For decades now, hosting friends for dinner has been a cherished ritual in
our lives. I’ve always liked to cook—I began learning as a kid. But cooking and entertaining took on an added dimension some time after Beth lost her sight, and later, when Gus was born.

We leaned heavily on friends in those days. For rides, babysitting, you name it. And we had very little discretionary spending money. So, one of the best ways we could thank them was to make dinner for them. Beth learned to bake bread, I tried various cuisines, and we have always had some of the very best times of our lives enjoying meals and conversations with friends.

And that’s what happened yesterday, when we had four neighborhood friends over to meet Beth’s dog—and to catch up with Beth: She’d been gone three weeks.

Beforehand, we went through the familiar ritual: Do we want to have people over? Do we have the time? Energy? Then…the cookbooks. Beth and I narrow it down to, say, a cuisine. Then I haul out the cookbooks and pore over them, running recipes—some new, some familiar—by Beth. (She claims she always tells me what she wants and I always make something else. Not true!)

This past weekend we settled on pasta, so the Italian cookbooks came out. My mom was born to Italian immigrants, so I have some stuff committed to memory. But some of the more complex ones are preserved in handwriting.

I came across one this past weekend—my dad had handwritten my mom’s recipe, essentially recording it as she dictated it to him. Not sure why—might have been when her health wasn’t great.

I must’ve read it 10 times. Not because it was so complicated, but because I experienced that thing where when you happen upon an old handwritten letter or thank-you note, something kind of magical happens. More than the words are communicated. A time, a face, the person who wrote it is there.

On a grander scale, Beth and I visited the LBJ Museum at the University of Texas-Austin several years ago. First, it’s well worth visit. One of the exhibits was Jackie Kennedy’s thank-you note to the Johnsons for allowing her and her children to stay in their White House residence a few days in order to make moving arrangements. It was warm, it was sincere, it reflected an impossible poise given the circumstances.

Somehow, I doubt that an email pulled from a digital archive and displayed on a screen would carry the same impact. Or even the printed email.

Apparently, handwriting may offer other powers that electronic communication doesn’t. Evidence has been mounting for awhile that writing by hand stimulates areas of the brain that typing doesn’t—kids learn better and faster, for example.

So, I’ll try to bear that in mind from time to time, and fire off some snail mail for old time’s sake.

Only one problem: I do it so infrequently that it’s hard to even write my name legibly.

It’s only been three days since Mike met Whitney my new dog and me at O’Hare, and in

That’s her!

that short time my new 53-pound bouncing bundle of Labrador Retriever energy has successfully guided me to:

• The Chicago Cultural Center (to prepare for our walk there Wednesday to lead a memoir-writing class)
• Grail Café (for a hot cup of coffee and croissant to celebrate our successful walk to the Cultural Center and back)
• Fifth Third Bank (she uses the small plot in front to empty)
• Half Sour (to take advantage of Thursday afternoon happy hour specials)

Today’s conquest? The pool where I swim laps. There we’ll find out if she’s able to sit quietly at the side of the pool while I swim, or if she needs to stay with staff members at the reception desk while I’m underwater. So far none of our walks have gone without a mistake or two (or five, or nine), and we are still working on our choreography, but we’ve been getting where we need to go, and returning home safely. “Good girl!”

This young 22-month-old Seeing Eye dog has never been to Chicago before, of course, so I am the one who tells her what direction to go to get our errands done. We travel one block, she stops at the curb. “Good girl!” I say, then give her a direction. “Left!” She turns left, I tell her how smart she is, and we proceed to the next curb. “Atta girl, good girl!” I say, then give a direction. “Right!” She turns right, and we’re off again.

This new dog really really loves getting outside and going to work. She is so enthusiastic, though, that sometimes when I command “Forward!” she forgets to stop when we get to the next curb! That’s when I step into my role as teacher. I give her a correction, either verbally or with the leash, then show her where she made her mistake.

