The photo above on the right is one of then-new Seeing Eye dog Luna’s first and last in-person school visits in early March, 2020–before you-know-what happened. And now…we’re back!

Well, sort of.

Black Lab Luna and I made four school visits this past month and will be doing more in April — all of them via Zoom. So now, rather than getting dressed up and packing a backpack with dog bowl, Braille book, white cane, talking clocks and other cool blind stuff and then heading outside where my fabulous friend Jamie Ceaser picks me up at the break of dawn to drive me an hour to the suburban schools we visit, I just brush my teeth and hair, put a nice sweater on, sit on the floor in my office, call Luna to sit at my side, have Mike arrange my laptop on a footstool to aim it so the kids see both Luna and me in our little Zoom square, and… abracadabra! We are live on screen in the bedrooms of third-graders learning from home during COVID.

These Zoom classes exist thanks to Patty O’Machel. A special needs advocate and the mother of a teenager who has cerebral palsy, Patty launched her business Educating Outside the Lines in 2018 to encourage other schools to use the disability awareness curriculum she developed years ago for her daughter’s elementary school.

Many Chicago suburban school districts added the program to their curriculum, and for a few years now I’ve participated in person as one of the people children meet who use “helping tools” to get things done. During disability week, children at participating schools get to experience prosthetic legs, wheelchairs, sign language, Braille, talking iPhones, Seeing Eye dogs and white canes hands-on.

But there’s the rub: after March of last year, “hands-on” was no longer allowed.

So Patty went to work, developed an online alternative, met with the schools to talk about how online visits could work, and we’re giving it a go. Our visits are only 30 minutes long, Patty introduces Luna and me to the kids, the teacher askes them to “mute themselves” while I give a short talk, then the kids either use chat to send their questions to Patty to read out loud, or they “unmute themselves” when they’re called on.

I far prefer them unmuting themselves to ask. Without being able to see their tiny faces on screen, I rely on the enthusiasm in their voices to assure me my words are connecting with these very bright eight- and nine-year-olds.

So many of you Safe & Sound blog readers have told me you’re sorry all my school visits were cancelled this past year, how much you’ve missed hearing questions kids ask. So here we go with a sampling from the Braeside Elementary third-graders Luna and I met virtually this past Monday morning:

• How do you get into a car?
• Do you remember what things looked like when you were a little kid and could still see?
• So after you get in the car, how do you drive, I mean, like, there are all those buttons so how can you tell those buttons and how can you know which one to push?
• So if a friend comes to pick you up, how do you know if they’re there and it’s the right car?
• Before COVID, did you feel people’s faces to see what they looked like?
• Did you have to learn a lot of new things after you were blind?
• I hope you don’t mind me asking, but how old were you went you got blind?
• How does your dog know what your destination is? (And yes, the kid really did use the word “destination.”)
• How long did it take you to learn Braille?
• Do you ever go anywhere by yourself, or is your dog always with you?
• When you used to use a white cane, did you prefer using one with a ball at the end of it? (And yes, the kid really did use the word “prefer.”)
• I know what you mean about that Braille thing, I read a book about Helen Keller and it had a chart of all the Braille letters and it looked like it would be very difficult (okay, not a question, but I appreciated his empathy and his use of the word “difficult” there).
• Do you ever make mistakes? Like, you said you have Milk in a carton in your refrigerator but you have juice in cans, Did you ever pour a glass of juice and it ended up being milk instead?
• How many years have you been blind?
• What if you use your phone to call someone and you don’t have the number right?
• How do you know the clothes you’re wearing?
• How does it make you feel when you make a mistake?

Make no mistake here: I was wrong to doubt whether Zoom could work for these school visits. Zoom is not the same as a real visit (the kids can’t line up after I take Luna’s harness off at the end to pet her) but I feel like the kids and I do connect in some ways. At the very least it gives those hard-working teachers doing this all from home a well- deserved 30-minute break!

