[Critique Group 1] January 2018 submission

[DQ Noriega]

This is an experiment. I have placed one of my poems in the chapter as an
illustration if you will. I decided to do this as a result of Leonard's
question about my poem, Loving Amber Eyes. If you think it works,. I may
choose other poems toad where I feel they would fit.

Add where they fit.

 

Chapter 9.

Girls Just Want To Have Fun

 

I know white cane users who view taking off into the unknown as an
adventure.  They love exploring and meeting the challenge of finding their
way back.  I like to try new things, but don't enjoy getting lost or feeling
vulnerable.  Tammy walking beside me granted me the freedom to go boldly
where I would never have attempted to go without her.  I knew she would keep
me out from under the wheels of the car unexpectedly turning right on red.
She would guide me safely around the open manhole.  I could approach other
pedestrians to ask directions, secure that my guide would serve as a
deterrent to them viewing me as a potential victim.  We could quickly move
away from anyone trying to engage us in conversation if they made either of
us feel uneasy.  Of course, a dog guide is not taught to protect.  In fact,
a dog that shows signs of aggression during training is eliminated from the
program.  Tammy had her own opinions on this matter.  Once a panhandler
approached us.  When he asked if I had any spare change, her only reaction
was to lick his hand.  She obviously decided he posed no threat and perhaps
needed a little affection from a friendly dog to brighten his day.  

 

One day, I arranged to meet Annie in Hayward to attend a powwow.  She was
supposed to meet me at the Greyhound bus station, when I arrived.  Tammy and
I boarded the bus, I asked her to find a seat.  She moved down the aisle and
stopped to put her head on an empty one.  An older man scrambled to his
feet. He spit tobacco juice on the floor in the aisle.  He moved away
declaring that he wasn't going to sit next to no hippie girl and her hippie
dog.  In his mind, my long braids long Navajo style skirt and moccasins and
Tammy's blue peace symbol had tagged us counter-culture types!  

 

When we got off the bus, Annie hadn't arrived to meet us.  Tammy and I went
outside and she located a bench for us to wait.  I placed my over-night case
on the ground at my feet and Tammy curled behind it under the seat.  After a
few minutes had passed, a man sat down beside me.  He moved to put an arm
around my waist and murmured a crude proposition. I angrily pulled free and
stood jerking on Tammy's leash.  As she scrambled to stand beside me I
ordered fiercely.  "Tammy! Kill!"  Of course, that wasn't one of her
commands, so she stood quietly waiting to discover what I wanted.  The man
took off running down the street.  An older lady chuckled and reported,
"Honey, he's about two blocks down and still running.  He hasn't looked back
to see if she's behind him."

 

At the powwow, Tammy got carried away with the drums and the chanting.  She
hung her head over the railing of the bleachers and wailed along with the
singers.  A little boy performing the hoop dance was distracted and his eyes
got bigger and bigger as he watched her doing her coyote imitations above
him.  

 

It's a funny thing, but if you carry yourself with head erect, turn to look
in people's direction when speaking to them and move with confidence, a lot
of people don't seem to believe you are blind.  Annie told me about an
overheard conversation she observed while working at the student bookstore.
One student declared that if that girl brings her big dog to class one more
time, he intended to bring his horse.  His companion tried to explain that I
brought Tammy because she was my dog guide.  The first fellow refused to
believe it because he said that he had seen me run down a hall leading
Tammy.  I probably did run a few steps to catch a friend whose voice I
recognized without using Tammy.  In a straight hall with no obstructions, I
wouldn't have felt the need to use her eyes. Although I hadn't even light
perception left after that final surgery when I was 8 years old, many people
expected me to shffle my feet, walk with my eyes closed and my head down as
many born blind children may do. Some of the people I know who are low
vision, may look just like anyone else. They may have lost vision later in
life, have such a narrow field of vision that they can read regular print,
but only see a couple of letters at a time. They may be able to use
peripheral vision or only their central vision, depending on the eye disease
they have. These conditions may be insufficient vision to travel safely
without using a mobility cane or a guide dog.   

