That's Chris and the late, great Gilda.

The Seeing Eye is sending instructor Chris Mattoon out tomorrow to help Whitney and me. Blog readers might recognize his name: Chris came out to help me with Harper last fall, and my husband Mike Knezovich wrote a blog post about the visit. During that visit, Chris explained that Harper’s training at the Seeing Eye had included a trip or two to New York City, but that there is really no way to know for sure how a dog will react to city surroundings — or any surroundings, for that matter — or in the long term. From Mike’s post:

He also explained that although Harper didn’t start balking right after the near-miss with the car, the stresses on the dogs can be cumulative.
The three of us talked and imagined what swirled around in Harper’s head. In the end, Chris made it clear that city life had just become too much for Harper. Beth would have to get matched with a new partner.

Chris is the superstar who trained Whitney to become a Seeing Eye dog. The day he introduced her to me in New Jersey last November, he started receiving calls from home. His beloved 13-year-old canine companion was ill and getting worse. It might be time to put her down.

The Seeing Eye gave Chris time off to be with Gilda, and the five of us in his group worked with Jim Kessler, Senior Manager of Instruction and Training, while Chris was gone.

Gilda died in Chris’ arms, and Chris returned the very next morning, sounding understandably sad. I gave him a hug and wondered out loud if it might be especially hard being back at the Seeing Eye at that particular time, with all of us gushing over our brand new pups and all. Chris shrugged and said, “I can’t think of anywhere better to be right now than right here.” That’s when I decided to break the rules. I took Whitney’s harness off and let her jump up on Chris to give him a kiss. He didn’t object.

Chris worked with Whitney and me for three weeks. He knows us very well, and he is well-equipped to help us fine-tune our work together in Chicago. Curious about what we’ll be working on? Here’s an excerpt from a note I sent the Seeing Eye about specifics we need help with:

-we don’t always go all the way to the curb at the end of busy city streets, especially if she anticipates we’ll be making a turn there, she is reluctant to go to the curb (I am reluctant to admit that after my near miss with Harper last year I may be transferring a bit of fear through the harness, too) — sometimes when we *do* go all the way to the end and I point “right” or “left” and command the turn, she can’t find the crosswalk of the street we’ve turned to — when she knows where we’re going, she can be a bit overconfident, i.e., wanting to cross diagonally or veering in street since she knows we’ll be turning right or left once we get across anyway — all to say, we can be a bit sloppy at intersections — distractions (children and dogs) I correct her but she’s all discombobulated after that — plows through crowds of people rather than taking us around them — running me into people — misbehaving at pool (I swim laps every other day and she is a disaster while I swim, for a while she stayed behind the desk with staff while I swim but she still goes bonkers) this week I’ve left her at home and found a human being to escort me to the pool instead

That note makes it sound like Whitney and I are having a terrible time! Really, we’re doing very well. I just need some fine-tuning and reassurance, and I’m grateful that the Seeing Eye is sending Chris Mattoon to provide just that.

Chris’ father, Gary Mattoon, was also a Seeing Eye dog instructor. Gary started training there in 1965, so Chris grew up with the Seeing Eye. The father-and-son team worked together for years before Gary died. While I was in New Jersey Chris told me he misses his dad “each and every day” and hopes he is honoring his father’s memory by his work at the school and his dedication to the dogs he trains.

I’d say Gary would be proud.

I happened to catch Daniel Levitin (the author of This Is Your Brain on Music) on the Commonwealth Club on NPR a few weeks ago, and I was so intrigued by the interview that I went online to hear it again last night. This time I took notes!

Dr Daniel Levitin is a cognitive psychologist who runs the Laboratory for Music Perception, Cognition and Expertise at McGill University in Montreal, and he said music is involved in every region of the brain scientists have mapped so far. Music is processed in the emotional part of the brain. It stays deep in our long-term memory.

Research shows that listening to music releases certain chemicals in the brain. Dopamine, a “feel-good hormone” is released every time you listen to music you like. Listening to music with someone else can also release prolactin, a hormone that bonds people together. And if you sing together? You release oxytocin, which causes feelings of trust.