Back when we could still do such things, we took Wisconsin Highway 26 on the last leg of our journeys to visit our son Gus in Watertown. A few years ago, the State of Wisconsin redid a stretch of that highway: Lanes were added and eventually, instead of a ramp and a traffic light, we took a ramp and a … roundabout … and after that, another roundabout instead of a second traffic light.

Carmel, Indiana is proud of its roundabouts, as it should be.

It was a bit jarring at first, but I’ve come to love the things. I’ve found I’m not alone, and for very good reason: roundabouts make tons of sense.

This I learned during a typical Sunday radio day, when Beth and I listen to On the Media and then Freakonomics Radio on WBEZ, our local NPR affiliate. I’m pretty sure I could just listen to both those programs once a week without any other news media and not be the worse for it.

Anyway, Freakonomics is hosted by Steven Dubner, the co-author of the enormously popular “Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything.” The other author was Steven Levitt, an economist at the University of Chicago.

The radio show takes measure and novel looks at about…everything, all through the lens of economics. Yesterday they focused on roundabouts!

The episode is titled “Should Traffic Lights Be Abolished?” and by the time it was over, my answer was pretty much, “Absolutely.”

For one thing, they’re safe. From a transcript of the episode:

As we noted earlier, about a quarter of all crash fatalities happen at intersections. So how do roundabout and non-roundabout intersections differ on fatalities? Looking at U.S. crash data from 2017 to 2019, you see that 0.1 percent of crashes at roundabouts result in a death. That could be the death of a driver, passenger, pedestrian, cyclist, anyone. 0.1-percent: that’s 1 death per 1,000 crashes at roundabouts. Okay, and how about your standard, four-way intersection, with traffic lights or stop signs? The death rate there is 0.4 percent, or 4 deaths per 1,000 crashes.

Jim Brainard, the Mayor of Carmel, Indiana, an Indianapolis suburb (and—who knew?—the epicenter of the U.S. roundabout movement) says it’s simple:

Roundabouts are smaller and because they’re smaller, everybody has to drive through them slowly. It’s about speed.

But there’s more. Because vehicles don’t sit and idle at stop signs or lights, roundabouts save energy and reduce carbon emissions.

From the transcript:

Studies by transportation scholars have found that converting a standard intersection to a roundabout does significantly cut fuel consumption and carbon emissions. Transportation scholars point to yet another advantage of roundabouts: smoother traffic. Now, that might seem counterintuitive — at least it did to me when I first looked at this research. You’d think that the slow speed required by a roundabout — which is good for safety — would be bad for traffic flow. But the data say otherwise. The data say that roundabouts reduce congestion.

That’s because traffic lights are programmed for maximum efficiency for a small window of time—morning rush plus evening rush. The rest of the time not so much.

In addition, traffic never just stops. It slows, but it flows. A friend of ours who spends a lot of time in Door County, a major tourist draw from Wisconsin and Chicagoland, told me the roundabout up there made an enormous difference. It used to be that traffic would back up a mile or more at a key stoplight intersection. Not so anymore.

The episode of Freakonomics is brilliant, especially if, like me, you have ever wondered about just how much a traffic signal costs, how much it weighs, and other geeky stuff. Give it a listen.

If not, well, drive safely.

P.S. Roundabouts and rotaries are not the same thing.

A 1-1/2 minute clip from Carol’s son Steven’s labor of love.

I am pleased to introduce Carol Rosofsky as our Saturdays with Seniors guest blogger today. A consultant at the Chicago Humanities Festival, Carol was once married to Chicago artist Seymour Rosofsky, who was part of a cluster of returning soldiers dubbed the “Monster Roster” after seeing the horrors of World War II and studying at the Art Institute of Chicago and University of Chicago on the GI Bill. They preceded to influence Chicago’s Hairy Who Movement.