 

On another occasion, Annie, Tammy and I decided to jump on the bus to San
Francisco. We planned to do some shopping and celebrate Annie's birthday by
having dinner in China town.  As we waited on a street corner for the light
to change in our favor, two sailors came whistling and walking in step
behind us.  Tammy was sitting on the curb waiting for me to reach down and
pick up her harness handle.  The two sailors split up as they reached us and
the light changed.  A sailor took me by each elbow and continued across the
intersection with me suspended above the ground between them.  When they
lifted me clear of the curb, I was so startled, I dropped Tammy's leash.
The two young men set me down on the up curb and continued on their way
still whistling and walking in step.  Annie and Tammy were on the other side
of the street.  All I could think to do was yell come to my dog and my two
friends raced across to join me before the light changed again.  My good
girl had remained sitting until my call released her.  Annie exclaimed,
"DEE, I have heard of allowing yourself to be picked up by sailors, but do
you have to be so literal about it?" Annie was sure everyone was staring at
her.  It wasn't until she took her dark sunglasses off that she realized
that her habit of resting her hand on Tammy's back and walking on her left
side had confused people into thinking she was the blind girl.  

 

Later that day, it started to sprinkle, so Annie Tammy and I dashed to board
a city bus.  A female passenger became hysterical as we walked toward her
down the aisle.  Tammy showed me a seat and I hurriedly sat down.  The lady
continued to scream that she was afraid of dogs.  Tammy became frightened by
her hysteria and crawled half onto my lap trembling and trying to hide her
face in my arms.  The driver stood up and roared, "Sit down and shut up
lady.  You're scaring the guide dog!"

 

I never stopped learning new things about Tammy as we went about our
routines together.  Occasionally, she twitched or gave a start in harness.
Her head swiveled.  It took me awhile to realize she was watching the antics
of a housefly or other insect on the wing.  If she was out of harness, she
felt free to go in hot pursuit.  Imagine a ninety-pound dog leaping five
feet into the air to snatch an aerial offender on the wing with the snap of
her jaws.  She was really quite a good flycatcher.  

 

When we went to a black spiritual music concert on campus.  The usher
thought we should sit in the front row next to the stage.  Tammy had more
room and people could reach their seats without climbing over her.  As the
choir broke into a rousing rendition of Rock My Soul In The Bosom of
Abraham, Tammy began to sing along.  I grabbed her and tried to quiet her
but it was too late.  The choir director stopped the performance and leaned
down from the stage to pat Tammy on the head.  He proclaimed her "A soul
sister!"  I guess she took her designation as a black Labrador/German
shepherd dog  to mean she was a person of color.  She obviously thought she
could claim to be both an Indian dog and celebrate that black is beautiful
too.  After that I avoided taking her to events that included music,
particularly singing. 

 

Tammy's house manners were excellent.  Although she had missed out on being
raised in a 4H home, she didn't climb on furniture or forage in trash cans.
Every so often though, her lack of experience led to her making an error of
judgment.  For example, she tried to sniff a hot iron when I was hurriedly
pressing a skirt on the floor without an ironing board.  Only my quick
response saved her from being burned.  Another time, she tried to lick
someone's hand while the person was smoking.  She burned her tongue on the
lit cigarette and became afraid of that individual's right hand.  Tammy only
allowed her to pet if she used her left hand.  She seemed to think the right
one would hurt her. Little incidents like these made it clear to me that
being raised in a kennel had left gaps in Tammy's education.  

