Seeing Eye weathering the storm in New Jersey

Reports I’m receiving from fellow Seeing Eye graduates tell me the Seeing Eye school, located in Morristown, New Jersey, was spared some of the more devastating damage caused by Hurricane Sandy. Training at the Seeing Eye usually includes a trip to the Morristown train station to learn to get safely on and off trains with your dog, and with so many trains not running, that may be eliminated for a while. Same goes for trips to New York City for urban work.

Every day last month the Seeing Eye posted a picture on Facebook of a graduate with a short anecdote about how Seeing Eye dogs change our lives, and my friend Jerry Smith and I were two of the 31 grads featured there.

That’s Jerry with his current partner Aztec.

You might recognize Jerry’s name – he lives in Ontario, and I talked about him in a post I wrote last October after his Seeing Eye dog Seymour died. Seymour and my retired dog Hanni were classmates at the Seeing Eye in 2001, and Jerry and Seymour were a particularly colorful pair. Jerry returned to the Seeing Eye earlier this year and is working with his sixth guide, a Golden Retriever named Aztec, now. He was paired with his first Seeing Eye dog, a male German shepherd named Val, in 1971, and wrote about that dog for his Facebook story:

This story happened soon after I was partnered with Val. We were hurrying to a meeting in a hotel in Toronto and I was pushing my partner to go faster and faster as I was very late. We went down some stairs and down a long hall when suddenly Val stopped. I urged him on but he stopped in front of me, blocking me from going forward. I was in such a rush I made a big rookie mistake: I ignored him, stepped around him, and went forward myself. I took a couple steps before falling down an open elevator shaft. I only fell a short distance and fortunately (for me) I landed on top of two workers at the bottom. No one was injured, and I had let go of Val’s leash when I fell so he was still up there. The workers told me he was standing at the edge, looking down at me as if to say, “You have learned the first lesson – always trust your guide.

My decision 20+ years ago to train at the Seeing Eye ended up introducing me not only to four fun, fabulous furry four-legged friends, but also to dozens of spirited blind people like Jerry who come from all over North America to train with Seeing Eye dogs. We all return home to travel safely and independently with our dogs, thanks to the hard work of hundreds of generous staff members and volunteers. Most of these people live in New Jersey, and my thoughts are with them, and the dogs in the Seeing Eye kennels, and the puppies living with volunteer puppy raisers throughout New Jersey, as they all weather the storm.

Next stop, New Jersey

Some people dismiss national conventions as silly schmoozefests, but I gotta say: I’ve met some pretty darned cool people at the ones I’ve gone to. Guess it never hurts to show up with a cute dog at my side, huh?

Signing books at the ASPCA booth during the American Library Association convention.

It was a very proud – and lucky – moment for us when the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA) selected Hanni and Beth: Safe & Sound as a Henry Bergh Children’s Book Award winner. Our luck didn’t end there, though. At the award ceremony (held during the American Library Association convention) Hanni and I were also lucky enough to meet Stephanie Burke and her aunt. Stephanie is the director of the library in North Arlington, NJ and her aunt teaches at an elementary school in Fairview, NJ. We hit it off right away. Before we left, I thrust promotional postcards and flyers into their hands. “Hanni and I would love to come visit!”

Two years later, we’re off to New Jersey! Turns out Stephanie’s mom works at a school in Fairview, too, so the triumvirate arranged it so Hanni and I will have not just one, not two but three different gigs while we’re there: one at Stephanie’s library, one at her aunt’s school, and one at her mom’s school. Sweet!

After those presentations were booked, ahem, I contacted Mendham Books in Mendham, NJ. I’d met the store owners on a bus ride between our hotel and Book Expo America in New York back in 2007. They remembered Hanni and me, and said they’d love to have us.

And so, thanks to two very fun conventions, a New Jersey book tour is born. Hanni and I fly to Newark this Saturday, and librarian Stephanie Burke has generously offered to pick us up at the airport and drive us to our hotel. She’ll chauffeur us to the bookstore event Sunday, then cart us around to our library and school visits on Monday and Tuesday. She’s even offered to take Hanni for walks. Pick up after her, too. Now that’s a true friend!

The school visits are only for staff, students and parents, but the library visit and the bookstore appearance are open to all. Mendham is very close to Morristown, NJ, so we’re hoping to meet up with some old friends from the Seeing Eye School at the bookstore appearance Sunday.

May 23 (Sunday), 1 p.m.
Mendham Books
84 East Main Street
Mendham, NJ 07945
973.543.4949
bseller@mendhambooks.com
http://www.mendhambooks.com

And we’re looking forward to meeting a lot of new friends at the library appearance on Monday:

May 24 (Monday), 4:30 p.m.
North Arlington Library
210 Ridge Road
North Arlington, NJ 07031
201.955.5640

I’ll be signing books in print and in Braille at both events, and of course Hanni’s paw print will be rubberstamped into every book purchased as well. If you know anyone in New Jersey, please let them know about these two events. And if you live in New Jersey…come!