Through Others' Eyes

One of the trainers at TSE told a story about a retired dog guide who had learned how to silently open a trashcan. He was quite stealthy about it so as not to alert his handler. When he retired, though, the dog was adopted by a sighted person. His new owner caught the dog sneaking into the trash one day and scolded him for it. The dog turned around and gave him an astonished expression, as if asking "you can SEE that?!?" The dog had learned that his previous handler couldn't see, but the new owner could.

I am like this dog guide! Two days ago I was working on a PowerPoint presentation for my Spanish 1 class and showed it to a friend, asking if the contrast on the slides was too poor, or if the text needed to be bigger. "No, it looks great, and the text is already pretty big" she told me. I was stunned. "You can see that red-on-black contrast?!?" I apparently have absolutely no concept of what a sighted person can and can't see. I continually make little discoveries like this.  I’ll probably never stop learning new facets of this perspective.

Prada continues to show signs of an ever-increasing bond. She looks upset now every time I trip on something, even when she's not in harness, and has taken to reminding me about our usual schedule, and yesterday she even whined when I left the room. She's never done that before. Apparently she didn't see me leave to go downstairs and let a friend into the building and my roommate reported Prada's unhappiness as she went from room to room in our suite looking for me.

She has become quite possessive of certain locations around me. In most classrooms I let Prada curl up under my chair 'cause there isn't much room anywhere else, but in choir I am seated on the end of the alto section so she has plenty of room to sprawl out if she wants to so I'd been sliding my bag under the table. For the first few weeks of class Prada had been very restless, sometimes getting up before class was over, and in general just shifting around a lot. Then one day she actually tried to paw my bag out from under the chair and I realized what her problem was! "Mommy, the bag's in my spot..." She has since been re-throned and the usurping bag put to the side.

She also disapproves of laptop cords running across her “place” next to my chair.