 

Scottie Hagedorn and I met during our sophomore year.  She was a petite
green-eyed blonde girl who was in both my beginning piano and French
classes.  One day she offered Tammy and me a lift home because it was
raining.  I asked her up for a cup of tea before she headed back out to her
family farm.  Although she got that tea, she had to crawl through a kitchen
window because I had forgotten my keys.  Sometimes, you are fortunate to
meet someone who you seem to recognize as a kindred spirit.  Practically
from our first exchange of words, we could finish each other's sentences and
talk in fragments and understand what was meant perfectly. Scottie's mom
decided that she couldn't tell us apart on the phone.  She took us shopping
for shoes one day.  When the sales clerk got too friendly with us, she
announced that she wanted us to have sturdy no nonsense shoes as we were
twins and were going into the eighth grade. That definitely put paid to his
flirtatious manner when dealing with us.   She insisted on referring to me
as her other daughter.  She liked to call us Snow White and Rose Red because
we didn't really look anything like each other.  Like sisters, we often
exchanged clothes and talked late into the night.  We both loved dogs.  

 

Her dog was a foolish funny little beagle dachshund cross.  Her name was
Dippy, short for diploma because she had been one of Scottie's graduation
gifts from her mother.  Dippy was a bottomless pit and managed to get into
everything.  She had a figure not unlike her namesake, long and round.  Our
two dogs seemed to like each other even though Tammy was a dainty eater who
preferred to nibble one kibble at a time.  Sometimes she took twenty-four
hours to finish her food.  

 

Having Scottie and her mom adopt me made up a little for having my family so
far away.  I could only make brief visits to see them each summer between
summer school and the fall term  

 

These visits showed me that family life was going on without me.  Instead of
being an important member, I was becoming a visitor.  My baby sister was
growing rapidly from toddler to pre-schooler.  She made mom laugh when she
imitated my habit of touching the frame of a door as I passed through it.  I
found her serious old-maid manners hysterical.  If I dropped my sweater
across the foot of a bed, she was sure to pipe, "Aren't you going to hang
that UP?"  Donny was changing into a teenager and Rob and Ruben were
developing more interest in their heritage.  They spent a lot of time with
tribal elders learning to dance and take part in ceremonies.  They were
rapidly becoming young men.  It was hard being so far from all these
changes.    

 

Rob was dating his first serious girl friend, Kerri.  They met at a roller
rink.  Both were excellent skaters and were asked to represent the rink at
competitions for dance skaters.  Her family didn't approve of the
friendship.  Her father in particular held a prejudice against Indians.  It
was pretty flagrantly accepted dogma, among the people living near the
reservation, that all Indian men drank and beat their wives.  When Rob
wanted my help convincing Kerri's family that we were not the stereotypic
dysfunctional Indian family, I agreed to go over to Kerri's house to play
cards with her sisters.  It was strange being paraded before her family as
Rob's big sister who is in college in California.  Mom did her bit by
joining the same bowling team as Kerri's mother.  Although I knew that my
family loved having me with them, it was clear that where they lived was no
longer my home.  Home was now the place where Tammy and I lived among our
possessions.  

 

My college was located just outside a small farming town.  When I got a lift
from Scottie into Turlock to pick up a few necessities, I had to work my way
around a large farm tractor parked in front of the J. C. Pennies.  Inside
the store the manager followed us up and down the aisles.  I wasn't sure if
he was suspicious of college students or just curious about how a guide dog
worked.  

 

When we stopped for a Frosty Freeze ice cream cone, I discovered another of
my girl's foibles.  She adored ice cream.  When we went to get into
Scottie's car, she jumped up on the seat, turned around and licked my cone
as I tried to follow her into the car.  She never got on car seats unless I
had an ice cream cone in my hand.  She knew that with one hand busy holding
the cone and the other used to judge the height of the car, I couldn't
defend my cone!  She never tried to eat anything not in her dish except ice
cream.  Woe to the toddler strolling innocently by minding his own business
and eating ice cream.  She was an expert at the quick swipe of the tongue as
we sailed past.  

