NJGPA Practice Test 2

Halfway Dog — a memoir by Ingrid Castellanos

¹The puppy arrived on a Tuesday in a plastic crate with a laminated card tied to the door. HAZEL, the card said. FEMALE. YELLOW LABRADOR. RETURN DATE: APPROXIMATELY 15 MONTHS. I was fourteen, and I remember thinking that "approximately" was a strange word to put on a living thing.

²My family had signed up to be puppy raisers for the Fairhaven Guide Dog School, a nonprofit that trains dogs to guide people who are blind or have low vision. The arrangement is simple to describe. The school breeds the puppies and, when they are about eight weeks old, places each one with a volunteer family. The family raises the dog for a year or more: house-training it, teaching it basic cues such as sit, down and wait, and above all introducing it to the world—buses, elevators, grocery stores, crowds, sirens, slippery floors, automatic doors. Then the dog returns to the school for months of formal training, and if it succeeds, it is matched with a person who will depend on it.

³What is not simple is the part where you give the dog back. Everyone asked me about it. Teachers asked; my friends asked; a woman in the cereal aisle at Lockwood's Market, seeing Hazel in her green "puppy in training" jacket, asked, "How will you ever let her go?" I had a cheerful answer ready: "She has an important job to do." I said it so many times that it stopped meaning anything, the way a word does when you repeat it to yourself in the mirror.

⁴For the first few months, though, I did not think much about giving her back, because I was too busy. Hazel had to go outside every two hours. She ate a sock, a pencil and most of a library book about ancient Rome. (We paid for the book.) Every outing was a lesson: Hazel learning to lie quietly under a restaurant table, Hazel learning that the hum of an escalator was nothing to fear, and me learning that a puppy in a jacket attracts strangers the way a dropped ice cream cone attracts ants. The school asked raisers to keep a log, and I filled three notebooks. Most entries looked like this one: Walked through hardware store. Startled at paint shaker. Recovered in 4 seconds. Good girl.

⁵Our raisers' group met every other Saturday with a supervisor named Lucille Gaines, who had trained guide dogs for thirty years. She could watch a puppy cross a parking lot and know, from the set of its ears, whether it was worried. Once, when I complained that Hazel still pulled on the leash, Lucille said something I copied into my log that night: "You're not raising a perfect dog. You're raising a confident one. The school can teach her to guide. It can't teach her to trust the world. That's your job."

⁶I did not fully understand that until the day we rode the city bus for the first time. Hazel was nine months old. The bus hissed and lurched, the floor vibrated, and a man two seats away was playing music loudly through his phone. Halfway through the ride I looked down and saw that Hazel had fallen asleep with her chin on my sneaker. Months of grocery stores and escalators and paint shakers had added up to this: a dog who could sleep on a bus. Someday, I realized, someone would need to get on a bus with her and trust that she would not panic. Every entry in my notebooks had been written for that person.

⁷Hazel went back to Fairhaven when she was sixteen months old. I will not pretend that day was easy. I walked her into the kennel building, unclipped her leash and handed it to a trainer, and Hazel trotted off without looking back, which Lucille later told me was the best sign of all. In the car, my mother passed me a box of tissues without saying a word.

⁸Not every puppy becomes a guide. Some dogs turn out to be too easily distracted, or too cautious, or simply better suited to another kind of life, and the school finds them other work or adoptive homes. For five months I checked my email every day. Then the message came: Hazel had passed her training. She had been matched with Bernadette Kwan, a music teacher who had lost her sight in her twenties, and we were invited to the graduation.

⁹At the ceremony, Bernadette held Hazel's harness handle and asked me to tell her everything—what Hazel had been like as a puppy, what she was afraid of, what she loved. I told her about the sock and the library book and the paint shaker. Then I told her about the bus. She laughed. "I take the bus to work every day," she said. "She's never once been nervous."

¹⁰People still ask me how I could let her go. I no longer give the cheerful answer. What I tell them now is that I never had her to keep. I had her to get ready. That was the job, and Hazel and I did it together.