An explanation of why I’m rooting for Seattle in the Super Bowl. (Note: a version of this post I wrote was originally published on the Easter Seals blog). 

Derrick Coleman gets ready for a game.

If you like that Duracell ad featuring Seattle Seahawk running back Derrick Coleman, the NFL’s first legally deaf offensive player, you’ll absolutely love Derrick Coleman: The Sound of Silence in the NFL, a video the NFL produced about him.

The NFL film is longer than the commercial, and it says a lot about how people with disabilities often need to go the extra mile to prove themselves before getting hired. Coleman was not drafted in 2012 even though he rushed for 1,700 yards and 19 touchdowns during his college career at UCLA. He thought he had the potential to go pro, so he found ways to convince coaches, at all levels of his career, that he had the skills to communicate with his team and get the job done.

The Vikings signed Coleman as a free agent after college, but he was waived in training camp. The Seahawks signed him as a free agent in December 2012. He played backup until veteran Michael Robinson became ill and was cut from the team. That’s when Derrick got his big chance to prove himself as a starting player.

The NFL video does a great job showing how Coleman used resourcefulness to solve problems related to his deafness. It opens with a shot of his mother tearing up her pantyhose: she and Derrick figured out that wrapping it around his hearing aids cuts the feedback he’d been getting under the football helmet. The video demonstrates how Coleman educated his teammates about his disability. He can lip-read, so he taught the quarterback to always turn around and look directly his way when giving audibles. The quarterback has to take his mouth guard out from time to time, too, so Coleman can see his lips.

The Seahawks coach recognized the extra effort that Derrick always put in. “His work ethic is outstanding,” the coach says. “We just had to put him on the field to see if he could put it all together.” Obviously, he could. Put it all together, I mean. So well, in fact, that he helped the Seahawks make it to today’s Super Bowl.

The NFL film ends with a quote from his mother. Earlier in the film she talks about knocking on doors to set people straight after she’d witnessed kids bullying her son. After that she encouraged Derrick to play football, thinking it might help him feel he “belonged.” She said she never dreamed he’d go past Pop Warner, a nonprofit organization that offers youth football leagues. When Derrick told her he wanted to play in the NFL, she warned him it wouldn’t be easy. “Oh, Mama,” he shrugged in response. “When has it ever been easy?”

Must be Video Week here at the Safe & Sound blog — Monday’s post featured a YouTube of me jamming on the piano with our talented friend Keith Pickerel, and now here’s a guest post about a short video a graduate student at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism filmed a few weeks ago.

by Eliza Larson

I’m pursuing a career in broadcast journalism, but I’m the first to admit: I am quite the novice in the world of video techniques.

Today’s guest blogger, Eliza Larson.

My professors are helping me learn more about putting together videos, but believe me when I say there is plenty of room for improvement. We were given an assignment to do a minute and a half long profile piece on an individual in the Chicago area. There are a lot of interesting people in Chicago, but getting someone to sit down and talk with you on camera is a real challenge.

I was taking the L home after a day of classes about a week and a half ago. Usually I doze off and listen to music or read a book, but this day I decided to tune into the world around me. I know, crazy, right? Sure glad I did, because I spotted a man on the opposite track standing with a dog. I wouldn’t think twice about this, but this guy was different. His dog was a Seeing Eye dog. The man was blind.

I thought to myself, how cool is that? Even though the man had a disability, he still was able to use public transportation just like everybody else. So I got to thinking, why not profile someone who is blind and lives in the city? Not to focus on the disability, but to highlight how a person doesn’t have to let a disability define them.

I did a little research and stumbled across this blog. I was inspired. I decided to try to reach out to Beth, and to my great surprise, she got back to me and agreed to an interview! The class assignment came with instructions to get three different shots in the video:

• the interview subject in the main frame (the video had to start with this shot)
• a two-shot (where you and the interview subject are in the same frame)
• a reverse shot (where you are in the frame but the subject’s head is just barely in the shot)

When I sat down with Beth and her very friendly dog, Whitney, I almost forgot about my assignment. Beth and I had a great conversation about living in the city without sight and what it was like emotionally to lose your sight. We spent almost 45 minutes on the interview itself. I wish I could have shown the whole interview in my video piece, but, alas, I only had a minute and a half. I had a lot of logging to do later on with the many great sound bites I gathered. Totally worth it.

Another part of the assignment was to get an interview with a secondary source, someone who could attest to the impact this person has made on his or her community. I read through some recent posts on Beth’s blog and thought I would try to reach out to one of the teachers of a school Beth and Whitney visited this month. A teacher at the Joseph Sears Elementary School in Winnetka agreed to be interviewed on camera, and what that teacher said really hit the nail on the head. “Her big message was just because you have a disability or some type of impairment, it doesn’t have to stop you from doing the fun things, it doesn’t have to stop you from doing routine type things,” she said. “Like she’s still able to get dressed in the morning, they were curious about how she gets dressed.”

