Last May my friend Lynn LaPlante Allaway, the principal violist with the Chicago Jazz Philharmonic, came to our apartment to perform a private concert to help me heal from open-heart surgery. Whitney and I tried to thank Lynn for her music therapy by visiting her kids at St. Petronille School, and gee whiz, now I have to thank her again for this guest post about our time together that day. I’m blushing at the glowing account — and reminding myself that she’s a biased reporter. But I’m biased, too, and I’m happy to share Lynn’s post:

The craziest thing happened when I went to meet Beth and Whitney at the train platform here in Mayberry, err…Glen Ellyn. After big hugs all around, we were standing there deciding very important business — coffee first or straight to the school? — when I saw a tall gentlemen walking behind Beth, coming straight at her. I could only see his head, coming closer and closer and….what the hell, is he going to just crash right into Beth? Doesn’t he SEE her standing there with her damn GUIDE DOG? Are you kidding me? Annnd…he did. He just smacked right into her.

I was shocked, Beth was shocked and so was this gentleman, who was also blind and using a white cane instead of a guide dog. Are you kidding me, people? What are the odds of two blind people colliding on the totally empty Glen Ellyn train platform, midday on a Friday? We were the only three people standing there and I looked around to see if we were being punked.

And: they knew each other. Of course they did. They laughed about being part of a blind mafia, but I’m not so sure they were joking. This gentlemen had taken the train to Glen Ellyn to catch a bus to take him to the grocery store. (Note to self: I will never, ever complain again when I get home from Trader Joe’s and realize I forgot cat food and I have to go back and get it.)

We all had a good laugh, and that began a day of coincidences, connections, and little woo-woo moments that I just LOVE. The day felt magical, pure and simple. It was more than just me having the “day off” to play with my friend Beth all afternoon. It was one of those full-moon, all the stars are aligned, everything goes smoothly and beautifully kind of days.

Right–to that point: we got coffee, stopped at The Bookstore to see Beth’s friend Jenny Fischer (all these coincidences between Beth’s childhood friends who now happen to live here, then I moved here, our paths cross, see what I’m talking about?) and got to school.

These kids have been so excited about Beth and Whitney’s visit! Talking about it all week, reading her book, preparing questions ahead of time! And the teachers were so appreciative of Beth and Whitney being there. Honestly, we were feeling the love all freaking afternoon.

All three classrooms were as rapt as this one.

First class was my son Aidan’s class — all 60 5th graders gathered in the Art Room and sat there, so quiet, so still, so mesmerized. I spend a lot of time in my kids classrooms, volunteering, assisting, whatever. They are lovely children, but trust me when I tell you they do not sit this quietly and engaged for me when I am giving an Art in the Classroom presentation. But that’s Beth for you: always gotta one-up me and show me how it’s really done!

She talked to these students about what it feels like to be blind, about how she lost her sight, about how she does her daily tasks. Beth has this ability to talk *to* these kids rather than *at* them. She assumes they are intelligent, sensitive, thoughtful and can comprehend what she is describing. And she is right: the level was raised that day for those 5th graders.

She asked Aidan to join her in front and call on classmates who had questions. He was so cute and blushed a bit while he did that. I hope he doesn’t read this; he’ll kill me for saying that.

Beth let Whitney off her harness so all 60 kids could get in line and pet her — Whitney looooved this. She is one playful and cute dog, and the kids looooved this as much as Whit did. I heard all about it later from friends with kids in the class.

From there, we went downstairs to visit my daughter Sophie and the third graders. Beth told them that in some ways losing her sight was a relief. It meant the painful, difficult time in the hospital with all the tests and surgeries was over. She also talked about the job she’d had before losing her sight, and how she had considered her boss a friend. But that was before the Americans with Disabilities Act was a law. “I couldn’t see anymore,” she told the kids. “So my boss fired me.”

The most poignant question came during that presentation, when a student circled back after Beth was done talking and asked her if she was sad her “friend” hadn’t let her keep her job after she lost her sight. This was such a gorgeous moment because it showed, crystal clear, how these students were able to feel compassion and empathy for another person’s pain. They saw Beth as she is, her funny personality, her great storytelling, her ease and comfort in front of and surrounded by people. And they understood. They related to the story she told them about her life, they were able to imagine how they themselves would feel if they were in the same position. They understood that people who appear to be “different” from them are not different at all.

