When Regan Burke and I were on WGN radio in January touting the benefits of memoir-writing, Justin Kaufmann, host of The Download, said over the air that “Stories by seniors make for great radio,” and that they should “have Beth on again with more writers from the memoir classes.” I contacted Justin and his producer Pete after the show, and guess what? He really meant it!

This Wednesday, March 7, another writer will be joining me for an interview with Justin Kaufmann on The Download on WGN Radio 720. If you caught the January show with Regan Burke, you heard how much fun we had. I’m expecting that again this Wednesday with Bob Eisenberg at my side – he and Regan are two of the writers from my memoir-writing classes whose stories intertwine with mine in my latest book, Writing Out Loud.

Bob Eisenberg

Bob shares stories in class of escapades growing up in Chicago’s Maxwell Street neighborhood with his buddies Squeaky LaPort, Da Da Hernandez, and Mario DeSandro. His nickname then was Bobby Butts Eisenberg, and together, they were the Pranksters. He describes Maxwell Street in the 1940s as a neighborhood full of Jews, Italians, and Mexicans.

When I assigned the prompt “What Are You Afraid Of?” we learned more of his story. “My mother died right after I was born,” he wrote. “I moved in with my mother’s mother until I was six. Then she died, too.” His answer to the prompt? He’s afraid to travel. “I don’t like leaving home.”

After finishing the school year in his grandmother’s neighborhood, tiny seven-year-old Bob was sent to military school. Sundry other relatives took him in after that, including his Uncle Morrie, who was a juggler/clown at Chicago’s Riverview Amusement Park.

“As I look back into my past I count six different grammar schools I attended and seven different families I lived with.”

Bob’s upbringing must have been tough, but when he writes about the people who took him in, he does so with a sense of joy and appreciation. He spent three years in the U. S.Army after graduating from Sullivan High School. Back in Chicago, he started styling and cutting hair, opened his own salon, and then studied with Vidal Sassoon to learn new methods. When asked how he ended up cutting hair for a living, Bob explains that it all started when he was six years old.

Bob is left-handed, and his stern first-grade teacher insisted he write with his right hand. Only problem? He couldn’t. He was simply incapable. And that meant he couldn’t write, do arithmetic, spell. With nothing to do, Bob was bored in school and was labeled a behavior problem. Whenever possible, he’d sneak the pencil into his left hand and draw the faces of his friends and teachers on his school papers.

“Cutting hair is just like drawing pictures of faces,” he tells me with a shrug. “All you have to do is add the hair.” After 60 years in the business, Bob has cut back to part-time and takes an afternoon off every week to join our Monday class. The ladies in that class tell me Bob wears his long white hair in a ponytail. Sure isn’t how I picture an 80+-year-old man who still makes his living cutting and styling hair! Bob married his wife Linda 30+ years ago , and their blended family of six children and numerous grandchildren provide him with plenty of other material for stories he’ll include in his memoir collection.

No doubt he’ll be sharing some of these stories on WGN Radio this Wednesday night , March 7 at 9 pm central. If you live far away and are one of those lucky people who received an Echo Dot or a Google Home Mini for a holiday gift, just say “Alexa” or “Hey Google” and ask them to play WGN. Or stream it on your computer or mobile device at http://wgnradio.com.

I tuned into Fresh Air Monday right in the middle of an interview with a guy they said was a cartoonist well-known for his series, “The Pain — When Will It End?” Host Dave Davies was asking the guy questions. Where did his impulse to express himself this way come from, what was his process for drawing himself into the cartoons, blah, blah, blah.

Except it wasn’t blah, blah, blah. The cartoonist was smart. Self confident, but not haughty. He never interrupted the interviewer. His answers were thoughtful. His voice sounded kind. Who was this guy? I stayed tuned to find out, and when it was time for a break, and when they said, “Our guest is cartoonist and essayist Tim Kreider” I was flummoxed.

Essayist? I thought he was just a cartoonist.

And did they say Tim Kreider? Isn’t that Kathy’s boyfriend? I kept listening.

Tim Kreider’s new book.

The rest of the story? The Kathy I am referring to here is 84-year-old Katherine Zartman, a writer in one of the memoir classes I lead in Chicago. Three years ago I had my writers pen 500-word essays answering this question: If you could have a guarantee that one specific person would read your memoir, who would you want that person to be?” Explain why it’d be that particular person, I said. “What do you want to say to them?”

Three days after I gave that assignment, Kathy Zartman read an Opinion Essay by Tim Kreider called The Summer that Never Was in the Sunday New York Times. She found that parts of it expressed much the same sentiments, sometimes in almost the same words, as her pieces do. “I flirted with the cockeyed idea of sending Mr. Kreider a note about our common world-view.”