Crushed it! My professor seemed to like it, and now you can look and listen to the video here and judge for yourself. I did my best, and I’m hoping I’ll be able to revisit this subject later on and really flesh out the piece.

Our flight from O’Hare to Washington, DC was cancelled Friday afternoon, but after re-booking and enduring Two additional flight delays, we finally arrived in DC at midnight.

Nine hours in an airport provides a couple with a lot of time to come up with great ideas about housekeeping, budgets, writing, Academy award nominees, work, Facebook, Hackney’s, Flo, the upcoming baseball season, the 2016 Presidential election, books, dog names, groceries, Fresh Air interviews, jazz music, bartenders, aquariums, business ideas, and…blogs!

And so, here’s the thing: Mike enjoys writing guest blog posts, and we get oodles of positive comments on my Safe & Sound blog when we publish his posts, so while sitting at Gate B19 with Seeing Eye dog Whitney lying patiently at our feet, we got to thinking, hey, why not have Mike Knezovich write a post once a week, and the decision was made. Starting February 3, 2014, readers can look forward to our Mondays with Mike segment every week on the Safe & Sound blog.

Before the feast: That’s Michael and Susie Bowers, Pick, and moi. Hank’s in the kitchen….

As for the weekend trip to visit our dear friends Pick an Hank in Washington, DC, the wait at O’Hare Friday was well worth it. Visits with Pick and Hank are always a joy, and the highlight of this one was dinner at their condo with mutual friends Mike and Susie Bowers. Hank prepared a fresh salad with homemade dressing, followed by scrumptious filet mignon with roasted brussel sprouts and beautiful russet baked potatoes. And then? Cheesecake for dessert. Pick provided musical entertainment, and if you link here you can hear me joining him for a blues number on the piano. It was as cold in DC as it was in Chicago over the weekend, but it’s amazing how much being with friends, and especially, playing music together, can warm the heart.

Just got word that my friend Lindy Bergman died. Lindy was a well-known art collector who found a way to continue living and loving her life after losing her sight. She was very smart and extremely charming, but you know what I liked best about Lindy? Her surprisingly wicked sense of humor. The frigid weather, combined with a bad cold I picked up a few days ago, kept me away from the memorial service today, but in her honor I’m reblogging a post I published about Lindy here back in 2012. You sure are gonna be missed, Lindy.

My friend Lindy Bergman was an art collector. Then macular degeneration set in.

When the disease became so severe that Lindy could no longer see the surrealist works on her apartment walls, she donated the collection to the Art Institute of Chicago. From a New York Times review of the Art Institute’s new modern wing:

The unsinkable Lindy Bergman

…and a wonderful little tropical fantasy by Leonora Carrington. This last work is part of the museum’s extraordinary Bergman Collection of mostly Surrealist art, which forms a kind of cabinet of curiosities at the heart of the third-floor galleries.

The Bergman trove includes a phalanx of 30 boxes by Joseph Cornell, an American. That collection contains the only artists on this floor who developed outside Europe, primarily Arshile Gorky, Matta and Wifredo Lam. (The exception is the Parisian expatriate Man Ray, who is in the Bergman collection and elsewhere in these galleries.)

After donating her collection, Lindy took to writing. Out of Sight, Not Out of Mind chronicles Lindy’s journey with macular degeneration and offers suggestions on how to keep your head above water when vision loss is trying to pull you under. Lindy is the perfect role model. In her 90s now, she swims a quarter mile each day, works out with her trainer, serves as a board member for a number of organizations, and goes to concerts and lectures. She is particularly enthusiastic about the audio cassette that comes along with her book — it features recordings of classical music as well as Lindy’s children and grandchildren. I recognized the voices of a few of the experts on the cassette — they are the same caring University of Chicago doctors that did my eye surgeries back in the 1980s. “I didn’t want it to just be my old voice droning on and on. Who’d want to listen to that?” she says with a self-deprecating laugh.”I wanted the book to be uplifting, not depressing!”

My friend Bonita has known Lindy a long time and was wise enough to introduce us when Mike and I moved to Chicago. On our first lunch date, I showed Lindy how to fix her talking watch so it’d quit announcing the time out loud every hour on the hour. She was so appreciative for what I saw as a small gesture. We’ve been friends ever since.

The stories Lindy tells me about tracking down art with her late husband Ed sound like Hemingway novels. “Ed always was a collector of something or other,” Lindy says with a shrug, describing a sun porch full of aquariums when Ed was collecting tropical fish, or his enormous shell collection.