What an education Beth provided that afternoon! I loved watching the kids’ faces watching Beth and Whitney. Sophie also got to lord over her classmates and call on them for the Q&A section. My little budding Napoleon, drunk on her own power, as she decided who got to ask questions. Hilarious.

And finally, off to first grade. I’m with these kids A LOT and when we walked in, I couldn’t believe it. No one was squirming or wiggling. None of these kids were talking or doing gross things involving their fingers and noses. They were spellbound from the first moment. Beth changed her talk again for this age-group. She is really ridiculously good at this: three different talks for three different age groups, la de da, no biggie.

Whitney stretched out here in this classroom and took a little snooze. Our son, August, got up to call on kids. I’d explained ahead of time that he couldn’t just call on boys. “You HAVE to call on girls, too.” He apparently was so scared of catching cooties from calling on a girl. At one point, Beth had to ask, “August, are there any girls in your class?” Adorable.

Beth ended each presentation by showing the kids how Whitney can show Beth where the door in the classroom is located and lead her to it so she can get out. And with that, and lots of applause and thank-yous from the first-graders, we left. But for Beth and me, the fun was just beginning.

We shopped at Marcel’s, her high school friend Jill Foucré’s sublime cooking store in downtown Glen Ellyn, and then Jill and Jenny from The Bookstore (they are sisters, see above about connections and coincidences) and Beth and I met for happy hour at the sushi bar down the street. We talked about books, being working moms, family. We talked and talked and laughed and laughed. It was heavenly.

I took Whitney and Beth back to the train station, and after scanning the platform to make sure there were no more blind people waiting to ambush her (for real, I still can’t believe that happened?) I waited with them until their train to Chicago arrived and watched them get on board. That was a solid six hours of bliss. Come back, Beth!!

Here’s my husband Mike with a terrific guest post about how my Seeing Eye dogs look from his point of view.

by Mike Knezovich

Beth’s on her fourth Seeing Eye dog—and, in a very real way, so am I. Everyone easily grasps the difference a guide dog can make in its partner’s life. What they might not consider though, is the huge difference a guide dog can make to their partner’s partner’s life, too

After Beth lost her sight, life was a slog for both of us. She had to learn a lot of things, and many of them were only learnable the hard way. And I had to watch. It pushed me into something of a parental role—how much to protect? How much to let her (literally) take her hard knocks? Beth went to school to get orientation and mobility training—which taught her how to navigate with a cane. The instructors were great, the techniques are ingenious. But it’s hard as hell to learn. Like Braille.

And, as Beth will attest, she kinda’ sucked at the white-cane-mobility thing. So when she left to say, go to the mailbox, it was utter hell for me not to spring to my feet and say “I’ll go with you.” So, at first, I did spring to my feet. Or offer to drive her to wherever. Because the thought of her out there by herself with that cane just about killed me. But my being there with her all the time was not sustainable, from either of our points of view.

That’s Dora.

Enter Dora. She was easily the most classically beautiful of all Beth’s dogs. A sleek, athletic, jet-black Labrador, Dora could jump and reach toys I held wayyyy over my head. She could swim in heavy ocean surf. She lived until she was 17. But she didn’t much love her job. She led Beth around and kept them safe —but she was stubborn and balky at times. Beth and I have often wondered if it had to do with us as much as Dora. And some of it surely did.

The Seeing Eye trains the people every bit as much as they train the dogs—and dreary consistency is vital. Beth and I were probably taken a bit by the novelty of a new member of our family, and we surely weren’t as consistent with our dog-training habits as we are now. Still, Dora had a defiant streak that I think would have, well, defied us, whatever our behavior.

The one. The only. Hanni. (Applies to Beth, too.)

Then came Hanni of course, and I probably don’t need to say much about that, given that she has her own book. Except, as much as I still love her, even Hanni wasn’t perfect. (Pretty close, though!) Her most annoying trait: She hated rain. A freaking Lab-Golden mix behaved as if rain drops were hot, burning acid. She’d walk slowly, and edge too close to buildings to try to get cover, walking Beth into things in the process. She also didn’t much care for swimming. Who can figure?

Harper came next, and from the start, he seemed somewhat ill at ease. He had an incredibly fast gait, but we realized in retrospect that he’d been treating walks as something to get over with as quickly as possible. He was stressed by his enormous responsibility, and why not? Still, stressed and all, he did his job heroically and saved Beth from a catastrophic accident. His ensuing canine PTSD could have been heartbreaking—except that it landed him with two fantastic people and he lives a helluva good life now.