I have happy memories of singing “Shine on Harvest Moon” during car rides with my sisters and Flo, I am still bonded to friends I made in my high school band, and yes, I do get a happy feeling whenever I hear a good tune. Everythinghe Levitin said about hormones made perfect sense to me, but his claim later on that humans develop a taste for music by the time we are five years old seemed a bit outlandish.

Then again, my brother Doug did buy us that piano when I was three or four years old, and when I flip through our CD collection, what do I find? A heavy dose of piano players. Randy Newman. Todd Rundgren. Stevie Wonder. Joni Mitchell. Marcus Roberts. Ben Folds Five. Maybe that Levitin guy is on to something after all.

I’m off to play the stereo now. Bring on the dopamine! What music do you like to listen to? Leave a comment — I’d love to hear what sort of music gets you high.

Harper and his Collie-buddy Beau wait for a treat in the backyard at Chris and Larry's.

The email came from a veterinary student in England. Her name is Rachel Orritt. “I hope this isn’t too out of the blue,” she wrote. “I have been enjoying reading your ‘Safe and Sound’ blog and was wondering if you would be interested in guest posting for my blog.” Rachel’s note went on to explain that her Animal Translation blog describes “aspects of animal science in plain English.” She asked if I might “share some of the practical aspects of Hanni’s help, and any instances in which she has gone above and beyond expectations to help.”

Hanni retired from guide dog work in 2010! Harper, my third Seeing Eye dog, retired in 2011. I didn’t tell Rachel that, though. I knew I already had a post written about Hanni that would fill Rachel’s requirements, and laziness won the day. After making just a few tweaks, I sent it to Rachel, and she published my guest post on her Animal Translation blog as an intro to a week of guest posts about assistance animals.

It wasn’t until I fetched, ahem, that post I wrote years ago about Hanni that I realized how much my near miss with Hanni in 2007 parallels the one that caused Harper’s early retirement last year. An excerpt from that post I sent to Rachel:

Traffic was rushing by at our parallel, cuing me that it was safe to cross. “Forward!” I commanded. Hanni looked both ways, and judging it safe, she pulled me forward. But then all of a sudden she jumped back. I followed her lead and heard the rush of a car literally inches in front of us. Hanni had seen the car turning right off the busy street. I hadn’t. She saved my life.

Hanni worked for three years after that near miss. Harper retired months after his brush with danger. Three major differences between the incident with Hanni in 2007 and the near miss I had with Harper last year:

• The car in Hanni’s close call didn’t brush her face, in Harper’s case he was brushed by the car.
• I didn’t fall backwards in the Hanni close call, but with Harper I ended up flat on my back in the street.
• By the time Hanni and I had our near-miss, we’d been working together for six years, three of them in the city; Harper and I had been together less than a month.

That last difference is the one I didn’t understand until I’d had a dog for awhile. I had to learn to trust each dog. And each dog had to learn to trust me. By the time Hanni and I had our scares, we’d been through a lot successfully. Not so with Harper.

The similarity: in both cases, I worried the near miss might cause my dog to develop a fear of traffic. Staff at the Seeing Eye have seen dogs react three diffrent ways to near misses:

• Some shrug it off as if to say, whew, we almost got hit by a car, but hey, let’s keep going.
• Some are slightly traumatized but with a bit of retraining can work themselves out of it.
• Some are so traumatized they can’t work again.

The only way the Seeing Eye can determine ahead of time how a dog might react to getting brushed by a car would be to do that in training. Brush them with a car, I mean. They obviously are not going to do that. They do teach the dogs to back away from vehicles heading towards them, and Harper had succeeded at that many times in my early months at home with him in Chicago. The near miss, however, was enough for him.

The other day Whitney was guiding me through our apartment lobby when a neighbor remarked, “This one’s a lot better than that other one, isn’t it?” I didn’t take the time to explain. The four Seeing Eye dogs I’ve worked with have all been great. Each one, and especially the three that I’ve had here in Chicago, have heroically saved me from cars pulling out of alleys, rushing into parking garages, ignoring red lights at intersections. Some “traffic checks” are more dramatic than others, but I am living proof that each and every one of them — Dora, Hanni, Harper and now Whitney — did their job, and I’m proud of all of them.

