Trusting Calvin (21 page)

Even the US government is intrigued enough to want to know more about the unique aspects of service dogs' relationships with, and therefore perhaps heightened sensitivity and sense of obligation to, their handlers. In 2011, the US Department of Veterans Affairs launched a three-year clinical trial aiming to place service dogs with 350 veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder. The goal is to ascertain whether the beneficial impact on the veterans' mental health and quality of life is as dramatic as many are reporting, and, if so, why exactly it happens, and whether having such a dog reduces—as appears to be the case—the costs of health care and mental-health care.

Vietnam veteran Raymond Galmiche of Navarre, Florida, who has battled PTSD for decades, recently found some relief from the horrific flashbacks and spirit-shattering anxiety that had plagued him for so long he could hardly remember what it was like to do normal things like a normal man. His balm is a big, hardworking, ever-happy German shepherd named Dazzle, trained by Guardian Angels Medical Service Dogs of Williston, Florida, which is participating in the VA study.

Dazzle did for Raymond in a few months what a loving, supportive wife and years of therapy simply couldn't accomplish, he says. “I don't think any more about ‘running away' ”—his term for suicide.

When he begins to descend into one of his regular flashbacks of carnage and the stench of gunpowder and seared flesh, the German shepherd, sensing the shift, leaps to his feet and licks and nudges the man—his face, his hand, whatever he can reach—to pull him back to the present. When nightmares hit, Dazzle positions himself on Raymond's chest and wakes him, cutting off the spiral before it reaches the point where the man cannot haul himself back out. Even in the course of daily waking life, when Raymond becomes anxious in the way that all people do—when he's trapped in the maze of automated voices that passes for customer service these days, or when storm winds are so fierce that trees fall and power goes out—the big dog notices and moves in with what Raymond swears is a grin.

These actions are what the dog was trained to do—to detect infinitesimal changes in the man's expression, focus, posture, and breathing, to take steps to shift his attention, to block the spiral.

But Dazzle's presence helps in ways beyond the specific duties he was trained to perform, Raymond believes. Dazzle is “completely nonjudgmental.” He's never upset when PTSD disrupts schedules or activities, or interrupts sleep. Dazzle looks at Raymond, no matter what, as if he's the “most important person in the world.” All of this makes a huge difference to a man battling to make, and keep, his place in a postwar world.

He distances himself emotionally from loved ones and strangers less frequently; he ventures into public more; he goes to therapy sessions only a few times a year now instead of weekly, as he once did, just to put one resistant foot in front of the other.

His war guilt—“the things I had to do to defend myself and my comrades”—is diminishing, and he is learning to trust, to shed his anger. He wants desperately for every vet who suffers similarly to be able to make the same kind of progress he has made.

“Dazzle,” says the former soldier, “has my back. It's probably impossible for anyone who hasn't lived with PTSD to understand how important that is.”

“It's so powerful to see these people, who had viewed themselves as a shell of what they used to be, get their dogs and take on life again,” says Guardian Angels founder Carol Borden, who partnered Raymond with Dazzle and is training many of the PTSD assistance dogs that are part of the VA study.

With the increase in the types of assistance that these dogs are being trained to provide, the number of service teams in the United States has swelled to as many as 40,000. (Estimates vary widely because there is no central registry, and huge numbers of training facilities are cropping up, along with a number of self-trained service dogs joining the ranks.) As their numbers have grown, so too has the motivation to learn about the myriad ways these relationships evolve. Scores of research projects are in the works.

Still, some of what is regularly referred to as “the magic” may forever remain unexplained, even in the face of investigation. Service dogs have had an impact in ways that can probably never be deciphered.

Karen Shirk of 4 Paws for Ability trained a service dog several years ago for a child with epilepsy. During the many years the girl had the dog, trained to alert to seizures and interrupt the behaviors, she never again had another seizure. When the animal died of old age, the seizures resumed. “Nobody knows why,” Karen says.

Carol Borden, of Guardian Angels Medical Service Dogs, regularly speaks about a veteran who had multiple psychological issues and medical conditions, including hugely fluctuating extremes in body temperature that he couldn't control, and of which he had only a dim awareness. One winter night while he slept under piles of blankets, his body temperature shot up dangerously. Instead of running downstairs to alert the man's wife, as he was trained to do when the man fell into one of his many medical crises (overheating not among them), the German shepherd service dog jumped on the bed and pulled back the covers, something he seemed to have figured out on his own. The dog began barking only after he had taken the necessary and instant action to save the man's life.