Carol is a longtime member of the memoir class I lead for Village Chicago and has written a number of memorable essays about life with Seymour, and then later about marrying civic leader Robert “Bud” Lifton 30 years ago on a ski vacation in Canada with their seven kids in attendance. That memoir-writing class is on spring break now, and for their last class of the winter session I asked them to use 500 words to tell us if –- and how — their life has changed over this past year. Here’s the honest, thoughtful and sweet essay Carol came back with.

by Carol Rosofsky

It’s been a year — one very tough year dotted with few memorable highlights, the monotony, the fear, the routine, the lethargy, pajamas, sweatpants…and then there’s that moment after lockdown kicked in when we realized the scale of disruption ahead. This wouldn’t be weeks, but months. A year.

To get through it I thought deeply about renewing or learning something that might come in handy to distract myself for the long term. What a great time to immerse myself in a master project of some sort, Something deep, thoughtful, requiring a significant amount of uninterrupted time to think through and execute.

In my head this was a perfect response to facing the reality and the dire circumstance at hand: a long cold winter, quarantined. I refurbished the old Singer sewing machine and resurrected the quilts and quilt books that inspired me as a first-time maker 25 years ago. But threading the needle and the bobbin with 86-year-old eyes was so challenging I only managed to semi-finish a part of one quilt and pillowcase and have been unable to locate a long arm quilter to follow up with the finish .

Next I hoped to revive the jazz piano lessons I had been taking at Merit Music before COVID, but online and not in person was not fulfilling. Cooking, a former passion, also lost it’s magic when it had to occur so often every day, plus the cleanup. I ended up ordering and stashing quarts and quarts of organic soups produced by Green City Market’s Bushel & Peck’s vendor, delivered directly to my door every other week. .

These projects soon revealed themselves in the form of no real inspiration or motivation, just coping elements that I’ve found tend to come in handy when attempting to create — and sustain — hope.

After a period of looking at blank projects and frustration, I made a conscious decision to allow myself to try to feel OK about “just getting by.” I’ve read a lot of studies saying that it’s going to be hard to have good memories of this past year (it all still feels like “Groundhog Day”) but I’m proving them wrong by ending this essay on a few upbeat, standout moments.

Number 1

This November in Lincoln Park, at Diversey and Stockton, near Bacinos’s Pizza, the news exploded in the air that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris were just confirmed. As the staff spread out into the crowd around Bacino’s everyone in the park started screaming and dancing, high-fiving, filling the air with unmitigated joy. It was the first time in a long time I felt genuinely three-dimensional and excited in months, resisting the temptation to hug every stranger in the crowd, mask or not.

Number 2

This past December, when son Steven finally invited the entire family to view his final updated version of the 1-and-a-half-hour documentary he’d been working on since 2004. The film is an homage to his artist father who died unexpectedly at 56 in 1981, a couple of years after Steven finished film school at NYU.

For over 17 years Steven worked on the film, interviewing family members many times over in various settings; also colleagues, friends, critics, artists, gallery owners, curators and museum personnel without showing his work-in-progress to anybody.

It was thrilling to see, over time, who we were then, who we are now. The good, the bad, the edited and unedited, the film is an homage and wonderful document for a lifetime.

Impromptu Number 3, added virtually after listening to all the class essays Monday

.The Wall Street Journal published a piece saying that in this past year memoir-writing has become an epidemic.

I am pleased to feature Annelore Chapin as our Saturdays with Seniors guest blogger today. Born and raised in post-war Germany, Annelore met her American husband Roy there and left for the U.S. at age 20. The couple settled in Chicago for their retirement, and Annelore has been a writer in the Me, Myself & I memoir-writing class for years. Sharon Kramer generously volunteered to lead that class after I was put on furlough last year, and when Sharon asked writers to “Find a Photograph and Describe It,” Annelore came back with this tender essay

by Annelore Chapin

Two fresh young faces smiling from ear to ear straight into the camera. They belong to two second-graders sharing a school-bench made from wood. They are front-row occupants looking out from the photograph, so close I am tempted to touch them. These two girls are sitting at a small desk built for two, their legs covered by the attached table. You see their arms with both elbows resting on that table, the right arm on top of an open book, index finger pointing to a line as if to remember the spot they left while reading.

