Losing my sight meant losing a lot of things I’d taken for granted. One of those was The ability to vote independently, without anyone knowing how I voted. I relied on Mike to help me with a ballot. One time Mike was out of town during elections, so a polling judge from the Republican party […]

For most of my lifetime, Chicagoans have voted for mayors who could be described as domineering and dictatorial and most often named Daley. Why they have is hard to figure. A friend offered the notion that the electorate is like the victim in an abusive relationship who keeps going back. Another friend offered that it’s like […]

A cab driver who picked my Seeing Eye dog and me up once had such a heavy accent that I couldn’t tell what he was saying. “Dog face on floor,” he demanded. “Saliva.” He repeated that word a few times to help me understand. “Saliva. Saliva. Saliva.” Was it his mantra? My face must have […]

Hello from Alexandria, Va., on the last day of our mini-vacation. It’s been, as always, a blast. And as always, it’s ending too soon but it was long enough to stir a big, bubbling pot of nostalgia. In the fall of 1977, my junior year at the University of Illinois, I enrolled in a political […]

Last week I asked my downtown Chicago group of memoir-writers to come up with 500-word essays titled What Makes Me Happy. “Don’t come back with lists, or with vague things like ‘family and friends’,” I said. I asked them to write about an event from the past couple weeks that left them feeling fresh, energized, […]