Two days ago our friend Ruth drove my Seeing Eye dog Luna and me to the Admiral At the Lake, a retirement community where I lead memoir-writing classes every Wednesday. I wasn’t there this time to lead a writing class, though: we were there to answer questions from third-graders who attend Goudy Elementary, a Public […]

Forty years ago this coming Sunday, December 24, Beth and I got in my junky Pontiac Ventura and headed north from Beth’s house on California Street in Urbana, to Beth’s mother Flo’s house on Colfax in Elmhurst, Illinois—a suburb west of Chicago. Phew, if I only known what was coming. To start, the temperature (not […]

Earlier this week I got word that Hannelore (Hanna) Bratman, a writer in the memoir-writing class I used to lead at the Chicago Cultural Center, had died Monday, just short of her 104th birthday. Hannelore had age-related macular degeneration and found out about my “Me, Myself and I” writing class decades ago from volunteers who […]

Many of the things I take on are difficult to do without being able to see. Some are even scary. I used to keep that to myself, afraid that admitting it would give others license to put me in a disability “box” and assume I have limitations that just aren’t there. Enter sports broadcaster Jason […]

Last December, Beth posted here about a couple of children’s books she wrote for a series on disabilities sponsored by Easterseals. She penned two of the books: “What is the Americans with Disabilities Act?” (2nd-5th grades) and “Service Dogs” (3rd grade). They turned out great and besides being distributed by Easterseals chapters and other agencies, […]