The man's wife rushed in just as the dog was yanking off the last layer, her husband in urgent need of a cool bath to bring his temperature down.

Jennifer Arnold, who founded Canine Assistants of Milton, Georgia, and has placed more than a thousand specially trained dogs, tells of a young woman with ALS (Lou Gehrig's disease) who requested a service dog in the 1990s. She received one, even though the life expectancy for people with ALS is usually two to five years from diagnosis. That was sixteen years ago, and the woman now has her second service dog. “Dogs,” says Jennifer, “can have an extraordinary impact,” sometimes impossible to explain.

When Max Edelman, now experienced in the ways of service dogs, hears about or reads these kinds of stories, he's not surprised. His dogs have granted their own special dividends that, although not as bold and dramatic as some, have changed his life in small ways and large. Ever the pragmatist, he refuses to be drawn into fanciful talk about the magic of dogs and has no interest in getting to the bottom of every factor and every mechanism that came into play in his own case. He's grateful for what he has been given by Calvin and Boychick and Tobi, much of it unexpected, and content to regard it all as one more conundrum in a life filled with them.

His former instructor and now friend, Jan Abbott, is as careful with words as Max is, but she doesn't mind suggesting that all that has happened with Max, starting with Calvin, is something pretty close to a miracle.

Max dislikes labels, but he acknowledges that his progression from a closed-in, dog-fearing man to a social, in-demand narrator with a dog he cherishes always at his side is, at the very least, a marvel. He had a role in that progression, of course, but the dogs offered the ways and means and a good measure of leavening.

If that's the stuff of mystery and legend, so be it.

Ten

Ninety years he has been on this Earth, and Max Edelman in 2012 is still shoving through life with fierce determination. He continues to prize and guard his freedom even more than most, and lives on his own in the modest house that he and Barbara bought twenty years ago. He and Tobi.

The two of them head out early every morning for a brisk, companionable, hour-long walk around the neighborhood, no matter the weather, excepting ice or sleet, which traps them inside, unhappy, Max the more unhappy of the two.

Breakfast when they return is at the little kitchen table where Max has eaten thousands of meals, and every morning, without fail, the old man slides a ripped-off chunk of toast and a piece of banana to the dog at his feet, precisely the behavior experts at Guiding Eyes for the Blind had warned against because it can turn a service dog into a food hound who noses along restaurant tabletops in search of left-behinds. Tobi sometimes does this, though he never snatches anything, content apparently with the discovery process.

Rules are rules, Max says with a wry grin, but “a man shares his food with his friend.”

The two amble out the back door to the deck after the breakfast dishes are washed so Tobi can fetch balls in the huge, fenced-in yard. After he has proved his ferocity by threatening a sufficient number of squirrels and scooping up several low grounders, he shakes energetically, bounces up the deck stairs, and pads over to sit at Max's knee for his daily brushing.

“He's no good as a watchdog,” Max declares with the affectionate tone used by longtime friends who recognize and point out every shortcoming but in all truth don't care about the imperfections. “Won't bark to tell me someone is at the door. They must have had a dog that barks they could have given me.” He's rubbing Tobi's ears while complaining about this unfortunate deficiency, and the dog is looking straight into the man's face, tail wagging.

The two have been together for three years now, and they know each other as well as any two creatures can. There's rarely a moment they're apart, and Tobi has enthusiastically embraced everything Max enjoys most, seeming to relish all of it every bit as much as Max—visitors to the house; lunches and dinners out, Tobi curled into a tight circle under the table, motionlessly awaiting the tidbit he knows Max will eventually sneak to him; and long walks around the neighborhood. They still walk miles every day, striding purposefully through the streets, rarely following the same route twice, as that would be less interesting for Tobi, and, really, not so much fun for Max, either.

Max has an uncanny, almost mystical ability to remember the names of hundreds of streets, and their precise distance and orientation from one another, even though he has, of course, never seen them, or a map of them. No one can explain how he can visualize and recite the street grids of neighborhoods he's only walked along or heard about but never seen, but he can, and it can't be argued.

