Questions about the color black

After the presentation, some of the kids got to see Whitney up close.

Last week was chock-full of school presentations for my Seeing Eye dog and me. I already wrote here about our Tuesday trip to Elmhurst. Two days later, Whitney and I got on another commuter train in Chicago to visit two more suburban schools.

“I’m blind,” I told a group of second-and-third-graders at our last session on Thursday at Barrington’s Countryside School. “Even when my eyes are open, all I see is the color black.” A second-grader’s hand shot up right then with an urgent question. “If all you see is the color black, then how do you know when you’re tired?” The questions went on from there:

• Is it the kind of black you see when you’re sleeping, or the kind of black you see when you wake up and open your eyes?
• How do you drive?
• Do you walk everywhere?
• If you can’t see red or green, how do you know when it’s time to cross the street?
• How long did it take you to get here from Chicago?
• How do you bake bread if you can’t see?
• Do you see different kinds of black, like light black and medium black and dark black??
• What’s wrong with your hand?
• Do you get dressed all by yourself?
• How do you tie your shoes when you can’t see your feet?
• You mean you really can’t see any colors? I feel so sad for you if you can’t see colors.

Read over those questions again. Notice anything? Those Barrington kids asked far more questions about my blindness than about how Whitney does her job.

Know why? Because Cindy Hesselbein, the Reading Specialist at North Barrington and Countryside Schools, volunteers to raise puppies for Leader Dogs for the Blind in Rochester, Michigan. She and her husband and their four children are raising their sixth puppy for Leader Dogs now, and for years she’s brought them along to school every day to socialize the pups and educate the kids about what service dogs are.

Mrs. Hesselbein, the other reading specialists and teachers had also seen to it that the kids had read Hanni and Beth: Safe & Sound before we arrived Thursday. All to say, these lucky Barrington kids know a lot about guide dogs. But what about this blindness thing?

I thanked the thoughtful boy who’d said he felt sad for me and tried to assure him that even though I can’t see, my life is still pretty colorful. “I just have to use my other senses to do things you do with your eyes.” I described how I read and write books, swim laps, bake bread, play piano, go to plays, meet with friends. “And if I wasn’t blind, I probably would have never known what it’s like to love a dog.”

That statement served as a perfect segue to point out how important people like their reading specialist Mrs. Hesselbein and all the other puppy raisers across the country are to those of us who use dogs to guide us. More than a dozen schools scattered throughout North America train dogs to guide people who are blind or visually impaired, and most place their puppies with volunteers like Mrs. Hesselbein until the dogs are anywhere from 14 to 18 months old.

Puppy raisers are not responsible for training dogs to guide, but they do teach important social skills, obedience and how to walk in a lead-out position (not like normal obedience training where the dog is behind you at your heel). Mrs. Hesselbein got a kick out of watching six-year-old Seeing Eye graduate Whitney turn her head left and right to scan the environment as she led me through North Barrington and Countryside Schools Thursday. “They don’t do that when they’re puppies,” she said. “It’s so fun to see the finished product!”

As for the thoughtful boy who’d felt sad for me, he must have really been pondering all this throughout our presentation. Before we left to catch our train back home, he raised his hand to tell me he didn’t feel that sad for me anymore. “Really, you’re lucky,” he said. I was expecting him to add something about how I get to bring my dog along wherever I go, that sort of thing. Instead, he surprised me with a new twist on the lemonade-out-of-lemons notion. “You don’t have to worry about ever getting blind,” he reasoned. ”You already are!”