I realized that I needed to learn about the legislative and legal aspects of disability as much as I did about our feelings regarding wholeness, beauty and ugliness, about the state called normalcy, about liberating technologies and therapies, about the role of the disabled in history and literature.

And what could better inform and enlighten me than contact with people who help create access, who elicit change via care, support, teaching, and study as their life's work?

As it turned out, I have learned from them that, in spite of the American addiction to youthfulness, "normalcy," virility, activity, and physical beauty, diversity in all its forms provides not only fascination but strength. Diversity tends toward higher forms, uniformity toward dullness and extinction. What could make more sense than to value all that is diverse, unexpected, and exuberantly impure?

On a sunny day in early spring, Loie and I climb into one of the Seeing Eye's vans for the ten-minute drive from the elegant spread of the guide dog school to the center of Morristown. The Seeing Eye's main residence, its offices and kennels, are situated in the rolling hills outside of town, but the real action happens in the streets of Morristown, a city of nineteen thousand, nestled in a hilly, horsey part of New Jersey.

Though I have trained here with three different dogs, the third of them, Tobias, now at my side, I have come this time to rediscover the place from a nonstudent point of view, and, most particularly, to talk at length with Pete Lang, who has been with the Seeing Eye for thirty-five years, the last ten as training manager.

The town, as always, is pulsating with activity, the traffic heavy, the nearly half-million residents of surrounding Morris County driving in to work. Upscale clothing, coffee and chocolate franchises have moved into vacated mom-and-pop businesses. Several fourteen-story buildings have risen far above the rest and contribute noticeably to the commotion of downtown. The tree-shaded green, rich with history, lies in the center of the city, girdled by churches.

Everywhere you look, you see guide dogs, chugging along at breakneck pace or moving slowly, carefully, dogs being put to one distraction test or another, by a pizza slice left on a sidewalk, by a squirrel, pigeon or cat, or by an unruly barking pet tied to a parking meter outside a coffee shop. There are dogs weaving their way through webs of scaffolding or police barricades, past spewing diesels parked across sidewalks, dogs picking their way around planters and trees, under flapping flags and low-hung branches, through puddles, ice and snowbanks, in hot weather and cold, from early morning till dusk.

And clutching the harness strapped around each dog is the hand of a trainer, or the hand of a blind person learning how to do it for the first time or brushing up and bonding for the second or third. At every corner, nook and cranny of this bustling city, teams are pushing their way through real-life situations. They labor in traffic, on city buses, trains headed to New York, inside the labyrinthine corridors of the county courthouse, in malls, chugging through racks of suits and dresses inside Epstein's Department Store, one of the few remaining family businesses struggling to stay alive.

Everywhere you go in this town, you can hear a chorus of "atta boy" and "atta girl" as shepherds and Labs and goldens stop at every curb, then step cautiously into the streets where they are tested by distracted drivers making a right on a red or by choreographed, near-disastrous events imposed upon them by the Seeing Eye's own drivers.

Pete Lang inches the huge Dodge van into a large garage attached to an unadorned, turn-of-the-century boardinghouse on Mt. Kemble Avenue, a central city location owned by the Seeing Eye and used as a drop-off point for students and trainers. Eight vans are already parked, each with as many as seven dogs waiting eagerly to be harnessed by a student or trainer for a downtown trip.

Several trainers are putting their dogs through the deliberate, careful pace of obedience exercises. Dogs are asked to come, then sit, then fetch a leather glove or a key chain. A dog barks from inside one of the vans and Pete hushes him. Lee, who was my instructor with my second dog, Topper, is leading a pup down the metal stairs. "We built that staircase without risers to be sure that our dogs would not be afraid of open staircases," Pete says.

We leave Tobias hitched to the wall and, unimpeded by alpha-dog conflicts, we observe Pete in the streets of Morristown as he retrains Connor, a five-year-old yellow Lab. "I'm working Connor to get him ready for an elderly gentleman with lots of new health problems," Pete says. Connor's been out of commission for nearly a month and needs this daily work while his blind handler recuperates. Connor is careful and Pete slows him down even more. "I don't get to do this as much as I'd like," Pete shouts back over his shoulder. "It's a young man's job. I told my wife Jane the other day that I'd give up being training manager in a heartbeat if I could get back to this. Being out in the street training dogs is the work I love.

"A couple of years ago the Seeing Eye celebrated its seventieth anniversary," Pete tells us as we take a break inside a coffee shop, Connor now relaxing under the table. "It's sort of amazing for me to realize that I've been there for half its existence."

Pete knew early on what he wanted to do. There was pressure from his family to find a calling that would make him as financially secure as his accountant father, who provided handsomely. Not rebellious by nature, Pete studied business administration in college, hating every moment. The certainty of a sedentary business life went against his still largely undefined longing for a deeper meaning, not to speak of the outdoors. He knew that there was something spiritual out there, something beyond helping one's self, but he didn't yet know what that something was.

"A decisive moment came in a class in which the professor asked which of us was concerned about the problem of world hunger. To my amazement, mine was the only hand that shot up in the air. I was disgusted and began looking for books in the college library which had nothing to do with business administration.

Of all things, I found Morris Frank's The First Lady of the Seeing Eye. It grabbed me in a way that nothing had until then," he says. "The fact that dogs could be trained to lead blind people made me gasp for breath. Just then, I happened to see a blind man working a German shepherd in the streets of Cincinnati. And, Andy, I couldn't stop gaping at the man. I was moved to tears and I wrote a letter to the Seeing Eye, curious to learn more about the process. By return mail, they invited me to come have a look. Two months before my graduation, I went east for the first time in my life. I arrived in Newark the day before my Seeing Eye appointment. I was terrified of the city, found a Y, locked myself in, wishing the night would end quickly, and the next day I took the bus to Morristown."

We now follow Pete into the town green where he tests his charge for squirrel distractions. Connor seems admirably uninterested. Pete points out one of the historic buildings ahead of us. "I remember when they had a fire at this beautiful old church," he says. "It was gutted and took a long time to rebuild but it was good training for our dogs, who for months and months had to work their way through the construction site." For Pete, the real world of objects at rest or in motion must be nothing more than a testing ground for dogs.

Back in the Seeing Eye's town garage, Pete introduces us to Christian, a tall young man who had just been accepted as a new apprentice. "This fellow really moves me," Pete tells us. "He's the same age I was when I started and he's doing it for the same reasons." Christian is a skier who came to the Seeing Eye to try to do something meaningful with his life. "I need to do work for others," Christian says, "not just for myself. I feel ready for that. And here I can do it without giving up the outdoors."

Copyright © 2002 by Andrew Potok. Excerpted by permission of Bantam, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

Tags: Personal Growth, Disabilities