That’s my niece, Kennedy (I call her Toots), with her teacher and Luna.

One week ago today I was at Sterling Park Elementary, a dual-language school in Casselberry, Florida giving a presentation to third graders. My eight-year-old great-niece Toots goes to that school, and my sister Cheryl and I had flown from Chicago to Florida a few days earlier to see Toots in a children’s theater performance of the musical “Annie.”

And then, what great luck: last Tuesday, November 15, was “Teach-In” at Sterling Park Elementary, and if we stayed in Florida for a few more days after the fabulous performance of “Annie” I could come talk with her third-grade class about what it’s like to be blind, write books, and get around with a Seeing Eye dog.

So we stayed.

When it was time for the presentation, my Seeing Eye dog Luna led me to a chair in front of the kids — they were all sitting on the floor, criss-cross applesauce. Except for Toots.

Note: “Toots” is not her real name, but she is, well, such a “Toots” that I can’t help myself. I have to call her Toots! And Toots doesn’t seem to mind. She was standing in front of the class as we walked in, ready to assist Aunt Beth with anything necessary. As we got ourselves ready to do the presentation, she came close enough to whisper and assure me that it was “okay to call me Toots.”

I kept my presentation short, and Toots surprised me by taking over from there, announcing we were going to show our audience a game the two of us play when we’re together. “I put things in Aunt Beth’s hands,” she explained, “and see if she can guess what it is!” From there she ran around the classroom to collect things that might fool me, and she even kept score on the whiteboard behind us. Pretty sure I won, two to one.

And then Toots was right there at the front of the room to call on her school friends who had questions afterwards. A note of thanks to Mrs. Grau (one of the teachers there) and my sister Cheryl for writing these all down for me: There were so many good ones!

• When you became blind, how did it feel?
• Does Luna ever get out of her harness?
• Where do the dogs go in retirement?
• Does Luna know braille, too?
• Do Seeing Eye dogs know they’re in the right place?
• Is it weird to just see black every day?
• Can any dog be a Seeing Eye dog?
• Does it feel weird to be blind?
• If you look at a light do you see a little lighter color black?
• Were you always an author?
• How do you tell the different bills in your wallet?
• How long have you had Luna?
• Does it hurt to be blind?
• Can Luna swim?
• Can a Seeing Eye dog be small?
• Can you send us a letter in Braille?
• How do you make meals?
• I have a Black Lab at home, too — how long did it take to train Luna?
• What are some things you like to do?
• When you dream, do you see things in your mind?
• How do you know what you are eating?
• What other books have you written?
• How many years does Luna have left?
• How does Luna use her sense of smell to help you?
• Who is your favorite service dog?

And with that, I thanked the kids for having us, and once I stood up, the Black Lab at my feet jumped up, shook herself off and stood patiently at my side. I lifted Luna’s harness handle then, commanded, “Luna, outside!” and dozens of eight and nine-year olds, all of them still sitting criss-cross applesauce on the classroom floor, laughed and cheered as Luna threaded me through them and to the door to the hallway.

And for her encore? I took Luna’s harness off so all the kids — and teachers  — who wanted to could pet Luna or rub her belly on their way out. As for that last question? The one about which is my favorite service dog? Adults ask me that question a lot, too, and my answer is always the same: The one I’m working with now!

I was delighted when Tammy Duckworth won last week’s election: it means she’ll  serve as senator here in Illinois for six more years. Senator Duckworth has a long career serving her country, and when it comes to disability access, she is an expert: she served in Iraq and lost both legs when a rocket-propelled grenade struck the helicopter she was co-piloting in 2004. After she won the 2017 election for Senator of the State of Illinois, an article in the Chicago Tribune pointed out that running a Senate campaign involves lots of travel and complicated logistics. From the article:

Duckworth said she and her staff have a pre-event checklist to make sure the site is up to their standards — and that means making sure even the bathrooms are wheelchair accessible.

“I don’t go to any place that isn’t accessible even though I have artificial legs that I can walk in; it’s on principle,” she said. “If someone in a wheelchair can’t get in it, I’m not going to do an event there. Just because I can get in there with my artificial legs doesn’t mean somebody else can.”

The article said that during her campaign Duckworth often heard from voters who question her ability to serve. A question about using a wheelchair in public during the campaign came up when she first ran for Congress. “I’m not ashamed I’m in a wheelchair. I earned this wheelchair,” she said. “I’ve always insisted it’s not something that we hide.”

A seasoned member of Congress now, Senator Duckworth joined Representative Sarbanes of Maryland last month to introduce the Websites and Software Applications Accessibility Act (S. 4998 , H.R. 9021) in both houses of Congress. The bill will require employers, state and local governments, and private businesses to make their websites and applications accessible.

