The First Student I’ll call him Robert. Robert had been a high powered attorney in Connecticut until he threw it all in and moved to Maine. He bought quite a bit of property on a mountain in Maine and moved into a sort of shack. He lived in the shack while he built his house….
Caring. That’s what Ben Branscomb did. Ben was a second father to me and he wasn’t alone. Lee McGriff Jr. (Daddy Pete) was my other second father. Daddy Pete died several years ago and it was pretty devastating. He had always been there solid as a rock. And then he was gone. We celebrated…
I began teaching speech-recognition 15 years ago. At that time, I was employed by the United States Department of Veterans Affairs as a subject matter expert. Many veterans have multiple disabilities such as an inability to use their hands and blindness. They find speech-recognition is the most effective way to work with the computer. In…
My “Quandary” It’s a boy. It’s a *big* boy. When Joan handed me his leash and told me his name, Quan, I was, what? What does it feel like when somebody gives you the next decade of your life? I have to admit my first feeling was that of humility. Seeing Eye was trusting…
First post to “Whirlpool” since late November… I’ll never be a “professional” blogger! Here’s the personal side of that post. On November 4 I had my first ever “Juno” walk. What? You’ve been handling Seeing Eye dogs for over thirty years and it was your first Juno walk? The Seeing Eye admissions…
Sounds strange, doesn’t it? But it’s true. My blindness was unexpected and I lost all of it at once. And, if I had to do it all over again, I’d opt for becoming blind exactly the same way. All that was over thirty years ago. So why am I bringing it up now? Regardless…
Unusual Holidays In the United States it’s Thanksgiving Day with whatever winter solstice festivities you observe right on its heels. We’re inundated with, “Eat, drink, be merry, spend money, receive gifts.” We’re told, “Go . . . be with family and loved ones . . . have fun.” So many of us can’t, or refuse…
Clicker training is used with many species of animals, horses, marine mammals, and, of course, dogs. What is it? It’s operant conditioning. The human becomes a machine the animal learns to operate. I met clicker training in the mid 90s when Lukas came to help me with a problem I was having with one…
Thursday of next week is the second meeting of the support group, Kismet Out Loud. Odd name but let me explain. “Kismet” is Arabic. It means destiny, or fate. In my mid-twenties,at undoubtably the lowest point in my life, I tried to end my life. At the end of the day I was still alive….
At the lowest point in my life I put a loaded gun to my head and pulled the trigger. Apart from blindness and probably PTSD the bullet left me otherwise unharmed. How can I express the struggle of those early days. I thought I had lost everything. One of the blind rehab professionals who helped…