The girls look statuesque, both in equal positions, one arm across the other. Not only are their smiles identical, so are their clothes. There is no doubt that these dresses had been knitted by my mother. A solid-colored bodice or vest gave room to colorful designs on the emerging sleeves. They are woolen, warm sweater dresses, so the photo must have been taken in winter.

The two girls are my cousin Elfriede and myself. I had had an operation earlier that year on a so-called Lazy Eye and was wearing glasses. I am surprised that I was wearing them while the picture was taken, as I was embarrassed to be seen with them on. Both girls are missing a front tooth, and my round face shows too much forehead beneath bangs cut too short — as well as crooked.

The photo also shows the two girls sitting in the row behind us. Those two girls seem more relaxed and somehow older. I remember their names: Annemarie and Roswita.

What touches me deeply when looking at these two young faces is the innocence, the wonder, the curiosity. They were looking at a life not yet lived, time not yet spent, and dreams not yet realized. When one is seven years old, much has been learned and much more is to come.

I cannot help catching a little spark of the miracle of life every time I look at that photo.

On this date last year, Illinois Governor Pritzker ordered all bars and restaurants closed as of March 17 until …  March 30. On March 17, I walked across the street to our polling place and voted in the Illinois primary.

Needlefest!

Then I went home to get back to work, when working from home was still kind of novel. About 2 p.m. I started feeling a little off—it felt like the beginning of a cold. At around 4:00 p.m. I was struck by the worst case of the chills I’ve ever had. They were positively convulsive and I could not get warm.

This wasn’t a cold.

Badness ensued. After passing out walking out of the bedroom to get a banana, I hit my head hard enough to be unconscious for what Beth described as maybe 30 seconds. On March 26 I entered the hospital—I was there for a week followed by three days of confinement in my room at a City of Chicago COVID quarantine hotel. I was deemed safe to go home on April 4.

All the details, outlined in an earlier post, kind of rolled back into my consciousness last week. That’s the bad news. The good news was the trigger: Beth and I went to the United Center vaccination site last Wednesday and got our first shots.

We were a little trepidatious: Going to a big gathering place seemed shaky. And our appointments were on the first full day of operation. The previous day was a sort of soft launch, and there were reports of long waits and confusion. We were prepared for the worst.

We needn’t have worried. We took a cab, got out, followed clear signs to a giant tent. Lots of people, but all masked and distanced. National Guard members everywhere, answering questions, helping people to their next processing station.

And a palpable sense of gratitude, relief, and of yes, joy. It was inoculation Woodstock. After months of being apart and understanding ourselves as a threat to others and threatened by others, people were together, and glad of it.

At our first stop a young Guard member took our tickets, scanned them, asked us a bunch of health questions, and then paused to ask me, “Are you planning on getting pregnant?”

“That’s always the icebreaker for nervous people,” he said.

We had a laugh. Beth had brought Luna, and he commented on how good she was. “I miss my Cocker Spaniel back home,” he said.

I asked where home was.

“Indianapolis, so not all that far.”

When Beth thanked him for doing what he was doing, he said, “When I raised my right hand and took the oath, I signed up for this—whether it’s here or overseas.” He gave us clear instructions about the next step, We said goodbye and checked in at another table.

We were directed to a distanced line. There were rows of distance, tables. Behind each was a uniformed, masked Guardsman (or woman) and a bunch of hypodermic needles and other supplies.

I thought about where I was just about a year before. I looked around and took it all in. I didn’t have a dry eye the rest of the time.

Beth got the first opening and had her shot in no time. I followed and barely felt a thing. We thanked our injector and moved on to a space where we would wait fifteen minutes to make sure we didn’t have a reaction.

The eavesdropping was great. Person after person profusely, sincerely thanking the Guard and the volunteers and staff. One of the Guards responded to a woman who thanked him by saying, “You don’t need to thank us, we’re having a ball!” People were happy! And they were together! At an event!

OK, it wasn’t exactly Lollapalooza (thank goodness), but it very much was a performance.

A really good one. I give it five stars.