A Woman, a Dog, a Stick and a Visionless Man

A visually impaired woman with her seeing-eye-dog on the corner of a busy city street.

A Woman, a Dog, a Stick and a Visionless Man

Snowflakes were flittering about.  I could see them through the windshield of the car I was driving.  We were going in the same direction. Down.  The snow was lightly falling from the sky and my car was pointed down a steep grade, away from the Wasatch Mountains.  My car and I came to rest at an intersection when the traffic signal changed from green to a brilliant red.  And, while I was stopped, the snow was still floating.  I watched it in wonder.

I also watched a woman and her dog begin to float from one side of the street to the other.  She was wearing a warm coat and was holding the harness of her companion, seeing-eye-dog, in one hand and a white stick, tipped with red paint in the other.  She carefully stepped off the curb and walked, along with the dancing snow, to cross the asphalt street.

That dance was a precursor to another dance that was about to begin.  As the woman and her dog drew near to the other side of the street my eyes were punched by the large orange construction barrels anticipating their arrival.  They defined that entire closed corner which was a mess of snow, dirt, barrels and broken concrete.  All of which the visually impaired woman couldn’t see.

She also couldn’t see a man, dressed in construction garb, standing at the corner waiting to greet her.  And he did greet her heartily.  I couldn’t hear their voices, but I could see him gesturing and pointing.

It caused me to laughed just a little.

“Who is the real blind person here?”  I asked myself, as the sighted man’s movements became more and more animated.  He just couldn’t understand why the woman wouldn’t follow the course this arms and hands were pointing toward safety.

The whole messy scene caused me to consider another question.

“How many times have I been blind to what kindly, patient others are working so hard to communicate, even when their good intentions are clearly focused on my wellbeing?”

Perhaps it was the beauty of the dancing, flittering snowflakes that somehow sharpened the visual impact of the scene.  I could see a woman, a dog, a stick, and a good-hearted-unseeing-man through the windshield of my car.  No matter how hard he tried, the man couldn’t see-to-understand that his animated gestures were never going to inspire a woman, with a visual disability, toward a safe direction.  And as if an accompanying beauty to the disorder, the snow continued its dancing during the entire unchoreographed interaction, on a roadside construction site near the base of the Wasatch Mountains.  It all joined together to inspire me with wonder.

And, I wonder still that it took a woman, a dog, a stick, and a good-hearted-unseeing-man to communicate that even when intentions are noble, it’s easy to be simply blind to the entirety and miss the important.