Much has been made about how people with disabilities benefitted from digital access during the COVID pandemic, but casual conversations I’ve had with friends who have visual impairments tell me how frustrated they’ve been with technology, the high number of web sites that are not easy to use if relying on speech software and the hours they’ve wasted trying to make it work.

I am one of those people. During the pandemic my husband Mike has had to take over much of the on-line ordering we do, the forms we are asked to fill out on line, and any online streaming we do. Throughout the pandemic I got a lot of messages in my in box about plays and concerts and lectures available on line free of charge, but when I gave them a try, the links and buttons were not accessible – frustrating!

If passed, this new legislation will make it clear that the Americans with Disabilities Act applies to websites and applications. I already know that my Senator will be voting in favor of the bill — she’s the one who introduced it to the Senate!

An earlier version of this post appeared last week on the Easterseals National blog.

We got the news Monday morning. Our dear friend Wanda Bridgeforth had died. Wanda’s daughter, Wanda Jr., had texted me last week to let me know “Mama is in hospice care at home.” She added, “Don’t be sad about this, Mama l-i-v-e-d long…and much!”

I was grateful to Junior for that message — her letting me know about hospice made the news about Wanda’s death easier to swallow. Wanda was 101 years old. She’d been in my “Me, Myself & I” memoir-writing class 15 years, sharing her life stories there with us every week. What joy and wonderment I feel now, having had the honor to know Wanda , meet her family, laugh with her…it’s all pretty miraculous.

Thinking about Wanda so much this past week got me reminiscing about meeting her for the first time: it all happened when she was in the audience at Printers Row Book Fair in 2007 to see her friend Minerva (another writer in the memoir class I led back then) appear with me at a presentation there. Here’s the story.>

That’s Wanda earlier this year, modeling her 1960 Easter bonnet for her home health care worker.

“Minerva told me she was going to be in the book fair with her teacher, and I should come and meet Beth Finke,” Wanda told me, explaining that Minerva and Wanda had been friends since DuSable High School opened in 1935. Minerva hadn’t mentioned that I was blind, and Wanda was sitting so far back that she didn’t see my Seeing Eye dog Hanni at my feet until she walked up to say hello. “I said ‘Holy Toledo! A blind lady teaching a writing class? This I gotta see!’”

I invited her to sit in on a class, and she signed right up.
Minerva and Wanda brought a slice of Chicago history with them to class every week. Tens of thousands of Southern blacks flooded into Chicago during the Great Migration of the early 20th century. Minerva’s parents came from Georgia, Wanda’s came from Mississippi, and the stories these two read in class describe Bronzeville, the segregated neighborhood they grew up in, as a “city within a city.”

Overcrowding, joblessness, and poverty was a fact of life, but so was literature, jazz, blues, and gospel music.

DuSable High School, the first Chicago high school built exclusively for African-American students, opened in the Bronzeville neighborhood in 1935. Minerva transferred in as a sophomore, and Wanda was a freshman. “I was in the birthday class,” Wanda would remind us any time her beloved high school was mentioned. DuSable was built on Chicago’s South Side 15 years before the Brown v. Board of Education decision. Wanda says it was built to keep schools segregated. “We were blocked in,” she’d write. “We knew not to cross Cottage Grove, 51st Street or the train tracks.” Everyone inside those boundaries was Black. “That was our neighborhood, and DuSable was our neighborhood high school.”

When DuSable first opened, some neighborhood parents applied for permits to get their children into nearby White high schools. “Their parents didn’t think a Black school could be any good,” Wanda wrote, adding that she felt sorry for those kids. True, DuSable classes could be very crowded; she remembers 50 or so students squeezing into classrooms. “But at those other schools, if you were Black and you wanted to be in a play, you had to be a maid or a butler,” she wrote. “At DuSable, we did everything, we were in all the plays, we wrote the school newspaper. We were having such a good time at DuSable.”

Between the two of them, Minerva and Wanda were at the high school between 1935 and 1939. During those years they walked the hallways with some pretty impressive classmates, including Nat King Cole; John H. Johnson, publisher of Ebony and Jet magazines; Harold Washington, first African-American mayor of Chicago; comedian Redd Foxx; and singer Dinah Washington.

“Nat Cole added King to his name later,” Wanda would tell me with a laugh. “You know, like Old King Cole!” They remembered Dinah Washington when she was Ruth Jones, and they knew Redd Foxx as Jon Sanford. “His brother was Fred, that’s who Sanford and Son is named for,” Wanda told us, reminiscing about the old television series. . “They changed their names once they were stars.”

DuSable’s initial fame was in its music program, and Wanda and Minerva both sang during “Hi-Jinks” student talent shows there. “We were in the background, but we put on shows that were better than what was going on in Chicago professional theatres,” Wanda wrote. “With musicians like Ruthie Jones and Nat Cole and all of those guys, we couldn’t miss!”

