Questions Kids Ask: With Answers This Time

When the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA) selected Hanni and Beth: Safe & Sound as the winner of its Henry Bergh Children’s Book Award back in 2008, my sisters accompanied my second Seeing Eye dog Hanni and me to the American Library Association convention in Anaheim to receive the award. Stephanie Burke, the director at the library in Cliffside Park, New Jersey was in the audience along with her aunt, who teaches at an elementary school in Fairview, New Jersey. They introduced themselves to us, we hit it off right away, and before we all left the convention hall I thrust promotional postcards and flyers into their hands. “Hanni and I would love to come visit!”

Next thing you knew, we were off to New Jersey. Stephanie’s mom worked at a school in Fairview, too, so Hanni and I had not just one, not two, but three different gigs while we were there: one at Stephanie’s library, one at her aunt’s school, and one at her mom’s school.

After I’d booked my flight with Hanni to Newark, Stephanie generously offered to pick Hanni and me up there, drive us to our hotel, and chauffeur us to our library and school visits the next couple days.

Stephanie offered to take Hanni for walks when necessary, too. She even picked up afterwards when Hanni “emptied.” Now that’s a friend one never forgets!

Stephanie has kept up with our Safe & Sound blog ever since that visit (hi, Stephanie!) and wrote me directly last month to catch me up on things going on in her life. For one, she is married! Now her name is Stephanie Burke Bellucci, and their son Declan is in First Grade. “He attends the Academy of Our Lady of Grace, which you visited all those many years ago,” she wrote. “Time sure does fly!”

The day she wrote, Declan’s homework had included reading about a person and their Seeing Eye dog. “A very nice story in his school reading book,” Stephanie said, adding that she’d lent her copy of Hanni and Beth: Safe & Sound to Declan’s teacher, who read it out loud to the class the next day.

“I was wondering if there’s a way we could arrange a quick visit with you and the students in Declan’s class and the other First Grade class,” she wrote, commenting on how, thanks to the pandemic, Declan’s classroom is pretty high-tech now. “So you could join with a simple Zoom login and be projected on the white board,” she said. “Let me know if this is something we can coordinate.”

Of course I said yes. I mean, c’mon! Compared to all the things Stephanie had done for Hanni and me (see above, about picking up) during our in-person visit to New Jersey all those years ago, Zooming in with her son’s first grade classroom would be a breeze.

And it was.

What fun to hear questions from first-graders, so different from the questions I’ve been getting during visits to third-grade classrooms the past couple years. Some examples:

• • How do you make your books?
  • Who was your first guide dog?
  • What is your favorite book that you wrote?
  • How do you drive?
  • When did you start to be blind?
  • How can you draw the pictures for the books?
  • What ages were you when you went to the school when you were blind?
  • How did you know how to cook food and to pour water and to write the book if you were blind?
  • How do you go shopping?
  • Did you ever have a second guide dog?
  • How do you clean your house?

Pretty sure my answer to that last question was, “Not very well.” Or maybe I said, “Just ask Mike.”

For the first time ever, you can find out for yourself how I answered that (and all the other questions the first graders asked). How, you ask? Super-Stephanie saw to it that the Zoom event would be recorded, she sent it my way, my friend Sharon Kramer had it transcribed in to words, and my husband Mike Knezovich created a YouTube you can link to here or watch it below.

You know what they say: it takes a village. A big thank you to Sharon and Mike here in Chicago, and to Stephanie Burke Bellucci and the teachers and first graders at the Academy of Our Lady of Grace in New Jersey for helping make this all happen. You’re the greatest!