Straight to the Heart
Wayne Roberts lives in an apartment on Venice Boulevard with his discus fish and his black Labrador retriever named Arrow. Roberts can talk at length without ever boring you about the curious ways baby discus fish feed, and the funny and fascinating ways discus fish establish their pecking order. He can also tell equally fascinating anecdotes about the reasons raising discus fish is a fine hobby for a quadriplegic, which Roberts is.
But the word hobby does not come up when Roberts discusses his relationship with Arrow. The words that do are work, love and conversation . I’m not sure why conversation is the right word to use, but I can give you a couple of examples.
One of Arrow’s problems is that he has trouble getting enough pettings. Arrow is an educated dog, and so for him, as for people, conversation is a form of intimate contact. Nonetheless, a dog does like to be petted, so it sometimes happens that Arrow comes up to Roberts and says, “Look here, Wayne, I love you and I love our little talks, but would you mind if I went over to Deena and had a little tickle-and-cuddle fix?” (Deena Frank is Roberts’ girlfriend. Arrow introduced them.)
On such occasions, Roberts, of course, replies, “Sure, just don’t forget to come back on duty.”
Another time one of the human helpers who comes to Roberts’ apartment twice a day to get him in and out of bed and fix dinner failed to show up. Roberts got out the phone numbers he calls in such situations, but the paper they were on slipped from his hand and, in the aggravating way of important pieces of paper, slid under the bed. This could have meant a helpless night in the wheelchair, but it didn’t. Though Arrow had not been trained to look for things under beds, when Roberts called Arrow and asked him to find the list and bring it to him, Arrow did.
The amount of work and money that goes into training a dog like Arrow is enormous, though not as enormous as the courage that goes into learning to handle a dog if you are disabled. These dogs aren’t gadgets; you have to earn the right to tell Arrow to do any of the several hundred services he can perform. Roberts said that when he first showed up at Canine Companions for Independence in Santa Rosa, after having gone through a lengthy application and screening procedure, he was totally unprepared for what he would have to do. “I had always had dogs, and liked them,” he said, “but I was full of misconceptions about how you talk to a dog. I thought you just had to be friendly, sort of make small talk. But a dog like Arrow doesn’t care for small talk, and he just ignores you if you try that with him. In order to talk to Arrow, you have to say what you mean and mean what you say. That’s hard if you aren’t used to it.”
People who succeed at Santa Rosa have been through a great deal, a kind of boot camp for novice dog handlers that entails training eight hours a day for several weeks. But the hardest part is that when at first you try phony flattery and small talk on Arrow and he ignores you, it hurts. It goes straight to the heart.
The good news is that all of the trouble is worth it, because what you learn from Arrow is the reason the English word courage has the French word coeur , or “heart,” hidden in it. Because when you do make the grade, and Arrow is willing to talk to you, that, too, goes straight to the heart--and stays there.