 

Tammy's desire to keep me always in sight caused her to fall in the pool
while I was swimming laps.  She had slipped her collar and escaped from
where I had tied her to race back and forth keeping pace with my swim.  Some
girls objected to having a dog in the pool to the manager.  Of course I had
gotten her to the steps and out immediately, but they thought that her
landing in the water was unsanitary.  Mr. O'Neil, the apartment manager
brought out a gallon jug of chlorine and poured a couple of cups of the
solution into the water to appease them.  He and his wife were very kind to
us.

 

In my sophomore year, my roommate and I were not getting along well.  She
brought a male friend to the apartment who was suffering from some sort of
drug reaction.  She kept giving him sleeping pills and tranquilizers and
trying to get him to eat.  Finally I insisted she get another friend of
theirs to take him to the hospital.  She was angry because she knew that the
hospital staff would report him to the police, but I didn't want him to hurt
himself or have an adverse response to the counter-measures she was taking.
Since my name was on the lease, I didn't want her to use or keep drugs in
the apartment.  I wanted to buy a small piano to practice at home, and she
complained the noise would disturb her studies.  I came home one afternoon
between classes to find her in the process of moving out.  I didn't have
enough money to pay the rent alone.  Mr. And Mrs. O'Neil arranged for me to
trade my one bedroom apartment with two girls who were sharing a studio
apartment in the same complex.  So Tammy and I were completely on our own.  

 

One day, they were resurfacing the road we crossed to the apartment and
Tammy and I ended up with black tar on my shoes and her paws.  I took off my
shoes and changed them and tried to keep Tammy on the tile kitchen floor
until I had retrieved what I had come home to get.  I went and explained my
problem and Mr. O'Neil helped me clean the tar off Tammy's paws.  When I
came home that evening, he had cleaned my shoes and the marks her paws had
left on the floor too.  

 

One day I was bouncing a ball to entertain Tammy.  In her pursuit of the
ball, she knocked my record player to the floor, breaking my favorite record
album.  I threw myself into a kitchen chair in dismay over the loss and it
collapsed when Tammy jumped into my lap to apologize.  When I told Mr.
O'Neil about the breakage, he brought me a replacement without charge,
exclaiming that the broken chair was obviously defective.  

 

Tammy felt she should vet any one who came home with me.  She decided if
they should be allowed inside our apartment.  One young man, who walked me
home from a dance, did not meet her approval.  She made him sit in a chair
and growled each time he stood up.  She kept herself stationed between our
unwelcome guest and me until he finished the cup of coffee he had requested.
Tammy saw him to the door with relief. 

 

I had to publish my phone number each term to hire readers.  I began having
some trouble with obscene phone calls.  This meant that I had to change my
phone number frequently, to avoid them.  The first time it happened, the
caller sounded so friendly that I kept thinking he had a wrong number.
Annie came over to study and I warned her about the problem.  She
confidently expressed the opinion that she could handle such a nuisance by
telling the caller that she had a venereal disease.  We kept at the books
until we were both ready to drop.  I asked her to make some tea while I took
a cold shower to wake up.  As I was toweling off, she knocked on the
bathroom door in a panic.  She had answered the phone and started to take
down a message for me before she realized what the caller was saying.  I
grabbed my robe and went to hang up the phone.  Despite this, I felt
comfortable living on my own with my furry roommate. There was simply no way
my girl would permit anyone to cause me harm.   

 

When Curt came to give me a lift to the market, I put Tammy in the back seat
of his car, but she insisted on pushing her head and shoulders between the
bucket seats to supervise his driving and be sure I was still safe.  

 

During classes, Tammy often fell fast asleep.  In an Introduction to
classical music course, our professor got frustrated trying to catch the
student who dared to snore during his lectures.  This class was a large one
held in the theater.  The instructor was a former conductor of the San
Francisco Symphony orchestra.  He was very dramatic.  The first day of
class, he appeared dressed in full tuxedo and tails.  He strode out on the
stage and declaimed, "Music is God! And I am his prophet!"