And with writers like Minerva and Wanda in the memoir-writing classes I’ve led over the years, I couldn’t miss, either. Their stories live on through the essays they wrote — I am so, so grateful. As Wanda always liked to say…”Hugs all around!”

I love voting, and look forward to doing so tomorrow at Jones College Prep high school. Democracy is a luxury and one that’s at risk, so voting is more important than ever.

(For the record, I’d rate the 2020 elections as the straightest, truest, cleanest presidential election of my lifetime. It was closely scrutinized in real time and tested again and again after the fact. I mean, remember 2000? The difference: The character, or lack thereof, of the lead actors and their followers.)

The Democrats, in my view, are missing an opportunity to trumpet real benefits that the nation will reap as a result of the Inflation Reduction Act, the infrastructure legislation, a legislative step toward gun sanity, and other accomplishments. But it’s kind of a Democrat thing to miss opportunities.

Apart from that, we are polarized in a way that surpasses any period of my life, including the 1960s and early 1970s. Back then we either did or didn’t support the war, but we agreed there was a war. We believed or didn’t believe in the domino theory but we knew what it was. Today, not so much.

Perhaps one thing we all can agree on—or at least all of us who watch any TV or listen to any radio: After tomorrow, the political ads will cease.

I can’t believe that any of them persuade anyone. I can only imagine that they’re made to remind the respective bases to get out there otherwise, the opposing candidate will indeed bake your children in a pie and make you eat it (cue the dark mood music).

It’s always bad but I feel like it’s worse than ever this year. For example, I was watching the Illinois Michigan State game on the Big Ten Network when political ads for Michigan races came on.

Even my beloved Jeopardy!, which usually is filled with ads for Cricket phones, calcium supplements, and all stuff for people of a certain age, has been filled with rapid fire doomsday ads.

Of course it is worse because there’s more money in politics than ever.

Maybe we can agree that’s a bad thing? Or at least, let’s all celebrate a political ad moratorium…until the next election.

Good information is easier to get than ever, if you’re willing to put in the effort to separate the wheat from the chaff. But if you’re not, bad information is everywhere.

Case in point: This past Saturday we took a Lyft home after visiting with family in the suburbs. The driver was affable, of Korean lineage, and wanted to talk. Along the way we learned he lived in the Chicago suburb Naperville, and that he thought Chicago was too liberal. Which was fine because by then we’d talked enough to learn that we probably agreed on more things than we disagreed on. So it was all friendly and constructive.

Then he got onto the pronoun thing—you know, where I’m “he/him/his” and the “they” thing. I, myself, have mixed feelings about that, mostly owing to longstanding grammatical concerns imbued by my mother, a teacher. But I’ve come to not care much and am happy to call other people by what they want me to call them. Things can change.

He felt the same, he just didn’t want to have to tell other people what pronouns he preferred.

And then things got weird.

He told a story about a woman passenger he’d picked up recently who said she was from Tennessee. She said she was having problems because her child’s school principal had allowed kids who identified as furries to wear their animal costumes to school.

So, I didn’t know what “furries” are, but apparently it’s a little subculture of people who identify as animals and dress as them and have conventions and stuff.

Well, the woman from Tennessee said things had gone far enough when one furry student who identified as a cat requested a litter box in the washroom.

I can’t believe I’m even writing this but I swear, it’s true. Beth will testify under oath.

So you know, we kind of just rode out the rest of the ride. He was a very nice guy and we mostly enjoyed the ride.

That evening, when we went to our local wine bar we talked with our friendly winetender. I told her about the litter box story. She then proceeded to say she’d heard a different version of that story. That it was in Columbine, the Colorado site of the infamous school slaughter. And that the litter boxes had been requested for classrooms in case shelter-in-place orders were issued and, you know, when you have to go you have to go.

So, what with having the power of the Internet tubes, I started looking around cyberspace. And, gee whiz, guess what? I learned it’s another hoax perpetrated by dumb politicians exploiting the culture wars.

From this story from NBC news:

To a person not steeped in the culture war battles over gender identity that have engulfed school districts nationwide, it’s the kind of claim that would sound bizarre and confusing — and, from high-profile GOP members, authoritative.

The week before, on Sept. 29, Minnesota GOP gubernatorial nominee Scott Jensen asked during a campaign stop, “Why do we have litter boxes in some of the school districts so kids can pee in them, because they identify as a furry?”

Apparently at least 20 Republican candidates have repeated this complaint, even though it hasn’t happened. Anywhere. At least not for the furry thing.

Turns out our winetender, crazily–and sadly–was accurate. From NBC news reporter Ben Collins:

NBC News found one example of a school district keeping cat litter on campus. The Jefferson County School District has had classrooms with cat litter since 2017, in case students are locked in a classroom during a shooting. Jefferson County is where Columbine is located.

Whatever your political leaning, I urge you: Before you spread information that has you agitated, check the accuracy. Because now, more than ever, you can look it up.