Kenko and The Christmas Wreaths

by Paul Gabias

From the Editor: Dr. Paul Gabias is an Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of British Columbia (UBC). His areas of specialization at the University are vision and touch, particularly picture perception. Paul considers his blindness from birth as a minor characteristic. It’s all a matter of perspective, he says. He is thrilled to work with kindred spirits in the National Federation of the Blind.

Kenko is the seventh guide dog that Paul has trained himself. She is a golden retriever. He has trained three guide dogs for other people. Two of them had never traveled with guide dogs before. He learned to train guide dogs from his blind professor of psychology, Dr. Robert Lambert. Bob learned from his English friend Bill, who was also blind.

For many years in the 1990s, Paul was the president of the National Association of Guide Dog Users and the editor of Harness Up. In addition to his other work, Paul is the CEO of his company The Gabias Wellness Network. His business has reached the level of Platinum Independent Wellness Consultant with the Nikken Corporation. He finds, trains, and develops people who want to grow businesses with The Gabias Wellness Network and Nikken. He says that at seventy years old, he feels better than ever, and I’m delighted he felt energetic enough to take the trip he describes and then to write us an article with a bit of holiday spirit:

How do blind people get to places they’ve never been before? The same as sighted people do! We do research as to how to get there. It’s no more complicated than that! So how does Kenko come into it? That’s what this story is about.

We live in Kelowna, British Columbia, Canada. My wife Mary Ellen is also blind. We have raised four sighted children who are now adults, and our daughter Joanne has made several important contributions that have found their way into this magazine.

Our Costco moved about six months ago. We used to go to Costco all the time, but since the beginning of 2020, we discovered Instacart through our daughter. Now, when we order from Costco using our cell phone, Instacart does the shopping for us and delivers the order to our door. This is so convenient! There is no needing help in the store any more and no need to call and wait for a taxi to get us home. Everything is done for us, provided that we can make the programming on the cell phone work. We can also look around through the aisles of the store to see what’s new. The phone robot never gets tired of listing the merchandise in each aisle. For a blind person, it’s a great way to shop, and sighted people like it too, otherwise the service wouldn’t exist. We use Apple phones and they speak to us, through something they call Voice Over. If you know how to use the speech aspects of the Apple cell phones, they will usually tell you what is on the screen, and you can interact with it.

Christmas wreaths didn’t seem to be on the Instacart menu. When we called Costco, they said that they had 157 wreaths in stock. Knowing Costco, that meant that I had to get there relatively quickly, even though we were still in early November. At Costco, items move fast, and you can never be sure if they’ll have more in stock. So I decided to go to the new Costco myself. On our home, we have double front doors adjacent to each other, so I wanted two wreaths, one on each door.

The official address for the new Costco is: 2125 Baron Road. I must have been there once before, because when I checked the address on my Blind Square App, it said that Costco is at 1830 Leckie Road. I must have entered that address in the App when I was at the front door. I must have taken a taxi there. I decided that I would trust the Blind Square address and not the Costco official address.

Blind Square is a wonderful App. There are others, but I use this one. The App can literally tell you what’s around you like street intersections and addresses and stores and restaurants around a location. In fact, you don’t even have to be at that location to get information about it. Blind Square can go there virtually if you want it to. You can literally look around different places, right from the comfort of your own home. I find it great for planning trips abroad. It’s like travelling from your armchair!

To find out how to get to where you want to go by bus, subway, or train, you can use Move It! It’s a public transportation App that works all around the world. It, too, can be set to operate virtually anywhere in the world. So again, you can explore public transportation from the comfort of your own home, right from your armchair.

When I entered 1830 Leckie Road in Move It, it said that the number eleven bus went to Springfield and Leckie. That’s convenient, because the number eleven bus stop is right in front of our house. Springfield is an East-West Street. Leckie is a North-South Street. I knew that the bus would be travelling west on Springfield. Because of the even numbered address of Costco, I also knew that Costco would be on the west side of Leckie. The trick is to know on which side of Springfield Costco would be. I can look at Google map driving or walking directions, and as we are travelling west on Springfield, if they say to turn right on Leckie, then the store is on the north side of Springfield. It turns out that that is exactly what the directions said.

The only question then was on what side of Leckie is the bus stop, the east side or the west side? Bus drivers typically don’t know how to answer that question. So you have to frame it in a way that they will hopefully understand. “Driver, when I get off the bus, is Leckie in front of the bus or behind the bus?”

“Get off at the front of the bus please,” the driver says. “It’s safer that way”, he says. He didn’t answer my question at all.

