Here are short summaries and my responses to chapters in Rod Michalko's book The Two-in-One: Walking with smokie, Walking with Blindness.
In this chapter, Michalko presents his own life history. He focuses on the aspects of his life relating to his growing and eventual blindness. He started as a child with very poor vision that degraded over years to recognizable, but indistinct blobs, and evnetually to simple dark shadows against well lit backgrounds. Michalko also discusses the concept of guidance from different sources and aids, and the concept and theory of blindness, which he develops more in chapter 2.
While reading this chapter, I realized that I had never considered a slow path to blindness, just from birth or suddenly, as from an injury. I must admit that it was somewhat jarring to visualize his descriptions of the experience, particualrly the day when he nearly tripped over a small child while entering a subway station (in chapter 2).
Here, we see the last events that lead Michalko to begin his search for a dog guide (after finding that he neither liked nor was very successful with a white cane). He and Tanya do research and discuss the many aspects and decisions surrounding this event. Michalko also discusses how, with little or no vision, other senses become dominant for awareness of surroundings. He references a conversation he had with a young boy who was born blind (and, thus, had no conception of sight), but thought that his mother could find things he could not reach because she has very long arms.
Again, I had not thought about the difficulty involved in finding a dog guide school in the first place, then of finding a good match with a school, being accepted, and then finding, working and being tested with a potential dog guide.
This chapter presents more of why Michalko uses the term dog guide
and not the more common guide dog
. Michalko finds a good match for a school and is accepted for training. He then spends a month getting tested and acquainted with Smokie to assure that they would work well together. He discusses the freedom and assurance that he feels while holding Smokie's harness, and how his mobility then increases. Michalko goes on to present his month of training at the school with Smokie, the other students, the instructors, and the administration. He talks about many aspects of the training, including the specific activities, concepts involved, and difficulties faced, both with keeping the dogs properly in line and in dealing with the school's administrative problems. Most interestingly of all, I thought, was Michalko's presentation of dogs' training through wolf pack concepts including the order of domincance and submission.
He wants to emphasize that guiding is a function that a dog may perform, and as such is more of an entity and less of a tool as many people seem to perceive. I was inspired by how freeing the harness and support was to him, and can see how a dog guide may be more reliable than a human guide and certainly moreso than a stick. I was surprised to see that guide dogs are provided to qualified applicants free of charge, as I had always thought that there was at least some sort of purchasing involved (like with a hearing aid). I was bothered by the way that the staff meetings, decorations, and meals were organized at this school. It seemed to me (as well as Michalko in part) that there was a large amount of coddling or disregard in many aspects of the school's approach to the blind.
Michalko presents his return home after his month at the school. He becomes somewhat of a local celebrity and is appreached with questions and comments by many people who saw or knew him in a variety of capacities. He had a high degree of success with Smokie there, and found new forms of cooperation and help that they could offer each other (like Smokie's apprehension at the cafe when there might have been a gas leak. He also describes how he and Tanya introduced Smokie to their home and neighborhood by tours and demonstrations (such as the cats' food and belongingness). Michalko then describes how blindness is a sort of home
in which people may live, or in which they may wish to live, but are restricted to the more abundant and dominant home of the sighted world. Next, he describes exactly how he and Smokie interact in their daily routine of guidance.
I was pleased with how the help offered grew more understanding of the two-in-one's
abilities and needs after being around the neighborhood for a few months. I found it interesting how much Michalko discovered about his neighborhood by acquainting Smokie with it. Walking on the sidewalk without sight really would restrict one's experience of the surroundings and landscape. I thought it was cool how Tanya got her own dog and then trained her to guide, relying in part on Smokie's example. I was surprised by how intense the concentration involved in guidance is on both sides, one more thing that I had not given any real thought to before this text. It interested me how Michalko and Tanya's own interactions changed once Smokie was around, with him taking over most of her previous guiding points. This may have been an element of some tension in the household, as the Rod/Smokie dynamic took over some parts of the past Rod/Tanya dynamic, but that Tanya still helped by, for instance, announcing the upcoming obstacles that Smokie saw before arriving at them.
This chapter brought to my attention a point of personal annoyance with Michalko's writing style, or, more specifically, his grammatical conventions: he uses many words in ways out of their original context and meaning, and so puts them in quotes, actually a good practice in itself, but then he mostly continues to quote them through the text, even after their meanings have been explained. Also, he is inconsistent about doing this, as sometimes he will use a previously quoted word or phrase and put it in quotes and sometimes without quotes. I nit-pick here, but even if he did not use my preferred convention, he could be consistent about it. Sound examples of this may be found on pages 80 through 83 of the text.
On every story Michalko uses examples from his own experiences, adding a sense of reality to his narrative of life with Smokie as described in The Two in One: Walking with Smokie, Walking with Blindness. For anyone who is interested, the book's ISBN is 156-639-6484. This book is worthy of notice on interested readers' radar because the author, Rod Michalko, is well-suited to present this material, being a blind man with a guide dog and a trained sociologist. We should note that in the text, Michalko refers to dog guides as tools, companions, and extensions of self.
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