Harper living the good life in retirement, with his best buddy Beau.

Which brings us to my new favorite, Whitney. Whit came home with every annoying dog behavior Beth’s previous mates didn’t have. When she’s off harness she licks. She sniffs too much. She always wants to play. And she never gets enough attention. God I love her.

On harness, especially during bustling weekdays downtown, Whitney’s head is on a swivel, constantly looking out for her and Beth. She walks at a great pace but slows when she should—threading Beth around construction zones, slowing down for ice, creeping gently around WPs (wobbly people). Walking right up to the curb at each crossing and waiting for Beth to command straight, left or right. God I love her.

People sometimes tell us that they saw Whitney—or Beth’s other dogs—screwing up. In some cases, the people actually have it wrong. For example, they simply don’t know that the dog is supposed to go straight all the way until they get to the curb—and wait for Beth’s command to go left or right. This looks wrong, because it means overshooting the point where a sighted person would make a right or left. But it’s absolutely necessary. The person has to be the navigator, and the dog can’t take shortcuts.

In other cases, the dog really is screwing up—weaving to sniff another dog (and our neighborhood is full of them). Responding to the whistle or petting of well-meaning but clueless passersby. Bumping into pedestrians who are texting. Beth is forced to correct her partner in those cases, which is no fun but absolutely necessary.

Without question, the dogs have flaws. All of them. But as the old adage goes, “If you come across a talking horse, you don’t complain about its grammar.” Beth’s dogs have probably added years to my life by relieving me of worry. So if they sniff or veer or bark occasionally, I’m OK with it. And I’ve loved them all.

That’s Jenny with Hanni and me at The Bookstore in Glen Ellyn.

After a presentation I gave at The Bookstore, a Glen Ellyn reporter approached my longtime friend Jenny Fischer, who works there, and asked, “Was she funny like that when she could see?”

That wasn’t the first (or the last) time someone has said something along those lines. It’s tempting to look for an upside to disability. That hardship can make you tougher. That blindness can make you a better listener. More humble. Or, I guess, make you funny.

The perception that becoming disabled changes ones character is one I’ve always struggled with, and have always been skeptical about. And Monday, listening to the radio, I finally came to understand why. I happened to tune into NPR that day just in time to catch a Fresh Air interview with journalist James Tobin about his new book The Man He Became: How FDR Defied Polio to Win the Presidency. I loved the author’s response to a question about whether polio had made Roosevelt stronger and more determined as a president. “The question doesn’t make sense to me,” Tobin said. “People either have those capacities, or they don’t.”

He acknowledged that a crisis might reveal a person’s character in sharper relief, and that perhaps Roosevelt’s disability allowed him to see himself for the strong person he was, but still, the author remained adamant that Roosevelt was a strong and determined man long before he was stricken with polio. “It gave him a kind of confidence in his own strength,” he said, adding that perhaps that sort of confidence might only come when a person is tested.

Whatever courage, humility, attentiveness, or sense of humor I have, I owe not to blindness, but to my marvelous mother. Flo raised me — and my six older brothers and sisters — that way. .

I’ve written before about our father dying when I was three, and Flo using her strength and determination and courage to pass a high school equivalency test while still grieving, transform herself from housewife to full-time office clerk and work until her 70s to raise us on her own. Children learn a lot from watching their parents.

Flo is 97 years old now, and we’re still learning a lot from her. She’ll be heading to Chicago Thursday to share Thanksgiving dinner with my sister Bev, her husband Lon, our neighbor Brad, me and the magnificent chef, my husband Mike. I have a lot to be thankful for. Happy Thanksgiving!

My husband Mike was at the Greenbuild convention in Philadelphia last week. Left with so much time on my own, I started reading The Goldfinch, Donna Tartt’s new 771-page novel. I had a hard time putting it down, and I wasn’t the only one. In a New York Times book review, Michiko Kakutani says Donna Tartt’s new book “pulls together all her remarkable storytelling talents into a rapturous, symphonic whole and reminds the reader of the immersive, stay-up-all-night pleasures of reading.”

And that I did. Stay up all night to finish it, I mean.

