1. Everyone leaves your Seeing Eye dog alone.
   

   Second Sense offers great services for the visually impaired.

2. Teacher knows material first-hand.
3. People listen to you.
4. When post-lunch fatigue sets in, you can lean back, close your eyes, put your feet up on the desk and still listen.
5. No dress code.
6. When the heat gets too high in the room, you can strip down to your underwear.
7. You hear conversations you’d never, ever hear anywhere else.

One of those wonderful conversations I heard on break this week at my Second Sense Intensive Screen Reader course was between two of the youngest women in class discussing some social network I’d never heard of. When I asked them what it was, the 21-year-old answered with a shrug. “It’s like Tinder for blind people.”

She told me a little about being raised by her grandparents on Chicago’s South Side and how much she’d hated her high school. “People there just didn’t get me.” She loves this social network app, though. “You just set up an account without any photos or images, pick an alias name, and then start recording messages or questions, then you just wait for people to listen and reply.” The app just records sound, she said, and now she’s talking with blind people from all over the world. “We’re pretty sure a couple of people on there can see, though,” she confided in a hushed voice. “You can just tell.”

I am wont these days to make declarations like “Music was better back then.”

But I doubt music is worse or better. I like plenty of new stuff I hear. I think what I’m really missing is the diverse, surreptitious exposure I got as a lad from, of all places, the likes of WLS and WCFL, the Chicago AM radio powerhouses of my youth.

We were experienced.

What I’m missing is the smorgasbord of music—Motown, psychedelic, schmaltzy, bubble gum, Osmonds, R & B, some really awful, some really great—you name it that, AM served up. Today, I can set my preferences on Pandora or other music services, and get what I know I like. But it seems harder than ever to bump into stuff I’d be surprised by if I just heard it.

When FM started taking off, I, like pretty much every music fan and audiophile, was happy. The tyranny of the three minute single and the low fidelity of monaural radio was replaced by the full, long versions of songs straight off an album, recorded and reproduced in stereo!

Today AM is populated by blowhard pundits and sports hate radio who fill time with repetitive droning. I still enjoy WXRT-FM, which was an evenings-only basement-studio based revelation in my teens. I still like it, but I guess somewhat ironically, it seems kind narrow in its own way—geared to people of a certain age, like, well, me.

To wit, my friend Patrick and I, during a serious barstool discussion, looked up the top singles from 1968. Check it out here, it’s incredible. And here’s a Pinterest collection of WLS “Silver Dollar Surveys” from several years. What my little transistor lacked in audio quality, it more than made up for with variety. Of course, there were the Beatles. And Monkees. But, also James Brown, Aretha Franklin, Otis Redding, Johnny Rivers, Steppenwolf, Herb Alpert, Jimi Hendrix, Donovan, Cher, Etta James, The Doors, Smokey Robinson, Petula Clark, The Turtles, on and on.

Yep, I’d grimace when the 1910 Fruitgum Company came on, but the pain was worth the epiphany of falling in love with something new, that I didn’t know or would even guess I’d like.

Even after the AM hay day, when I was in college, I heard new stuff just by walking the halls of my dorm. There was no disc jockey, I’d just duck into a room and ask, “What’s playing?” Today, pretty much everyone is on ear buds. I’ve been told that the thing to do in the modern age is got to festivals—here in Chicago, that would be events like Pitchfork and Riotfest and, gulp, Lollapalooza.

But I’m tool lazy, not mention too cheap (though I happily still buy recorded music). For readers who are music fans, I’m open to ideas.

AM singles-oriented radio certainly had its problems. There was payola and the crazy, caricatured disk jockeys. But I not sure they weren’t better than today’s recommendation algorithms.

I have a love/hate relationship with my computer.

Don’t we all?!

I keep thinking I’d love my computer more if I was more efficient at using it. So with my memoir-writing classes on break now, I signed up for this weeklong course at Second Sense, a fantastic non-profit in Chicago for people who are blind or have visual impairments:

Our Intensive Screen Reader course is a great way to quickly update your computer skills in a fast paced one week class. You learn the new Windows 10 environment along with Microsoft Office 2016, (Word and Excel), Internet browsing and web-based email. This class is great for people who are working or those who cannot commit to our 16-week comprehensive course. If you are transitioning from Windows 7 to 10 or if it has been sometime since you last had some computer training, you might want to consider this course. Prerequisites include being able to type at a steady pace, having previous computers skills and familiarity with your screen reader. Classes meet Monday through Friday From 9:00 am to 4:00 pm April 2 to 6.

You read that right. Five days of computer training. Every weekday this week. 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. Was I crazy to sign up for this? Too early to tell. One thing for sure, though: I’m already looking forward to 4 pm on April 6. Look for me at Friday happy hour.

The questions were fast and furious. Photo courtesy of retired teacher Maria LaPlaca Bohrer, who, with her husband Glenn, graciously fed and put us up for the night.

