[nagdu] Beyond the Obvious...How Does Your Guide Assist You?

[Cindy Ray]

I don't know if it is me or what, but I find this idea that the dog helps me in a social way to be pretty much 0. I find that people don't think of me beyond my dog. They want to know his name, but they don't even care what mine is, and they don't want to know what I'm doing. They want to pet, coo, cluck, chirp, and talk about him, but they don't care about me. I always found this to be a problem, and I often have to steer them away from that topic if I want to be talking about something else that is more important at the time. Once when I was married to Dr. Chuck he went with me to my daughter's teacher conference and we wondered if we would get to it for the questions the teacher was asking about the dog he had. Now, I agree that we need to educate, but there's a time. But one of my dogs saved me once from falling down an unguarded hole. We walked up to it and she stopped. It looked like a curb at the first thought, but when I started to step down it, tentatively, of course because a curb  had not been there before, there was nothing but space.