Last week was chock-full of school presentations for my Seeing Eye dog and me. I already wrote here about our Tuesday trip to Elmhurst. Two days later, Whitney and I got on another commuter train in Chicago to visit two more suburban schools. “I’m blind,” I told a group of second-and-third-graders at our last session […]

My Seeing Eye dog Whitney and I started our new year of elementary school visits in a big way: we took a commuter train to Elmhurst (The Chicago suburb where I grew up) and gave a presentation to 250 kindergartners, first-graders, and second-graders. All. At. Once. Whitney usually leads me to the train station in […]

Realizing I wouldn’t be able to see when his schoolfriends raised their hands to ask questions, my six-year-old great nephew Ray volunteered to help me call on kids in all three of the first-grade classes we visited at his school yesterday. All of the first-graders at Westmore Elementary had read Hanni and Beth: Safe & […]

It’s been a very happy week here in Chicago. Ours started last Friday, when Mike and I took an el to Schaller’s Pump on the South Side to watch a playoff game. Schaller’s Pump has been at 37th and Halsted since 1876, and from Mike’s description it hasn’t changed much since then. The bar is […]

You might recognize my friend Lynn LaPlante Allaway’s name: she is principal violist with the Chicago Jazz Philharmonic. Lynn wrote a guest post here after Whitney and I visited her kids’ elementary school, and your fun comments to that post helped encourage her to start a blog of her own called Backwards and in High […]