It’s “Disability Awareness Week” at Wilmot Elementary School in Deerfield, Illinois, and the kids there had already enjoyed a special guest before I showed up there with Whitney yesterday. Melissa Stockwell, a three-time Paratriathlon World Champion and decorated U.S. Army veteran, had been at Wilmot the day before us. Melissa was serving in Baghdad in 2004 when a roadside bomb […]

My first high school reunion — the 10-year one — happened right after I lost my sight. I didn’t go. I haven’t been to any since then, either. Friends and family members who go to high school reunions tell me it’s hard to recognize old friends when you can see them. Blind at a high […]

Yesterday Whitney and I enjoyed a magical morning in a classroom in one of the most impoverished neighborhoods of Chicago’s South Side: the Auburn-Gresham neighborhood. Fourth, fifth and sixth graders in a Montessori program at Oglesby Elementary are writing essays for a book they’ll publish in November, and their teacher asked me to come talk about memoir-writing. […]

A couple years ago I published a post here about an instructor at the Seeing Eye who was in Manhattan on September 11, 2001. When I told the editor at Bark magazine about Jim Kessler, she asked me to write a guest post on the Daily Bark blog about him. The post is called Career […]

Whitney and I are taking a train to Champaign this Wednesday — I’m speaking to an animal sciences class at the University of Illinois, and while we’re there we’ll visit an old friend, too: retired Seeing Eye dog Hanni! Whitney has been guiding me over two years now, and I’ll share some stories with the […]