He's a man of routines partly because that's his makeup, and partly because he has quite a lot to do, and keeping organized ensures that everything gets done. As he makes his way around the house, preparing meals, tidying up, returning phone calls and e-mails, Tobi curls up in an out-of-the-way corner, awaiting any signal that he can be of use. National Public Radio provides all-day background noise. Max believes these radio chatterers can't hold a candle to the real newsmen of the past who understood news, had a commendable command of the English language, and were possessed of rich, memorable voices infused with authority and intelligence. Still, the thready, self-important voices of the NPR people filling up the house sound better than whatever racket the television might offer, he figures. He has almost no interest in TV, though he does turn it on every evening to listen to the news—more out of habit than the expectation of gaining any information of any consequence. “Again, not worth the bother,” he mutters when he shuts it off.

Max spends a good part of most days in the guest bedroom/office, working at his computer, which is outfitted with software that turns e-mails into spoken words, or absorbing yet another talking book. He belongs to a reading club—computer friends who discuss a range of books, some of them best-sellers, some not.

He's a discriminating reader but not a snob. Any tale well told with good pacing and good description, regardless of whether it's sold in the literature section of the bookstore, pleases him. He has found particular delight recently in
The Soloist,
the Stieg Larsson trilogy, and
In the Garden of Beasts,
which focuses on the travails of the US ambassador posted to Berlin during the early years of Hitler's reign. Tobi, during all of this reading and computer conversation, lies in one of his two favorite spots nearby, raising his head from his doze when Max shifts position.

Some days Max might have a morning speaking engagement, a doctor's appointment, or, as he does on every Tuesday, a commitment of several hours of volunteer work at the library. The tiny shift in the dressing routine and the pace with which Max moves alert the dog to the fact that this is an outing morning, and Tobi is instantly more watchful, awaiting the moment when Max pulls out the leather working harness and says, “Let's go, Tobi.” Dog and man perfectly match their pace to each other and maneuver out the door, down the driveway, and into the waiting car or cab, or they walk the few blocks to the bus stop.

“Tobi really enjoys bus rides,” Max offers. “The other dogs were fine with getting on the bus and going where we needed to go, but Tobi very much enjoys it. He sits next to me, very alert. He is always watching people get on and off the bus. I think he must like all the movement and different people. I don't know.”

Several times a month Max has lunch or dinner out with a friend or relative, and every Sunday afternoon, son Steve delivers the week's groceries, reads to his father any mail that has arrived, and takes care of financial matters. Then the two men and the black dog climb into Steve's car to make the short trip to his house for a family supper in the big comfortable kitchen. Tobi joins Steve's dog in the backyard to play, both disinterested in all the human conversation. But after a few minutes, Tobi makes it clear he is unhappy that Max is on the other side of the glass, without him, and he insists upon coming in, trotting through the door to take his place at Max's feet.

Max rarely misses a family event. An honored-elder presence at family gatherings, Tobi always at his side, he also joined Steve's and Rich's families for a two-week trip to Israel three years ago, a hideously hot and muggy trip that he nonetheless enjoyed. He keeps a framed picture from that vacation on the wall next to the front door, a photo he can't see, but which has been described often enough he almost thinks he can. He enjoys having it there, thinking about it being there, the family together in the Promised Land. Tobi didn't go on that trip, as the distance and horrid heat would have been too much, Max believed.

Max has become fairly accepting of the limitations and frustrations of old age, having decided it makes more sense and takes less energy to be philosophical than to rage against whatever it is that unhappy old people rail against on a given day. He broke a tooth a few months back while chewing nothing more threatening than a piece of nut bread, and that required two trips to the dentist and a crown.

“Things wear out, including teeth, I suppose,” he shrugs. “Such is life.”

He has some bad days, raging stomach upsets mostly, and most of the time, when it's not too bad, he simply muscles through, hopeful that time will solve the problem. Sometimes that works, sometimes it doesn't. In January 2012, he spent a few days in the hospital after several days of feeling weak and lethargic. His hemoglobin count, doctors discovered, had fallen alarmingly low.

“Don't worry, I'm not ready for the coffin yet,” he declared. The doctors did many tests. “I'm leaking somewhere, but they can't find out where.”

Max bounced back.

Arthritis keeps him in a fairly constant state of dull pain, principally in his hands, the result of all those war years of chopping wood, loading timbers, and digging trenches in frigid temperatures. In idle moments, especially when reliving tough memories, he rubs constantly at his left wrist, the one with the tattoo. That's not a subconscious gravitation, he insists when asked.

“It is worse in this left hand because it is the one I use to grasp the dog's harness.”

He seems somewhat more relaxed than perhaps he was in his earlier years, comfortable with his life and the patterns he has established, proud of what his sons—one a police chief, the other the chief operating officer of a large company—have accomplished.

