August can be a sad time for us dogs and cats who have to watch our little humans head back to school. My friend Wizard is a lucky guy – he gets to go to college with his human, Andrea DeCrescenzo. Wizard is Andrea’s service dog. He protects her as she tools around campus in her motorized wheelchair. If she has trouble with a heavy door, she ties a soft rope around the handle and hands it over to Wizard, who tugs until it opens, then holds it there for her.
He can turn the knob too. Once, when she left him in her apartment to go to the laundry room, he opened the door to go find her. He’s even been to frat parties with her – what dog wouldn’t? But he mostly lies at her feet; he’s all business when he’s got his service dog vest on.
If she drops a pen or a calculator, he picks it up for her. And if she can’t reach a book on the shelf in the library, he jumps up in her lap to get to it.
Yes, I said in her lap. All 75 pounds of him, full fanny, hind feet and tail. The first time he did it was on their very first day together. There were six other people getting service dogs that day, and the breeder and trainer started things off by letting the dogs choose first. “She let them all out of their runs at the same time,” says Andrea. “All the other dogs went to somebody. But Wizard just ignored me and went off to the gardener and licked his foot. I thought, well, I guess that’s my dog.”
By the end of the day, the class had moved on to doing sit’s and stay’s, and giving their new buddies a treat. “Wizard would mostly just sit there and stare at me,” says Andrea.
Then came the command: “My lap.” That’s particularly useful for someone with mobility issues, because service dogs are often asked to deliver something important to their owner. Andrea wasn’t hopeful. But Wizard knew there was already something important in her lap – a fanny pack full of treats.
The second she said “my lap,” he jumped completely up in her lap, opened the fanny pack and devoured the treats – “about 80 of them,” Andrea estimates.
Their first week of college, there was a purse-snatching. Suddenly five security guards came running from around the corner. Wizard saw the guards and leapt into Andrea’s lap. “He had his front paws around my neck. He was scared,” says Andrea.
The two of them graduated from Flagler in 2012 and they’re now down at Nova Southeastern in Fort Lauderdale. Andrea’s getting a master’s degree in drama therapy. For her master’s thesis, she’s performing a play she wrote herself. Hopefully, Wizard won’t get stage fright.
Til next time,
Raven