with blindness.”

“Hmmm.  I think I’m beginning to see the light

 Here’s a story Annie Dillard tells in her book, The Writing Life:

Every year the aspiring photographer brought a stack of his best prints to an old, honored photographer, seeking his judgment.  Every year the old man studied the prints and painstakingly ordered them into two piles: bad and good.  Every year the old man moved a certain landscape print into the bad pile.  At length he turned to the young man.  “You submit this same landscape every year and every year I put it on the bad stack.  Why do you like it so much?”

The young photographer said, “Because I had to climb a mountain to get it.”

Blindness is an Olympic event: the movements remain the same; the degree of difficulty increases.  My trip to the Swedish Bakery requires minimal exertion.  But the concentration is exhausting.  Every trip is an adventure.  It’s effort versus payoff, risk versus reward.  And, aside from really great donuts, the reward is intrinsic.  It’s the sense of accomplishment.  Fear is a daunting foe.  Some days I need to push myself.  I don’t want to stay relegated to the sidelines, to the life of what might have been.  

“No, but thanks for asking,” I replied.  “Seems I spend half my life bent double at the waist, feeling the ground for what I need but can’t see.  What makes you think I want to make a game out of that?”

“But the ball beeps,” he persisted.

“So does a garbage truck backing up and I avoid that too,” I said.

“Oh, you’re no fun,” he said and walked away, or at least I think he did.  I felt alone, which reminded me of golf.

I once joined the Blind Golfers Association.  Walking home from the thrift shop with my new, gently used golf clubs, my neighbor-turned-heckler shouted, “You must have one heck of a slice.  The eighteenth fairway is four miles east of here.”  I never got the chance to prove him wrong because I never found a sighted golfer to pair with and I donated the clubs back to the thrift shop.

Maybe I’m fated not to return to the playing field. I have my own take on spectator sports.  I’ll just harness Randy and hike over to Wrigley Field.  We’ll hang outside the ivy walls along with determined and desperate Cubs fans.  The view’s not so great from Sheffield Avenue but my old transistor radio describes the action just fine.  And I might not circle the basepath like I once did but I can walk eighty blocks round trip between home and Wrigley.  And I might watch baseball with my eyes closed but I know for a fact that, on that close play at second, the ump missed the call.  That’s not everyman’s version of fantasy baseball but it works for me.

Randy requires accommodation, but I don’t consider him a nuisance.  I simply nod and smile at questions like, “You mean that dog gets to ride in the cabin too?”  But when a fellow traveler tries to pass off Frisky their pet ferret as a bona fide service animal, I get riled.  I understand how people with disabilities come to be viewed with cynicism and distrust, like we’re all out to beat the system.  Our needs become degraded to the level of the scammers, for whom each whim becomes an entitlement.

George said it best.  George was the O’Hare skycap who escorted me from gate to curb.  While we talked sports, George admonished travelers who blocked our path or distracted Randy from his work.  “Some people got no respect,” said George.

Travel is stressful.  So I practice patience and tolerance.  I respect rules and regulations.  I don’t blame the T.S.A. for making me get half-undressed at Security, nor to have my methodically packed stuff spread among nine plastic bins.  Measures seem extreme, but then so are folks who blow up planes to make their point. 

A little help and consideration get Randy and me safely home.  And we’re grateful for that help, for those who came before, those for whom being treated like a nuisance was a call for change.

Nobody warned me about the hazards of a writing fellowship.  Consequently, I contracted a painful case of “Writer’s Neck.”  While colleagues insisted suffering breeds creativity, I sought relief from Ms. V, the Main Street masseuse.  Talk about relief!  My Vermont muscle-rubber kneaded me like sourdough.

Stretched out on the slab and slathered in sandalwood oil, I submitted to Ms. V.  Randy shed vicarious muscle tension and fell to dozing.  Gas Music from Venus wafted from the digital boom box.  Then the sandalwood oil bottle hit the floor.  Randy retrieved.  “Good boy,” said Ms. V.

But in Randy, the scent and taste had triggered the call of the wild.  He licked the oil off my foot.  He licked the floor where the bottle fell.  “There’s nothing there,” said Ms. V.

“That won’t stop him,” I said.  “Not once he’s got the taste.”

“But there’s nothing there,” repeated Ms. V.

“I hope you’re right,” I said.  “I’ve borne witness to Randy’s gastrointestinal misadventures and they rival Vesuvius.”  Randy licked my other foot.  I shooed him away.

“Don’t worry,” said Ms. V.  “Those slurping noises are just from the little bit in his mouth.  Oil doesn’t dissolve, you know.  It lingers.  He’ll be OK.”

I formed my response carefully.  Too strident was whining.  Too casual was ineffectual.  I said, “He’ll shit like a goose.”

The phrase hung like a southbound gander, then plopped to the floor along with the sandalwood oil bottle.  “Oops, slippery” said Ms. V, then hastily added, “Don’t worry.  Nothing spilled.  Everything’s all right.”

