Trusting Calvin (17 page)

He became a different dog with Hannah, the tiny toddler who brought giggles into the house, a curly-headed girl with a sparkling personality, the first of two children Steve had with second wife Janet. With Hannah, Calvin took on the role of patient, accommodating, ever-ready playmate. His tail would wave so hard his whole backside would swing from side to side as he and the girl (and later her brother, Andy) played hide-and-seek, or chase-the-dog, or whatever other games kids and dogs devise that make perfect sense to them and no one else.

It was the same later when Rich married a vibrant young woman named Sue, who had three children—“She came fully furnished,” Max announced with a grin to friends—and Calvin had more little people to nurture and play with.

With Max, Calvin was a serious, skilled jobholder who relished the chance to show his mettle. The moment the working harness came out, Calvin jumped to his feet, quivering with anticipation, eager to hit the streets and do the work he was so sure of, so good at, for a man he knew appreciated and trusted him. Calvin became the ideal partner, just as the trainers had predicted, for a man of structure and routines, rules and standards.

Still, somewhere along the way, the dog—apparently concluding that Max needed a little more humor and unpredictability in his life—developed the habit of stealing Max's socks as the man was dressing. Nearly every morning, the big dog inched stealthily, silent as a fox stalking his prey, to where Max had laid out the day's clothing. When Max was preoccupied with zippers or buttons, the dog made his move, pouncing in from the side and making off through the house with his plunder.

Max, the man of habit and sequence who had never before left a task unfulfilled, would interrupt whatever he was doing and take off through the house, roaring, because that's what Calvin wanted.

Realizing that they no longer had to live directly on a bus line because Calvin could guide Max wherever necessary, including to a bus stop a few blocks away for trips downtown or across town, Barbara and Max bought a small two-bedroom house on a quiet street in Lyndhurst. Rich and Steve built a deck so Calvin and Max could sit in the shade of the enormous maple tree, and they had a fence installed around the huge backyard so Calvin could romp or relax on the grass.

It was a new neighborhood for man and dog, but they explored in ever larger squares, walking at least four miles every morning, and soon these streets grew as familiar as those of the old neighborhood. Sometimes, as they snaked their way through the side streets and cul-de-sacs, Max fell deep into thought, and the moment would arrive when he realized he had no idea where they were.

“Okay, Calvin, let's go home.”

The dog would turn in the direction of home, not certain exactly how to get there, and eventually they would reach a street that Max recognized—because of the traffic sounds or the surface of the sidewalk or the familiar scent of the neighborhood bakery—and from which home could be found.

“We got home in a very unusual way, but we got here,” Max would announce merrily to Barbara when he and Calvin eventually burst through the door.

With Calvin at his side, there was no chance of Max remaining closed into himself and remote when he was out and about. Neighbors saw the deep-chocolate dog and began conversations. Shopkeepers recognized them as they made their daily rounds, and would introduce themselves and call out to Max and Calvin as they passed.

Calvin was serving as what the experts term a “social lubricant”—a charming dog escorting Max, attracting attention and conversation of the sort that Max, on his own, would not have had. With Calvin, he was constructing a broader, richer life that became wider with each passing month.

Every Tuesday the two of them left home right after daybreak, headed for the bus stop, and traveled downtown to the Cleveland Library for the Blind. For the next several hours Max performed volunteer work, mostly quality control of books on tape. People in and around the library stopped to watch as the two of them passed, the trim man with the brisk pace and the handsome dog, focused, noble, always at the man's left side. After a while, those people approached, filled with questions:

“What does Calvin do while you're working?”

“I keep him on a long leash for his own safety, so if someone opens the door he cannot bolt out, but he can still wander around the room I'm in, and, if he gets tired of being next to me, he can go off in a corner and lie down if he wants to.”

“How do you know when it's time to take him out for a potty break?”

“I keep Calvin on the same schedule for meals and water that he had at the training school where I got him, and this ensures that his elimination breaks are needed at the same time every day and every night, and I make sure, no matter what, to get him outside at these times.”

“Does he ever get to play?”

“Yes, he does. All work and no play would make Calvin a very dull boy. He knows when the harness is on he is my guide, as he has been trained. But when we are at home and he knows it's time to relax, he can chase balls in the yard or snuggle with my wife on the couch.”

Max had discovered what he regarded as an astonishing level of ignorance about how guide dogs function with their people, and he relished every chance to inform others. He was always firm in explaining that Calvin was not a pet but a brilliantly trained working animal with significant responsibilities as part of a well-oiled duo operating in tandem.

“It is a partnership. I, lacking in sight, contribute the power of reason, and Calvin, lacking the power of reason, contributes the sense of sight.”

Calvin, an adventuresome sort, was fond of any outing, but he especially liked these Tuesdays downtown at the library. He had nosed out every hot-dog vendor in the vicinity, and at lunchtime he took Max directly to one of them—always getting his own little nub of meat for his trouble. Sometimes, if he was feeling particularly lucky or convincing, he tried to entice Max to visit a second vendor.