Which is to say, I’m a little defensive of Harper, and rightly so. The dogs aren’t robots — they’re doing something very, very difficult. And I still miss Harper.

The couple who adopted Harper are having fun with him, and they are also, slowly but surely, working with him to help him overcome the fears that cropped up after my near miss with him in Chicago. Harper has lived with Larry, Chris and their cat George in a quiet Chicago suburb for two months now, and Chris sent us an email yesterday with a subject heading, “major progress.” Harper had walked completely around the block with them two days in a row! “Most of the time it’s me walking backwards, coaxing A LOT, but we’ve gotten it done!” she wrote, the number of exclamation marks in the note accentuated her delight in Harper’s progress. “All of this has been without the leash — he still wigs out when I put it on him outside (inside, it’s not a problem at all).”

Every one of my guide dogs has been a hero. None of them better than another. Just different. And if you ask me about Harper, I’d say he’s still showing his bravery: Chris sent another email just now to say Harper went all around the block for a third day in a row. “I’m so excited!!!!!!!!!” Chris wrote. Me, too!

My dad died when I was three. I don’t really remember him — or even the evening he died. But my older brothers and sisters — who have kept his spirit alive for me over the years with stories about him — certainly do remember that night. Today I am especially grateful to my sister Cheryl for writing this guest post as we remember our dad.

Dion and Daddy

by Cheryl May

That's Cheryl's yearbook picture when she was 15 years old.

Fifty years ago, on January 6, 1962, I was waiting for my friends to pick me up to go to the Elmhurst Youth Center to dance and just hang out together. This is what a 15 year old looked forward to on the weekend. While I waited, I watched The Red Skelton Hour with my dad. No one had T.V. sets in their bedrooms back then, but this small black and white T.V. was sitting on their bedroom dresser.

My dad had been sent home from work a few weeks earlier because he wasn’t feeling well. After a visit to the doctor he was told to get some bed rest and not to exert himself. This was a lot to ask during the Christmas season with five of his seven children still living at home. It was the first time I put the lights on the Christmas tree — a job my Dad had done previous years.

Family and friends came over to celebrate Christmas like always, but daddy didn’t move from his bed — everyone took turns visiting with him in his bedroom. Mom took good care of Daddy and we even rigged up a “new found contraption” that let him read a book while lying flat on his back.

On that evening of January 6, as I waited to go out dancing, Daddy and I talked about the popular music I listened to on the radio. Daddy loved music. He sang with the Illinois State Champion Lions Barbershop Quartet and was a member of The Society for the Preservation and Encouragement of Barber Shop Quartet Singing in America (SPEBSQSA). A popular song in 1962 was “Runaround Sue” by Dion and the Belmonts. We talked about the song and Dad said he liked it. I thought that was pretty neat that my dad could like all kinds of music. My friends arrived, and my dad said, “Have a good time!” I squeezed his hand and told him to rest. That was to be the last conversation I ever

Eddie and Flo clearly enjoyed their time together.

have with my dad.

I arrived home later that evening and found Mom sitting quietly in the kitchen with our neighbor Marion. They told me to sit down. “Your dad had a heart attack,” they said. I was not prepared to hear the rest. “He died at home. An ambulance took him away.” I put my head down and sobbed. I would never see or hear my dad again.

After wearing myself out crying, I walked down the hallway to the bedroom I shared with one of my little sisters and caught a familiar smell of my dad from his jacket in the closet. I went and found a picture of my dad taken at my sister Bobbie’s wedding a couple years before. I put it on the table next to my bed.

A while later I heard the back door open. My older brother was home. I had never heard my brother cry like that before. I stared at my picture of Daddy. I was afraid I would forget what he looked like as time went by.

Our lives changed that day 50 years ago. I got a work permit and got a part time job as a waitress after school and on weekends. Mom found a job in a bakery. Our family pulled together and we made it through some tough times.