 

During his class, we suffered a power failure.  The theater was located in
the middle of the classroom building with no exterior walls with windows.
The room was thrown into total blackness.  The only light came from the glow
from the professor's pipe. His rich baritone boomed out "Is the little wood
nymph and her dog in the room?"  When I answered that we were present, he
asked, "Would you kindly proceed to the door and open it so we may see to
find our way out?"  He continued to refer to me as the little wood nymph the
rest of my time at school.   

 

One of the tricks Tammy occasionally played on me involved her location of
seats in a classroom.  Anywhere else, she showed me an empty chair by
putting her nose on the seat.  In classes, she located a chair and dove
under it.  This was fine, except about once or twice a term she chose to
dive under an occupied chair.  I ended up sitting down on startled
classmates' laps a few times before I caught on to her tactics.  She never
chose chairs with girls sitting in them, only those occupied by male
students.  I apologized and turned bright red while explaining that my furry
friend thought I needed to improve my social life.  

 

Of course, she didn't approve of any social activities that didn't include
her.  I liked to dance, and from time to time went out with girl friends to
some place to enjoy this activity.  The first time I left Tammy tied to a
table, she followed me towing the small table out on to the dance floor.
After this incident, I left her home.  She hated being left and wailed
piteously.  One time I returned to a friend's house to find Tammy curled in
my suitcase fast asleep.  She had made herself a nest in my clothes.  After
that, I learned to bring along a familiar sweater or other object of mine
for her to curl up on to be able to go off with friends. The presence of my
scent seemed to reassure her that I would return.

 

Tammy injured a forepaw when someone giving us a lift pushed the seat back
before I had gotten her properly settled.  The paw was badly bruised and her
gait was too uneven for her to guide.  My rehabilitation counselor thought I
should have some cane lessons.  This was the first time I had ever used a
white cane.  I knew my way around campus and only needed the basic
techniques.  I found though that I tended to walk too fast and caught that
dratted stick on things.  I ended up doing a lot of pole-vaulting with the
cane, putting a permanent bend in it.  Tammy strenuously objected to being
left alone while I went out with that stick.  During my first lesson, she
howled so loud that Mr. O'Neil came up to the apartment to be sure I wasn't
hurt.  It was such a relief for us both when she was able to return to
guiding. 

 

   The fluid grace that a good team can achieve is like dancing.  Each of
the partners responds to subtle almost imperceptible body movements and
reacts to those cues almost without thought. It doesn't happen instantly,
but over the first year, the teammates develop an understanding of each
other's reactions. Communication becomes as natural as breathing. Perhaps
the following poem I wrote about a 16 block to a dentist appointment will
give you a sense of what I mean:

 

Dancers

By DeAnna Quietwater Noriega

We are cloud dancers,

You lead and I follow.

Our steps synchronized

Our bodies swaying to the same rhythm.

 

Swept along in the current of the jet stream.

Floating lightly on the swell of an updraft,

Swooping into a glide down the slope of a down draft.

Side slipping around a gaggle of migrating geese.

Pausing a few beats to let a thunderhead rumble past.

 

Through fog and mist through falling snow we whirl,

Our movements in perfect unison.

Where your paws lead, 

My feet follow.

What does it matter,

If only we two hear the music.

We move together as one being.

We are Cloud dancers, you and I. 

 

 

There is also an emotional bond that makes a dog guide very responsive to
its handler's moods and state of well-being.  Tammy always knew my true
feelings even when other friends were fooled by my efforts to project a
smiling exterior.  When I was actually frightened or unsure, she was never
deceived by my pretenses of composure or confidence. She could always make
me laugh or relax.  One way she did this was to give air kisses.  Someone
had tried to break her of licking faces.  She brought her face close to mine
and flipped her tongue in and out rapidly without actually touching me with
it.  This never failed to make me smile.    

 

 

D.Q.N.

Quieth2o at charter.net

 

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://bluegrasspals.com/pipermail/group1/attachments/20171228/78336144/attachment-0001.html>