Sarah Blake LaRose

After lunch on Sunday afternoon, all students retired to their rooms. No, this was not an afternoon siesta. It wasn’t even quiet. For me, it felt a bit like a strange game of hide and seek, except that I wasn’t allowed to do any seeking. I heard instructors walking around the halls, accompanied by panting and nail-clicking.

Did you know that the sound of a dog’s panting changes as the dog’s chest size and mouth size increases? When a blind child has spent her life thinking about stinky breath and slimy tongues, she develops a keen sense of dog size based on the sound of panting. I mentally calculated the size of every dog that walked past my hall.

Then it happened. “Miss Blake, could you come to the lounge please? And bring your leash”

Why did Mr. Franck have to sound like this was just an ordinary day in paradise?

I took my leash and went to the lounge. And I heard it. Large-mouth panting. Mr. Franck had the dog across the room.

Where was that biscuit? Oh, that’s right. I wasn’t throwing biscuits to dogs to make them stay away from me anymore. I was supposed to be wanting this dog to be my companion.

“Call her,” Mr. Franck said. “Just say, ‘Elli, come.'”

“Elli, come?” My voice sounded like I felt: scared and uncertain.

Elli stayed where she was.

“Sound like you mean it. ‘Elli, come.'” Mr. Franck did sound like he meant it. He didn’t ask a question. He gave a command.

I took a deep breath and banished the thought of the biscuit. “Elli, come.”

Elli bounded across the room and stuck her upper body into my lap.

Was that what I had meant?

I stroked her head and back, trying to recapture the sense of calm that I had when I met my rehab counselor’s guide dog. But Elli was not wearing a harness. And she was black and not yellow. And she was mine. There was nothing inherently wrong with a black dog. But the calm was just not coming.

Mr. Franck approached me. “Stick your hand in her mouth.”

What??? She was already breathing stinky breath on my face!!! I can’t put my hand in that big, slimy mouth!

“Go ahead. She won’t bite you.”

He held her mouth open, and I stuck my hand in. Teeth. Tongue. Slimy cartilege over the roof of the mouth. I wanted to yank my hand out and leave the room, take a break from the whole experience. But this was full immersion into the world of the dog–and the world of texture that I could not stand.

I eventually did finish with the mouth exploration, and it was time to take Elli back to my room. I clipped my leash to her collar and gave my first real command. “Elli, heel.”

To my surprise, Elli did exactly as I told her. And I became less afraid of Elli.

I had never had personal experience commanding a dog who was trained. I was nearly overwhelmed by the relief that came with the ability to relate successfully to a dog–in effect, to control its behavior. Control was what I sought when I threw biscuits to the family dog as a child so that she would be busy while I raced from my swing to the house. How much more liberating it would have been if I had known that it was possible to negotiate that interaction with words like “sit,” “stay,” etc.

I wanted desperately to put this life-changing experience in writing. But I did not have the words to explain it. I was a faithful journal keeper in my everyday life and was accustomed to writing about my spiritual life, family vacations, etc. But I never wrote about the way that my sensory experiences affected me or my negative experiences with dogs. Because of this, I had no frame of reference to express the depth of what happened when I met Elli. So I wrote only a few sentences, and they were woefully inadequate to speak about Elli herself or my emotional state at the time:

This is unbelievable! I got my Seeing Eye dog today. She is a black Lab, and her name is Elli. She already seems to like me, and she obeys pretty well.

After the mouth exploration incident, I was afraid that I would have to let Elli lick my face. Licking faces was what dogs did–and it was what I hated about them. But if I was going to have a dog, I would have to get used to it, learn their ways and accept it. So once back in my room, I settled on the floor with Elli and lowered my face to her level. “Go ahead, girl,” I said. “Get it over with.”

Elli never licked my face. She turned her head away graciously as if she thought that licking my face was the dumbest idea in the world! Instead, she flopped onto the floor for a belly rub. Now THAT I could learn to tolerate. In time, I learned that Elli’s love of belly rubs was so strong that she would take them anytime, anywhere, including in harness. This routine earned her the nickname Elli Belly.

Elli was the perfect first match for the little girl who was terrified of dogs. She was strong and confident, but she didn’t overuse her strength. She was filled with joy and loved her work; but she didn’t force her exuberance on me. Instead, she waited until I was ready to share it with her. When I said, “Elli, are you ready?” she responded with great beating of the tail and loud panting. I learned to listen to those mouth sounds and recognize when she was happy, frightened, sick, or tired.

I made time during class to read some historical accounts written by some of The Seeing Eye’s early graduates. They often described feelings of exhilaration when speaking about their first walks. I don’t know how to speak about my feelings in comparison. These young men did not have the experience of traveling with a white cane prior to their training with dogs. I can imagine that the sense of freedom they felt must have been many times greater than what I felt. While I disliked my cane intensely, I at least had the experience of independent travel and the knowledge that I could move around in the world. I did not feel ignorant of the environment. The cane told me what was in front of me; and my eyes and ears gave me additional information about what the cane could not tell me.

My reaction on my first walk was something like fascination. Walking with Elli was nothing like walking with the fictitious Juno. I expected to feel a simple pulling on the harness handle, like what I had felt when Mr. Franck held it during our walk.

I felt every movement of Elli’s body: every step she took, every turn of her head and shoulders. Her feet became my link to the ground instead of the cane. We took trips twice a day, and I learned to interpret those motions as she stopped at curbs and steps, went around obstacles in our way, slowed down to take care on broken pavement, and walked on country terrain.

Every activity during the training class was designed to help me learn to understand Elli’s movements in various settings and to communicate my needs and desires to her. Elli was responsible for seeing me safely through the environment; but I was responsible for seeing that we arrived at the correct destination. If I did not learn the difference between when to trust and when to direct, our teamwork would fail.

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About Sarah Blake LaRose

Sarah Blake LaRose teaches Biblical Hebrew and Greek at Anderson University School of Theology and Christian Ministry in Anderson, Indiana. She is one of three blind academic scholars who received the Jacob Bolotin Award from the National Federation of the Blind in 2016 in recognition of innovative work in the field of access to biblical language texts and tools for people who are blind. In addition to her work as a professor, she provides braille transcription services specializing in ancient languages. Her research interests concern the intersection of disability, poverty, and biblical studies.

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