Mike, Whitney and I flew into La Guardia last Tuesday evening. The next day, New York City schools were closed due to snow. The next day, schools on Long Island were closed, too, so our Thursday visit to Rall Elementary School was cancelled.

Eyebrows up! Whitney and I finally outlasted Mother Nature on Friday. We spent that entire day at Harding Avenue Elementary School in Lindenhurst, and if you ask me, the questions the kids asked there made the wait worthwhile. Some examples:

• What happens when you have to go upstairs?
• How many dogs have you had?
• What inspired you to write books?
• How do you eat ice cream?
• How can you write books if you can’t see??
• What if your Seeing Eye dog bit you?
• How come you’ve had so many dogs?
• But what if the ice cream is in a cone?
• Can your dog have babies? Why not?
• When you go to shop, how do you pick out clothes?
• How can you drive?
• How come you have to change dogs so much?
• Is your dog with you all the time when you’re at home, too?
• How do you feel if you’re blind?
• You said all you can see is the color black, right, so I gotta wonder if, when your dog pulls you, does she keep you safe?

It took that little boy a while to get that last question out. I sure didn’t mind — it just gave me a chance to lean down and scratch Whitney’s ears while I listened. Bonus: the concern in the boy’s voice motivated me to lift the harness on Whitney’s back and demonstrate how a Seeing Eye dog works.

And so, for our grand finale, I commanded “Whitney, outside!” The kids watched in awe as my magnificent Seeing Eye dog led mea safely around chairs, bookshelves and children sitting criss-cross applesauce on the floor to the door out of the room.

This past Monday special education teacher Caitlin Farrell emailed me thank you notes from her class that I can hear. If you are looking for — or need — something to smile about, click the players below to hear their beautiful voices.

I turned 60 last year. Other than my 16^th (I could get a driver’s license), 18^th (I could vote), and 21^st (I could drink liquor legally), I had never paid much attention to the numbers. But 60 kinda got me. So, I did something to remind myself I’m not dead yet—I went to Japan and road tripped with our nephew Brian. Staying in hostels, walking around Tokyo, and seeing a Japanese metal festival reminded me that I’m still 25 inside. But outside, 60 meant unequivocally that I’m, as golfers say, on the back 9.

That’s our nephew Brian and me at a Hanshin Fighting Tigers game at Jingu Stadium, the oldest baseball stadium in Japan.

Of course, I have been on the back nine for awhile. The number 60 just made me more aware. But eventually, I remembered that it’s just a number and it doesn’t really say a lot about me.

Still, we cling to generational labels and stereotypes. Being 60 makes me a baby boomer. But that term has always bugged me. Or at least the notion that it says anything about me. My sister Kris, only five years older than I am, also qualified as a boomer, but she had a substantially different experience than I did growing up. There’s an 18-year range that labels us as boomers. That means a wide variety of experiences—from music you listened to as a teenager (one boomer could be weaned on The Lettermen or Elvis, another on Janis Joplin and The Doors), to whether the Vietnam War was more than controversial—it was a matter of life or death.

And that generational thing doesn’t touch stuff like where you grew up (Alabama? Minnesota? South Side of Chicago? Evanston, Illinois?). So many other factors have always seemed to me to be more important than age.

So it was satisfying to read an op-ed in the March 6 New York Times titled: ‘Millennial’ Means Nothing. Here’s the lead paragraph:

The Pew Research Center announced last week that it will define people born between 1981 and 1996 as members of the millennial generation, embracing a slightly narrower range of years than the ones used by the United States Census Bureau. It would have been better, though, if it had announced the end of what I call the “generation game” — the insistence on dividing society into groups based on birth year and imputing different characteristics to each group.

The writer, an economics researcher at Australia’s Queensland College, focuses initially on the emptiness of stereotypes about millennials:

To see what’s wrong with the idea, take a look at American millennials. In seemingly endless essays in recent years, they’ve been derided as lazy and narcissistic or defended as creative and committed to social change. But these all sound like characteristics that the old have ascribed to the young since the dawn of time. Similar terms were applied to the “slacker” Generation X and before that, the baby boomers.

He adds:

Much of the apparent distinctiveness of the millennial generation disappears when we look at individuals rather than aggregates. Black millennials, like their parents, overwhelmingly vote Democratic. By contrast, 41 percent of white millennials voted for Donald Trump in 2016. That’s lower than the 58 percent of all white voters who went for Mr. Trump, but it makes more sense to attribute the difference to individual characteristics and experiences rather than a generational attitude.

Moreover, the writer holds than none of the popular generational tags really tell us much. And he throws a bone to us 60-year-olds:

Some may argue that the generation game, if intellectually vacuous, is basically harmless. But dividing society by generation obscures the real and enduring lines of race, class and gender. When, for example, baby boomers are blamed for “ruining America,” the argument lumps together Donald Trump and a 60-year-old black woman who works for minimum wage cleaning one of his hotels.

Which is all to explain, I guess, why I felt a greater kinship to those young’ns who were out on the street Saturday for than I do to some of my contemporaries. Here’s to kids of all ages.