Flo’s voice rang out from the phone early yesterday morning. “Your friend Jenny Fischer’s picture is on the front page of the Tribune! It’s a really big picture, too!” The photo in the Chicago Tribune accompanied a story about the success of some independent bookstores, and it opened describing the store where my longtime friend […]

Jessica and Julia, two grad students from IIT’s Institute of Design, are working on a class project to come up with a product that will help people who are blind. They contacted me as part of their research, and one of the many, many, many questions they asked during an interview was whether there is […]

I was lucky enough to be home this afternoon to hear Terry Gross play an excerpt from her 1986 Fresh Air interview with George Shearing. The jazz piano great died yesterday. He was 91. Shearing was born blind. When Terry Gross asked him if his piano teachers thought a blind person could learn to play, […]

The memoir-writing class I teach for senior citizens at the Chicago Cultural Center was cancelled on Feb. 2 due to the blizzard. You know, I’ve seen other winters, and I’ve made it through, but this one doesn’t seem the same. After a phone call to Flo to make sure she was doing alright, I dialed […]

Second dog syndrome. That’s what they call it at the Seeing Eye. Graduates return after retiring their first dog, and the second dog is never as good. The new dog goes after other dogs. The first one never did that. The first dog always went right to the door you were looking for, never peed […]