“Not just a few shells. We had a lot of them. So he really was always a collector, and I just went along with it.” They’d already been married about 10 years when she and Ed decided to take a course on the Great Books at University of Chicago. A teacher there recommended a book by the Museum of Modern Art called Masters in Modern Art. “We had a lot of books to read for class, but every night we would start reading about art. That’s how it all began. We really educated ourselves.” By the late 1950s, the Bergmans were established as Surrealist collectors. They met Wifredo Lam on a visit to Cuba in the mid-50s, and the painter met them again in Paris in 1959 to show them around. Aside from that Salvador Dali poster with the melting clocks we hung in our college dorm rooms, I don’t know a whole lot about surrealism. Lindy met a couple artists in Paris whose names I actually do recognize, though: Man Ray and Max Ernst. She and Ed met Dali on another trip to Europe.

Time flies when I’m with Lindy. She loves hearing stories about my travels with my Seeing Eye dogs, and delights when Hanni — and now, Harper — sneak away from me under the table to lie on her feet. “It keeps me warm!” she laughs. The Chicago Lighthouse for the Blind is honoring Lindy Bergman at a gala at The Four Seasons tonight, and Bonita is generously sponsoring me to attend. A description of Lindy from the invitation reads like this:

Lindy has been living with macular degeneration for nearly fifteen years and has become an exemplary benefactor of The Chicago Lighthouse. In 2009, she was among those who played a critical role in helping The Lighthouse realize its goal of a new building addition. Most recently, she has helped establish the Bergman Institute for Psychological Support, where our professional rehabilitation staff counsel people who are blind or are losing their sight. Finally, she has partnered with our professional rehabilitation staff on a second “Lighthouse” edition of her book on macular degeneration, Out of Sight, Not Out of Mind.

With all of Lindy’s accomplishments, the one area where she lacks confidence is … public speaking. At our last dinner together, and in subsequent phone calls, I’ve been coaching her for the short talk she’s been asked to give at tonight’s gala. I know she’s gonna wow them. She sure has wowed me!

Which is which?

The Kenilworth kindergartners squealed with delight when Whitney led me into their school wearing snow boots. “That‘s our special guest Mrs. Fink,” their teacher announced. “And that’s Hanni, the dog from the book, too!”

We’d arrived late (our commuter train had been delayed in Chicago due to weather) and our opening assembly had to be cut back to 15 minutes. After that, Whit and I gave separate fifteen-minute sessions for all the kindergarten and first grade classes at Joseph Sears Elementary School.

Fifteen minutes was not enough time to explain that Hanni, the star of Hanni and Beth: Safe & Sound had retired, that this was a new dog, I’d had to decide when it was time for Hanni to retire, I could have kept Hanni as a pet or brought her back to the Seeing eye but I decided to find friends to adopt her, that she’s doing fine and is living an enviable retirement in Urbana, that I had another dog after that, his name was Harper, he retired, and now, this new dog is Whitney, and she’s a ball of energy.

And so, I did what I had to do. I referred to the dog at my feet generically. She was “my Seeing Eye dog.” Ick snay on it-whey ee-nay. The questions during the classroom visits reflected what the kindergartners and first-graders are learning to do in school:

• How do you put on your shoes?
• How can you print your name if you can’t see the paper?
• How do you read those green signs that tell you what street it is?
• How do you get dressed?
• Can you tell time?
• Does your dog really know right from left?

I had to be honest with the little girl who asked that last question. I really wasn’t sure. “We say the word ‘left’ when we want our dogs to turn left,” I told her. I went on, then, explaining how Seeing Eye trainers teach us to point to the left and face our shoulders left, too, at the same time we give the “left” command. “So I don’t know if my Seeing Eye dog understands the word ‘left’ or she sees my body language… .” I could hear the kids starting to fidget. I was losing my audience. Gee whiz, Beth. Stop talking! Just show them how it works

In the real world, out on the street, a blind person memorizes or knows the route before leaving home. The pair gets themselves situated on the sidewalk and faces the direction they’ll start. The blind person commands “Forward!” and the dog guides them safely to the curb. When the dog stops, the person stops. That’s how a blind person using a guide dog knows they have arrived at an intersection.

If the person wants to turn right or left at that corner, the person commands the direction, simultaneously turning their upper body in that direction and pointing in that direction, too. The dog turns, and the blind companion follows the dog’s lead.

Back in the school classroom, I wake up the dog sleeping at my feet and lift the harness off her back. And then, uh-oh, it dawns on me. These kids all think this dog is Hanni.

Dog is my co-pilot. I offer a quick prayer. “Please, Whitney, go along with the ruse.” I point both shoulders and my right finger left and command, “Hanni, left!”

My dog heads left with more exuberance than usual. She’s on to the fake. I give her another command. “Hanni, outside!” She leads me to the door.

Dear Sears School kids who are reading this: I’m sorry I lied.

Dear Safe & Sound blog readers: any of you have a phone number for a dog psychiatrist that specializes in identity issues?