Max developed a greater willingness to speak about the Holocaust and about being blind, which resulted in a growing flurry of invitations from elementary schools, high schools, and colleges, Calvin always lying calmly a few feet away, seeming to enjoy the sound of Max's voice and the attention the man was getting. One group of fourth graders was so enthusiastic about the Max and Calvin Show, as they called it, that they organized a fund-raiser, collected $100, and donated it to a guide-dog school.

How much of this Max could have, and would have, agreed to had he not had Calvin to get him to his destinations and to be a warm presence against his darkness is impossible to know. But things were very different now than they had been in the pre-Calvin days. Max, in his seventies, was increasingly being seen as a teacher, developing a patient style and an ease with talking about some of the awful moments of his past that he had previously preferred to leave undisturbed.

Max and Calvin became regulars at a monthly program called Face to Face, in which busloads of Cleveland-area high school students were transported to a synagogue for lectures about the Holocaust. He received and accepted an invitation from a group of Holocaust survivors in New York to speak at a commemoration of the fiftieth anniversary of the liberation.

One morning, after Calvin had been with him for several years, Max was having a bagel at one of his regular spots, the dog, as always, curled at his feet. When the proprietor stopped by the table, talk shifted to the local elections.

“You should consider running for the Lyndhurst council, Max,” the man said. “You're retired, you have the time, and you would do the job as well or better than others.”

“Who will vote for me?” Max said with a laugh. “I am not well known in the city.”

“You must be kidding!” the man responded. “You walk with your Calvin all over the city. People may not know you by name, but they all know who you are. Print campaign literature with pictures of you and Calvin, and people will say, ‘Look, here's the man with the guide dog. Let's vote for him.' They'll probably vote for Calvin, but you'll still win.”

Max didn't throw his hat into that particular ring. He did, however, become something of an activist. From 1998 until 2001, he served on the board of Services for Independent Living, an advocacy group aiming for total acceptance of and adherence to the Americans with Disabilities Act, which had passed in 1990 but was not uniformly or universally applied.

His volunteer work with the library grew, too. One Tuesday morning in August 1997, as he and Calvin headed for the sorting room, library director Barbara Mates intercepted them.

“There are blind children who need more practice reading and writing in Braille,” she said. “The teachers don't have the time, and most of their families don't know Braille. Do you think we could organize a group of volunteers to help the kids?”

“Yes, of course,” Max said, wholly unsure whether, in fact, such a group could be organized.

There were many obstacles, most of them unanticipated, but eight months later, Braille Read-Together was launched, with volunteers and willing youngsters meeting every Saturday. Max worked one-on-one with a girl who was blind and had other disabilities.

“By fifth grade, six years after she and I had started working together, that little girl read Braille faster than I did,” Max proudly told his friends years later. “It is hard work, the tutoring, but it is my greatest pleasure.”

At about the same time, the library installed its first “talking” computer, equipped with software called Screen Reader, which translates text into speech. Mrs. Mates suggested Max be the first student/user, even though Max had never before indicated or demonstrated any particular interest in, or facility with, technology.

William Reed, a librarian and computer expert, and, as Max later described him, “a man of much patience,” taught Max to send and receive e-mail, use word-processing programs, and access the Internet. When the bugs had been worked out and the equipment made available to library patrons, users sometimes complained that learning it was too hard for a blind person. Reed always responded: “If Max was able to do it at the age of seventy-nine, anyone can.”

Calvin and Max took on all of these new challenges together, a team, as close as any. People from miles around knew them. Newspaper stories were written about them. They learned from each other and taught each other, Calvin regularly surprising Max with his amazing good sense.

The two were out together on a summer afternoon when a quick-forming storm blew in with a blast of cold wind and an instant downpour. Max quickly reversed direction with Calvin, heading for the bus-stop shelter a block away, figuring they would wait out the rain there. Oddly, when they reached it and Max instructed Calvin to enter, the dog disregarded the command. It was so uncharacteristic that Max decided to see what his dog was up to.

Calvin took a sharp turn into the driveway a few steps away, and Max, knowing precisely where they were, suspected that Calvin had felt the bus shelter wasn't nearly as good a solution as the Jewish Community Center that they had visited several times in the past. Indeed, in less than a minute, Calvin and Max were standing in the lobby of the JCC, out of the rain and wind, much better protected, Max frequently told people, than they would have been if the two of them had done things Max's way.

Max by now had decided this was an animal unequaled. The trainers at the school had regarded Calvin as intelligent, though not necessarily, among his peers, exceptionally so. Max found him brilliant. Calvin's food obsession never really abated; Max regarded it as an endearing quirk. Calvin could entice the grandkids into turning a nice, quiet afternoon into a cacophony of shrieking, laughing, and dog noises; Max found this delightful. Max liked everything about this animal: his eagerness, his streak of silliness, even his big, deep bark, which sounded threatening to most people, as it had to Max in their early days, but now seemed to Max a joyful, boisterous song.