Hours later now, I’m hunched over my keyboard, undoing all the good work of Ms. V.   Randy is sacked out.  He twitches in sleep. Chasing rabbits by the river? Closing on that solitary gander winging south?  Someone’s stomach rumbles.  I massage my writer’s neck.  The skin is slick, the scent is sandalwood.

I am accustomed to playing second fiddle to Randy’s Stradivarius.  I am the black tie on the arm of the hot starlet on Oscar night.  I accept that even in shadow there is reflected light

While my fellow artists honor the “Don’t Pet, Don’t Feed, Don’t Distract” guide dog protocol, Many find Randy in harness simply too tempting.  They want to get their hands on him.  Self-restraint in the canine arena offends their artistic sensibilities and inhibits their craft.  In consequence, uninspired product cheats their muse, their patrons, their public and, most egregiously, their dependent children.  The entire industry faces collapse.  Or so they say.

Rather than contribute to stunted growth in a colony where uninhibited expression is encouraged, I propose an event I’ll call, Randy’s Petting Zoo, in which Randy, unharnessed, will rub elbows with the artistes.  He is a tactile body, having submitted to being mauled by small hands over at the village schoolhouse.

Randy will begin the audience with his version of the Pope wave.  Then he’ll get right into pressing some flesh. Ask him nice, he’ll sit on your foot.  Say left/right, he’ll slip you five ambidextrously.  But no rough stuff, please.  And parents, mind your toddlers—that tail packs a wallop.

Beyond satisfying Randy’s intimacy issues, this event addresses a common human need: physical connection.  Studies show that infants deprived of human touch fuss, fret and grow up weird.  So, break the cycle and join us at Randy’s Petting Zoo.  We’ll all be the better for the effort.

Jeff’s Note:  On February 21, 2013, a gathering of the clan rivaling Woodstock took place in rural New England.  Randy’s Petting Zoo, now known as RPZ13, changed the lives of many artists and one dog.

Proximity breeds osmosis.  He amazes me by being adaptable, annoys me by being inconsistent.  He calms me with his serenity, riles me with his distractibility.

He makes safe strange paths covered with snowy camouflage.  He leads straight across the bridge, diagonally over the crosswalk, circuitously along the paths, up and down the stairs.  He scarfs chocolate crumbs under the dessert tray, yearns to join critters along the riverbank, sidles and sniffs poets and painters.

He has learned main-traveled routes, where to fork right walking north and cut left heading south.  He shorelines the railing on the narrow sidewalk of the bridge over the river.  He descends icy steps one, two, three, in tandem with my left, right, left.  He gives extra breadth for me as sidecar to his sleek, black cruiser.

He needs reminders.  That’s my part on our team.  Keep him on task, override his detours and distractions. Dissuade that instinct to follow his nose down the path to the river.  Or into the kitchen where those lusty smells live.

Yesterday, we had a slip.  We walked in the street.  A car had to stop for us.  I guided him to the sidewalk.  “What are you thinking?” I demanded.  “Get your head in the game!”  Then we retraced our steps and got it right.  I could tell he felt bad.  So I celebrate his success.  He does well and by doing well even once, he is promise and hope.

He demands nothing and asks so little.  How can I not meet his needs?  He is mine; I am his every step of the way.  Three meals a day.  Vermont.  26 days, 24/7.

Jeff’s Note:  My NEA Creative Access Writing Fellowship in Vermont is now more than half complete.  Twelve pounds of dog food down, six to go.

I considered Sherlock, my first Seeing Eye dog, an old soul.  He possessed wisdom beyond intelligence.  He wore life like a loose garment.  He flowed rather than walked, considered rather than reacted, observed rather than looked.  To me, Sherlock had been around the cosmic block a few times.

I retain the imprint of sorrow left the day Sherlock died.  His eight-year-old body surrendered to cancer.  His goodness was, and remains, energy which cannot be destroyed, only transfigured.  This truth, this law of nature, is my consolation.

Short weeks after Sherlock died, I met Randy.  From the first, I found Randy to be a new soul.  He is, literally and figuratively, the new kid on the block.  He lurches and lunges, senses and reacts, gobbles, nudges and prods.  He has no guile.  He is refreshingly candid and forthright.

I have loved both dogs, I think equally.  There is a season for being laid-back; there is a time to forge ahead.  Sherlock was born old and died young.  Randy will stay forever young, regardless of age.  Their differences are ingrained at the molecular level.   

Today I found how this essential difference manifests behaviorally.  From it, I conclude that even without his harness, Sherlock knew that I needed care. Randy, unharnessed, is mindful only of where his own nose leads us, which, this morning was into a bush and a fence post. Not that Randy is uncaring.  He has boundaries which he creates and respects.  Harness means work and no harness means play.  Randy acts like a twelve-year old boy and, as such, is aptly named.  Sherlock acted like a middle-aged man, and so was aptly named.  God love ‘em both, and protect me.

Jeff’s Note:  I am in residence at the Vermont Studio Center in Johnson, VT, thanks to being awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Access Writing Fellowship.  We caught half the Nor’easter that hit the East Coast.  Sherlock would have made snow angels; Randy excels as a trailblazer, in harness, that is.