Cosmo and Roselle

Daniel and Cosmo and Roselle

We had taken Cosmo to the clinic for a stiff knee. We were in the waiting room when one of Kelly's colleagues from the guide dog program walked in with a dog from work. "Oh, what are you doing here?," she asked brightly. We gave the thumbnail description of Cosmo's woes. "And what about you guys?" "Oh, Roselle needs to see the vet again." "Well okay then, good luck, see ya...." During this bland exchange Roselle lay down on the floor smiling up at me, an ordinary-looking yellow lab with regular, warm eyes and a normal pink nose. Roselle and her handler were soon ushered into an exam room; I figured, they're corporate clients, they get special treatment, not like us peons.... Then Kel mentioned, "Roselle's the WTC dog." Oh, I realized. This dog is getting special treatment because she's earned it. I don't know what he was doing there, but on the morning of September 11, 2001, a graduate of Guide Dogs for the Blind was on the 78th floor of WTC Tower One, accompanied, of course, by his guide dog. When a jet-powered, aluminum-clad Molotov cocktail 500 feet long slammed into the building at 400 miles an hour, they were stuck up there. Needless to say, if the Pentagon hadn't prepared for this catastrophe, neither had Roselle. Regardless, she got her human to a stairwell and led him down and out to safety. Along the way, smoke and particulates in the air got up into her sensitive snout. After they had made their escape, the man was hired by Guide Dogs as a public speaker, sharing his story with audiences around the country. Roselle, however, soon had to be relieved of her duties and was brought back to the school where she'd been trained. The stuff she'd inhaled had gotten to her - her lungs and nose started giving her trouble. These days, she was spending a lot of her time with the veterinarians. So I had been standing in a cheerful waiting room in the company of two dogs - one that I knew only too well from personal experience to be braver and stronger, possessed of a morality and rectitude far beyond my own; and the other, a stranger to me, unprepossessing, soft and yellow and friendly, an ordinary dog to the casual acquaintance, but one I now knew to have survived one of the most horrific incidents ever to be perpetrated by humankind against itself, to have led a blind man down 78 flights of smoky chaotic stairs surrounded by shrieks and suffering, loyal to her duty regardless of the terrible detriment to herself. While we people chatted, their four eyes had gazed up to me as if I had been a superior being; their two tails had wagged with the joy of sharing my presence. Well, they might be smart dogs and all, but I knew one thing for sure - that I had been, in their company, utterly outclassed.