“Both of my boys recognized I was not in a position to open any doors for them,” he says. “They had to do everything on their own, and they did.”

Ever phlegmatic, he doesn't effuse over their accomplishments, but he does slip into a softer, warmer tone as he speaks of them.

“They respect everything, both of them. Every belief, every person, every idea. That is what Barbara and I taught them. Respect everything. And that is how they are.”

Talk of his sons reminds him of something else, a not-pleasant memory, and his voice shifts to flat again, ribbed with pain. “One time, a friend of Steve's asked him what it is like to have a blind father. Steve answered pretty fast. ‘I don't think about it. He's the only father I know.' ”

It's still a raw place, this bank of memories of what his sons had to endure.Tobi detects the small shift in Max's voice as he recounts this unhappy episode, and instantly jumps to his feet, moving to the man's side, nosing around until Max cups his muzzle with one hand and rubs his head with the other. It's easy to see when a person knows how to comfortably pet a dog, and this man, who once did not, now does. They both seem to relax, the man and the dog, gaining mutual comfort from the nearness and the touch.

Max still doesn't sleep well. Insomnia may be the predictable bane of every person's elder years, but for Max it's far more dramatic than that. He wakes many nights now, just as in his earlier years, sweating and panting, heart hammering, wrenching himself from the obscenely vivid images of stacks of dead bodies in a long ditch; of a doomed man standing quietly on a tall platform, hands tied behind his back, lips moving in prayer as a noose is slipped over his head; of two blond guards coming toward him, putting the whole weight of their bodies into raising their whips and bringing them down again and again on his head; of big German shepherds, eager, prowling.

Some things change with age; some do not. It helps to have Tobi there during those nighttime horrors, he thinks—calm, not at all put out when Max's troubled wanderings interrupt the dog's sleep, too.

Max is no closer today than he was six decades ago to understanding why he edged close to death in the camps so many times and survived when so many died. He has been asked the question he cannot answer so often that it seems to annoy him a little, a riddle for the ages he would like very much to solve, but cannot.

“How did I manage to survive in a Nazi concentration camp after being blinded, at a time when thousands were dying every day? A simple answer might be ‘By the grace of God.' But who is naive enough to take that literally?”

There must be, he believes, a better explanation—but he doesn't know what it is.

Luck? He rejects that, too, attempting to initiate a semantics debate.

“What is ‘luck'? Is winning the lottery luck? Or walking away from a car accident without a scratch luck? I do not really know. We managed to elude the rifle barrels and the crematorium fires long enough. That is as much as I know.”

One explanation for his survival, advanced by a girl named Sarah, who sent him a thank-you note after he spoke to her ninth-grade class, seems as plausible to him these days as any. “There is no doubt in my mind you had a guardian angel,” she wrote.

He has grown fond of that explanation, thinks it has merit. How else could he have been so close to dying, more than once, six or seven times really, and yet lasted long enough to be liberated?

The pragmatist in him also credits his brothers; Erich, the German supervisor who risked his own life for a blind Jew; and the German eye doctor, Wesseli, who saved him from almost certain suicide and became a cherished friend; and Barbara, who “made life worth living.” Three of the most important, Germans.

Erich's actions are especially confounding when he thinks back, as he often does.

“Erich was fully aware of the consequences had the camp officers or guards found out that he was protecting a blind inmate, and a Jew at that. Both of us would have been hanged before the day was out. Erich took that chance. He also prevented me from taking the easy way out, giving up on life. ‘Hope is the only thing we have,' Erich told me. ‘Deliverance might come tomorrow or the day after tomorrow.' ”

Erich, Max learned from the man's family several weeks after their liberation, died the day after he and the three Edelman brothers hugged at the farmhouse at the end of the eight-day march away from Flossenbürg. A group of Ukrainian former prisoners launched a grudge attack and beat him to death.

Max struggles still with his long-held conviction, now confirmed by most historians, that the world was fully aware—and chose to ignore it—when the Nazis moved from bully behavior to mass murder. It's not inconceivable that such a thing could happen again today, in a different place with a different group of people, he says.

That concern has intensified in recent years as the rhetoric in this country and others has grown more acidic, more divisive. So many people have become so convinced of their own rightness that they're incapable of hearing others' perspectives. They increasingly seek out, online and through the media, only the ideas, opinions, and feelings that mirror their own. It all feels sickeningly familiar to Max, and the ache he gets in his stomach and in his heart is similar to what he felt as a teenager in Krasnik all those decades ago, when the rumors and fears began to build.