The flight here was almost 5 hours. As is my custom, I asked the person beside me – an extraordinarily friendly young woman from Japan – if I could follow her to baggage claim. I reread my email from GDB Admissions, though, about halfway between Cincinnati and San Francisco, and realized that it said someone would be meeting me. Now that’s service! Still, I began heading out of the gate area with Yuki when, sure enough, a pleasant man introduced himself as my transportation from the school.
I was the first of four flights he was meeting, so it was well over two hours later when we loaded the GDB bus with students and luggage and headed for the school.
There are six of us at present, two who have received dogs in the past and are returning, and four who are tasting the adventure for the first time. Five women and one man (a ratio that has been the case in my last few classes here, so that one woman asked, “Do more women lose their sight than men?”) Personally, I think it’s mere coincidence. Three more women, all returning students, will join us next Sunday.
The settling in process was filled with various minutia – a tour of the dorm, a meeting to introduce ourselves to one another, individual meetings with the nurse. Because I wear hearing aids and the day room (the large room where we gather as a group to receive information) is acoustically difficult, I plopped myself in the middle of the floor during introductions, the better to hear my fellow classmates tell about themselves.
Only six people, but we span the continent – from California to Nova Scotia, and a few mid westerners sprinkled in for flavor.
My primary goal by 9:00 p.m. was to get a good night’s sleep. I did.
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