Daddy was 47 years old when he died. Over the years I would think of all the good times he was missing with his family. I’d think of Daddy when I was at a parade in town, or when my brother took my sister to a Father-Daughter dance at school, or when I’d hear Mom crying quietly in church. When I think of all Daddy missed, I think of what we missed, too. But I sometimes see his smile, his patience, his kindness or his quiet sense of humor when I look at my children and grandchildren. And whenever I hear Dion and the Belmonts I smile at the memory of our last time together.

Last month I published a post about two trips I took to New York City with Whitney during our training. Here’s an excerpt:

I am happy to report that corrections don’t shake her confidence. “Oh, you meant for me to turn into Penn Station, Beth?” she seemed to say once. “Well, then, let’s back up a few steps and do it again, get it right this time.”

Those two NYC trips were part of the “freelance” period of our training: during our last week at the Seeing Eye, instructors expose us to some of the specific things they know we’ll be facing once we return home. The confidence I gained working with Whitney in NYC is coming in handy here in Chicago.

I work part-time for Easter Seals, and their headquarters is located in Willis Tower (the tower formerly known as Sears). Our route to work involves going down steps to the Blue Line El stop (we don’t take the subway, I just use the stop to go under a very busy street), and then coming up the steps on the other side before embarking on a seven-block walk of lefts and rights. Once we get near the entrance of the building, I feel for a dip up and down to indicate we’ve crossed the entrance to a parking garage, suggest left, avoid the revolving door and find the button to open the accessible door instead, and…voila! We’re there!

My husband Mike trailed us on our first trial run to Willis. The next day, Whitney and I did it on our own. Whitney was a trooper, and she handled all the city hustle-bustle with eagerness and confidence.

Whit and I headed back to Willis Tower last Wednesday. A friend met us there to help me teach Whit how to get through security, navigate the lobby, go through the turnstiles, find the elevator, head to Easter Seals reception desk, find my cubicle. We went through the route more than once, and the third time was the charm. “Good girl, Whitney! You got it!”

A lot of temptation for a pooch who likes kids (photo courtesy of The Seeing Eye).

The next challenge: children. I visit a lot of schools with my children’s book Hanni and Beth: Safe & Sound, so while I was still training with Whitney at the Seeing Eye, Jim Kessler (one of the Senior Managers of Instruction) arranged for me to visit his daughter’s elementary school in New Jersey.

The gymnasium was empty when we arrived, and I had Whitney follow Jim to a seat. After I sat down, I commanded Whitney to do the same. “Whitney, down!” She lay down and stayed still. Until the kids marched in, that is. That’s when she started crying.

”Great,” I thought. “She’s not afraid of Penn Station, but she’s afraid of kids!” This did not bode well for my career as a children’s book author. “Rest!” I told Whitney. She whined and sat up. “Whitney, sit!” She stood up and tried to wrangle out of her harness. I panicked. Jim Kessler to the rescue! “Put your finger under her collar,” he suggested, his voice totally calm. “Lift the collar closer to her ears.” It worked. She settled in and lay down at my feet. By the time we got to the Q&A part of my presentation, Whitney was asleep.

I’d assumed Whitney was scared of all those kids crowding her space in the gymnasium, but it turns out she likes kids. The reason she cried in the gym? I wouldn’t let her play! We don’t run across a whole lotta kids in our Chicago neighborhood, but any time we do, Whitney loses focus, turns towards the kid and invites them to play.

Well, I should say, that’s what she did when she first came home with me. Since then I’ve learned to snap a quick “leave it!” any time I hear a kids voice anywhere near us, then snap the leash if Whitney ignores my command and lunges towards them anyway. Whitney is a quick learner. She’s starting to leave kids alone.

I already have a number of presentations scheduled at elementary schools, colleges and conferences in 2012, plus a return to the children’s section of the Milton H. Latter Branch of the New Orleans Public Library in February. Whitney’s first test will come later this month at a disability awareness presentation for thirdsecond graders at Kipling Elementary School in Deerfield, IL. Let’s hope she gets an A.