Nothing holds my attention more than a story about grief and bereavement, and this book is full of that. and more. It starts when 13-year-old Theo Decker and his beloved mother find themselves inside the Metropolitan Museum of Art when a terrorist bomb explodes. Theo’s mother dies, and the story takes off to Las Vegas, Amsterdam and then back to Manhattan from there.

I always wait until I’m done reading a book before reading the reviews (don’t want to spoil the plot) and after staying up late Wednesday night to finish The Goldfinch,, I woke up and read the reviews Thursday morning. Brilliant, they said. Dickensian. With all the gushing, though, none of them remembered to compliment the clever ways Donna Tartt weaves the sense of smell into her writing. I mean, sure, her editor at Little, Brown & Company said that Goldfinch readers “never doubt for a second that you’re experiencing something real,” but he neglected to mention how using the sense of smell is one of the best ways to draw readers in. If The Goldfinch had been published before I gave my Smelling is Believing workshop at Northwestern University’s Summer Writers’ Conference last August, I could have used it as a textbook.

Writers often overuse similes when describing odors, aromas and fragrances, but saying something smells like lemon, like chocolate, like rotten eggs, whatever can sound tedious. In The Goldfinch, Donna Tartt’s main character Theo weaves aromas into his descriptions smoothly. Some examples:

• With his deadbeat Dad in a room in Las Vegas: “The air was overly chilled with a stale, refrigerated smell, sitting motionless for hours. The filament of smoke from his Viceroy floated to the ceiling like a thread of incense.”
• Waking up in a bedroom near the furniture restoration shop: “Lying very still under the eiderdown, I breathed the dark air of dried out potpourri, and burnt fireplace wood, and, very faint, the evergreen tang of turpentine, resin, and varnish.”
• Buying flowers to bring to a dinner party: “In the tiny, overheated shop, their fragrance hit me exactly the wrong way, and only at the cash register did I realize why. Their scent was the same sick wholesome sweetness of my mother’s memorial service,”
• A close-talker startles him with “a gin-crocked blast that almost knocked me over.”
• A young hip New York City restaurant: “The smells were overwhelming. Wine and garlic. Perfume and sweat. Sizzling platters of lemon grass chicken hurried out of the kitchen.”

Funny. Those examples all focus on the sense of smell, but don’t you just picture yourself in those scenes? Forgive me, I just can’t help myself here, I gotta say it: Donna Tartt’s new book? It smells of success.

LBJ being sworn in on Air Force One, November 22, 1963.

A writer in the Monday memoir class I lead worked for Life Magazine in 1963. Giovanna Breu was at the magazine’s New York office when legendary editor Richard Stolley was negotiating for the right to reprint stills from footage of the assassination filmed by Abraham Zapruder.

The Zapruder film arrived at the Life Magazine office before Giovanna left to cover President Kennedy’s funeral, and in an essay she wrote for class, she describes sitting with her fellow reporters in New York to review the film frame by painful frame. “It was horrific,” she wrote, explaining that out of decency and respect for the President’s family, they decided not to publish every single frame.

Giovanna left the New York office then to catch a train to Washington, D.C. and work with Life photographer Bob Gomel from two different locations to photograph the funeral. “We had credentials to a rooftop where we watched Jackie Kennedy walk with a long stride and a firm step behind her husband’s body to St Matthew’s Cathedral,” she said, reading her essay out loud in class. “Our second spot was at St. Matthew’s Cathedral where little John Kennedy saluted the body of his father as he lay on the caisson.”

Every writer in class reads their completed assignment out loud every week, so I ask them to keep their pieces short. “No more than 500 words!” I tell them. I may not be able to see who I’m wagging my finger at, but after weeks of hearing their stories, I know who they are.

The 500-word limit encourages writers to edit their work. They learn to use stronger words to express themselves. And no matter how busy these seniors are, 500 words a week is an attainable goal. Asking Giovanna to limit this story to 500 words was probably asking too much, though. Her essay read more like a piece of journalism than a memoir. When she was done reading, I reminded all the writers that the word limit was just for class. “If you want to write longer pieces for your family, or even for yourself, that’s fine,” I said. “We just have to stick to this 500 –word rule in class, you know, so everyone has enough time to read.”

I turned towards Giovanna then to suggest she add more emotion to this piece, that she tell her readers how these events made her feel. Giovanna mulled this idea over for a long time, and the class stayed uncharacteristically silent. Her response finally came in two sad, simple words:” I can’t.”