Next, I bring her back to the curb, tell her to sit, tap the curb with my foot and praise her. “Good girl! Here’s where you stop. Good girl!” We take a few steps backwards then, maybe two dog lengths, and we re-work the approach to the curb. She almost always, always gets it right the second time. And when she does? I praise the bejeezus out of her. “Good girl, atta girl!” I rub her up. Her tail wags. “Good girl! Good girl!” She eats it up, and she rarely misses that curb again.

Praise is really what it’s all about for Seeing Eye dogs, and to that end, one thing The Seeing Eye urges graduates to do during our first two weeks at home is keep our new dogs attached to us. Literally. 24/7. So picture me now, working at my computer. My dog is chewing her Nylabone, her leash looped around my ankle. Any time I stand up to head to the kitchen to warm up my coffee, she looks up, stops chewing, and drops her beloved bone. “Heel,” I say, and she walks at my side to the microwave. “Good dog!” When we get to the microwave, I give her another command. “Sit!” She sits. “Good girl!” I want her to stay there while the coffee warms up. “Rest,” I say. She does. “Atta girl, good girl!”

Having a dog on leash 24 hours a day is strangely exhausting, and it sure is tedious. Understanding the method behind the 24/7 attachment madness makes it easier to execute: having them at the end of the leash all the time gives us plenty of chances to tell them how great they are. If your Seeing Eye dog sits when you tell them to, you praise them. When they heel, lie down, rest on command, they are praised. On the other hand, if my Seeing Eye dog misbehaves (sniffs inside a garbage can, nibbles at crumbs on the kitchen floor) I can feel her movement through the leash and catch her in the act. We can’t see our Seeing Eye dogs, but if they are only a leash away while they’re being naughty, we can correct them.

All of this transfers to our work outside, too. I praise, and often pet, my dog anytime she stops at a curb, or at the top of the stairs to the subway. If she messes up, I correct her and give her a chance to do it right. And if she succeeds the second time, guess what? She gets praised!

And so, as much as we Seeing Eye graduates would like to think it’s clear sailing after our three weeks training in Morristown, the work continues, and in some ways really starts, once we get home. I’m looking at the months ahead of us as a ten-year investment in my new dog, and in our work as a team. So while having her on leash all the time has been tedious (for both of us!) it’s well worth the investment. These first three days at home have really flown by, and before you know it, it’ll be February 7, our two weeks will be over, and then watch out, world, my new Seeing Eye dog and I will be unleashed (at home, at least)! Right now, though, it’s time to warm my coffee. “Heel. Good girl!”

…no one. They didn’t play any song at all over the intercom to wake us up on our last day at the SeeingEye!

Speedo is already settling in at home.

A majority of the Seeing Eye graduates going home with our dogs yesterday were scheduled on early morning flights. Each of the four Seeing Eye trainers in our class was charged with driving a van full of Seeing Eye graduates and their dogs from Morristown to Newark International Airport, then arranging for special passes to accompany us through TSA, and finally seeing to it that each dog-and-human team reach the right gate for take-off.

My new dog and I were scheduled for the 4:30 a.m. van, which means my wake-up call did not come as a song. It came as an individual phone call at 2:30 in the morning. That call was followed by a knock on my dorm-room door at 3:30 a.m. My assigned trainers wanted to make absolutely sure I was awake.

My new dog and I are settling in extremely well here in Chicago so far, but I’m feeling a vague sense of jet lag. Maybe she is, too. As I write this note, she is sleeping under my desk, keeping my feet warm. Awwwww!

But back to the wake-up call contest. Just about everyone who was flying home yesterday had left for the airport before 5:30 a.m., the time the Seeing Eye wake-up call is usually played over the intercom. No trainers were there yesterday to decide which song to play, and hardly anyone was left there to hear the song if they’d played one. My guess is that the few remaining students were woken up yesterday the same way I was: each got a phone call and/or a knock on their dorm-room door (but at the much more reasonable time of 5:30 a.m.!)

During each of the four “park times” on Wednesday, the day before our departure, I regaled the trainers with new song suggestions I’d received from you blog readers. Many of your ideas got good reviews, but it’ll be ten more years before I find out if they really did add any of your suggestions to their repertoire. It’s my plan to work with this new magnificent dog of mine for at least a decade!

