I was busy shoving Whitney’s water dish and extra leash and a Braille copy of Safe & Sound into my backpack Wednesday morning when it dawned on me. The presentations we’d be doing at Ravinia and Braeside schools in Highland Park that afternoon would mark Whitney’s final school visits as a working Seeing Eye dog. […]

Couldn’t make it to the Chicago Cultural Center to hear writer Wanda Bridgeforth at StoryCorps Live: The Greatest Generation last Friday? Don’t despair! Now you can hear the five-minute excerpt they played online. One thing you’ll miss out on by listening at home is the positive energy in the room during Friday’s event. Ask anyone […]

I have a part-time job moderating the blog for Easterseals national headquarters, and we published a post there this week that I’m sharing here, too. Some of you might remember Bernhard Walke from previous guest poasts – he and his wife Rosa are the proud parents of nine-year-old Elena, and every year he comes up […]

This past Tuesday my friend Jamie drove Whitney and me to the north suburbs of Chicago to visit four different groups of third graders there. We were in Deerfield as part of Educating Outside The Lines, a disability awareness program that uses a hands-on approach to help kids discover how things like wheelchairs, sign language, […]

If you’ve followed our Safe & Sound blog for a while, you know who Wanda Bridgeforth is: she has been attending the memoir-writing class I lead in downtown Chicago for over a decade. She’s witty and talented, and today, October 19, not only is Sweetest Day, it’s Wanda’s 98th birthday! When our “Me, Myself and […]