I try another way. “To get to Costco, do I have to cross Leckie or not?”

 “No, Costco is right in front of you when you get off the bus.”

People can be so sloppy with directions. I remember my father asking for directions when driving somewhere unfamiliar, and no two people gave the same directions. No wonder men don’t like asking for directions! The driver kind of answered my question, but not really. And also, right in front of me when I get off the bus is Springfield, not Leckie, since the bus is travelling along Springfield. The Costco address is on Leckie.

To solve this problem I used another form of technology with my cell phone. There is a service for blind people called Aira. I open the App and get somebody on the phone. Through the phone camera, the Aira agent can see our surroundings and go on Google Earth to also see where we are. When I call with my phone, the agent can tell where I am in my city. This is a service that blind people can pay for every month.

Because this is a new Costco, it doesn’t show up on Google Earth. Scanning with my phone, I show him the parking lot in front of me to see if there is some kind of pathway that I can expect Kenko to follow to get inside the store. He doesn’t see one, just lots of snow. He says that he can see a little path that people might have created, but he’s not sure.

I’m going to assume that the entrance to the parking lot is on Leckie, not Springfield. The Costco might be in front of me, but the path to get there may not be. I tell the agent that Kenko is pretty good at figuring out navigable paths, so let’s see what she does if I give her the “inside” command. She turns to the right, and starts to walk east on Springfield, not wanting to traverse the snow bank which is sure to be there. I don’t know exactly how far we are from Leckie, so I keep asking her to turn left when she can. She ignores all of the left turns that I give her, which tells me that she believes that there is no path into the parking lot on the left. In fact, she does not cut the corner turning left. She goes straight to the intersection, as I have taught her to do.

At the intersection I ask her to turn left, which she does. I continue my requests to turn left, and she ignores them all. We are now walking north on the west side of Leckie, and I don’t know how far the entrance to the parking lot is. I hear cars moving on my left side, which indicates that they are moving in the parking lot, but still Kenko does not turn in, which means that there is no path to do so. Just to be sure, I ask the Aira agent if she’s passed it, and he says no. Finally, about a thousand feet farther, she does turn in. “Good Girl!” I say.

She tries to walk west along the south bank of the parking lot, which is on our left. She wants to stay out of the middle of the parking lot if she can. After a while, maybe one hundred feet, there’s a car in the way, and the agent says that there’s a shopping cart in the way too. Sometimes these parking lot banks run out of sidewalk, and we are forced to walk in the parking lot. I feel that this is what Kenko wants to do, and I give her the “forward” command to step off the curb. She wouldn’t step off the curb without stopping before and waiting for the “forward” command. That’s to tell me that there is a curb there. She is also alert to whether I have checked the location of the curb with my left foot. If she feels that I haven’t checked, she will not obey the “forward” command. She is ever-conscious of what she thinks that I know and don’t know.

Now, it’s a huge parking lot, with moving and parked cars. I know that Kenko can handle this. We come up to a silent parked car, which I can sense with my ears, but we don’t make contact with it. Kenko stops and thinks. I’m telling her “inside.” She moves to the left and heads purposefully across the parking lot. I can tell that she knows what she’s doing, and I just go with her. A few minutes later, I hear and smell and feel the heat of the Costco entrance. We are there, with relative ease. I thank the Aira agent for being there. I tell him that he was there as a backup. He saw through the camera what Kenko was doing. So I said: “Wasn’t she a good girl?” He said that indeed she was. He didn’t say more! I got the impression that he might have been all choaked up. After all, how often do people get to see guide dogs perform like this? It’s one of the perks of his job. But I get to experience it every day! Lucky me!

An employee at Costco helped me find two beautiful wreaths. They’re about 2.5 feet in diameter, with lots of greenery and pine cones. We pushed the shopping cart through the store (they call them buggies here), and Kenko heeled on my left side. Leave it to Costco; they are double buggies, with room for two babies side by side, but only one side had a seat belt.

We took a taxi home, and I hung up the wreaths on the front doors as soon as I got home. There’s a kind of hook on each door that I use every year. The doors are made up of an oval frame filled in with glass. This way, people can see the wreaths from both the outside and the inside of the house. I can touch them each time I leave the house, if I want. I just like knowing they are there. They serve as a pleasant Christmas greeting for those who view the front of our home or enter into it. My father installed the Christmas wreath on our front door when I was growing up. The wreaths remind me of him too.

[Paul can be reached at: paulgabias.mynikken.com]