I was blown away by how many of you responded to that little ditty blog post I wrote. You came up with some good ones! So forget what I said about no one winning. Everyone was a winner, right? So here’s the deal: anyone who got their song suggestion to me before we took off on Thursday will soon receive an email message from me with Speedo’s real name in the message. Stay tuned, and…thank you.

Editor’s note: Mornings at the Seeing Eye start with a 5:30 a.m. wake-up call: Ttrainers blast music through the intercom system to make sure we’re out of bed feeding our dogs and taking them outside to “empty.” Here’s a list of some of the more memorable selections from the January 2020 class:

1. Fleetwood Mac’s “Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow” (played the day before we were to be matched with our new dogs)
2. Michael Buble’s “I Just Haven’t Met You Yet” played the morning of January 8, the day we’d be introduced to our new dogs
3. “Found a Job” by Talking Heads
4. Carole King’s “Where You Lead”
5. ”Follow You, Follow Me” by Genesis
6. The Cure’s “Friday I’m in Love” played, you guessed it, Friday
7. Queen’s “You’re My Best Friend”
8. “Monday, Monday” by the Mamas and the Papas played on, you guessed it, Monday
9. Rusted Root’s “Send Me on My Way”
10. Simon & Garfunkel’s “Homeward Bound” played this morning in honor of graduates who live close enough to be driven home, they leave today

Wonder what they’ll play tomorrow morning, the day all of us flying home take off with our new Seeing Eye dogs. Got a guess? Leave the name of the song here, and if you come up with the correct last-day song title, who knows? I just might reward you by sending a personal email to let you in on what Speedo’s real name is!

My longtime favorite, and my new favorite. (photo by Robin Brelsford)

As I write, Beth is on her trek in New York City, the biggest training exercise she and her new Seeing Eye Dog Speedo will take before they board a plane for Thursday morning. I’ll take time off to meet them at baggage claim and we’ll head home together.

A few days after Beth left for her stint at The Seeing Eye, a friend asked, “Do you miss her?”

“Not yet,” I answered.

It was an honest question and an honest answer.

Beth and I have been married 35 years. Enough time that, despite us both being pretty distinct individuals, there is a sort of mind meld that has formed. So time away from each other can be disorienting, but also illuminating in a way. When you sign up with each other the terms of one partner’s life necessarily shape the terms of the other’s. And naturally, you start thinking we instead of I. That’s largely as it should be. But you do lose track of the I.

As in, say, “I’m hungry, what do I want to do right now?” And answering without weighing in someone else’s schedule or wants. Or “I think I’ll go out for a beer, coffee, or…” rather than “Wanna go out for a beer, coffee…”.

And when it’s time to go anywhere, just throw on your coat and head out. A minute, maybe two between the impulse and the action. No waiting.

In our relationship, the mechanical terms of Beth’s life have dictated the terms of my life more than mine have hers. In the big picture, when Beth started seeing blobs on sheep on our honeymoon in Scotland lo these many years ago, I was aimed at law school. (I count it as probably having saved me from a life of grey misery.) In the daily grind, her life’s logistics have determined many of my life’s logistics. Beth could function fine without me. But a lot of things are just more practical and faster for me to do, and we function more efficiently that way. Sometimes, frankly, that’s a drag for both of us.

So it’s refreshing to get a glimpse of what it’s like to do just what I want to do, when I want to. To not know that sometime after 8 p.m., I’ll be taking the dog out in the cold for her last constitutional. To going out without waiting for Beth to do whatever it is she does that last 10 minutes between the time I’m ready and we actually leave.

The individuals in any healthy partnership help each other in ways that are obvious and a ton more that are not obvious, that only they know. The ways that I help Beth are more obvious because I can see and she can’t. But there are millions more that are not.

And billions of ways she helps me that are invisible.

And so, yes, enough time has passed that I can answer, “Yes, I miss Beth.”

But more than that, I miss us.