As she read more pieces by “Mr. Kreider,” Kathy’s sense of kinship deepened. The essay she read out loud in class the next week explained why, if she could guarantee one person would read her memoir, it would be Tim Kreider. “His take on his mother’s move into a retirement community, his analysis of the only hope for curbing gun violence, and his feelings when he kills, or does not kill, household ants — on all these topics he expressed, far better than I ever could, exactly how I feel.”

After some online stalking, our octogenarian sleuth discovered that if you send a letter to Tim Kreider’s Maryland P.O. box via U.S. Mail, he will (eventually) answer that letter. ”So I was presumptuous enough to send that essay to him.”

And just as promised, Tim Kreider eventually did send a handwritten note back. “I work hard to make sure my essays are universal,” he wrote, thanking Kathy for her note. “It’s good to know they resonate with people who are on the surface very different from me.” Mr. Kreider’s note went on from there, and he ended it with a friendly, “Tim”.

Kathy was so thrilled that she mailed him her self-published collection of essays, Life’s River Flowing, along with a note letting him know she had developed Parkinsonism, and the syndrome was making writing a bit more difficult for her.

And guess what? The very person Kathy Zartman wanted to guarantee would read her memoir? He actually did.

Kathy and Jim Zartman’s four children grew up in the 70s, and in a letter back to Kathy, Tim explained that he was a kid in the 70s, too. “So your recollection of family life in the era were especially interesting,” he wrote, letting Kathy know he’d passed her memoir on to his mother. “I think you and my mother would get along — I just helped her put together a similar collection of her own memories and reflections, which she plans to self-publish,” he wrote. “As it happens she’s been living with Parkinson’s for several years, and writes about it with equanimity and humor. She told me to tell you the best advice she ever got was…FIGHT it.”

Kathy Zartman is ffighting Parkinson’s Disease quite literally — she regularly attends Rock Steady, a boxing-inspired exercise class here in Chicago. Mildred Sherk Kreider’s self-published memoir, Songs in Diminishment came out in October last year. Kathy has a copy, of course. She turns to it for understanding and encouragement, especially now as she and her husband Jim prepare to move into a retirement community. As for Tim Kreider? He was doing that Fresh Air interview to promote his new book, a collection of essays called I Wrote This Book Because I Love You.

Back in—I think it was early1986—Beth was several months into blindness, and a baby was on the way. And I was out of work. At first, unemployment was by choice. I was home to help Beth in the early months of learning to live in a completely different way. Before she lost her sight, we’d made the decision to move out of an old house on Urbana’s tree-lined streets to a somewhat dingy campus apartment that had the virtue of being extraordinarily cheap. It was owned by an eccentric physician who, while he didn’t do a lot of upkeep, kept the cost low for impoverished students and people like us. Beth had put her name on a waiting list years before, and a space had opened. I think it was $135 a month, all utilities included.

Click to read the story at Reveal.

We took it on the idea that it would allow us to save money to buy a place of our own some day. Instead, it was something of a lifesaver during a difficult period. But even cheap rent is rent, and as our savings dwindled I had to find some work. I put out applications everywhere that had any kind of work that I was trained for—in Champaign-Urbana that was a pretty finite universe. So I also looked for, well, anything.

I eventually got a call from a property manager for a local apartment building owner. They needed a leasing agent—someone to take calls, show properties, follow through on leases, etc. They offered and I took the job.

A woman walked me through the tasks, and took me on a ride-along showing or two. I think I did a couple showings on my own before the property owner took me aside. He talked about the nitty-gritty details when it came to getting security deposits and first month’s rent, how to size up potential renters, etc.

Along the way, he sort of hushed his voice and said, “If they’re black, don’t accept a check—ask for cash for security deposit and first month’s.” I must have gotten a look on my face, because then he tried to offer some explanation.

It was a jolt, an eye-opener, and a moral crossroads. If I were in today’s skin, in today’s circumstances, I would’ve popped a rivet. Back then we were pretty beat up and needy. I didn’t say anything. I went home, told Beth about it, and we both stewed.

I went back, dreading having to possibly deal with the owner’s edict. And then I was rescued by a phone call: A local printing company was interested in hiring me. Not exactly my field, but enough for me to end my short-lived real estate career.

I anonymously left a tip for the local tenants’ rights organization. If I had it to do over, I would’ve given my name.

I hadn’t given the incident a thought in decades until Beth happened onto an NPR program called Reveal. Produced by The Center for Investigative Reporting, it covered the results of a yearlong study The Center had done on mortgage lending to black and other minority applicants.

The radio program is based on an extremely thorough piece of work, and I chose to read rather than listen to it. The piece is part of a series called Kept Out. I can’t cover the complexities—I just hope you’ll read it. Bottom line: It found that blacks and other minorities were turned down at rates much higher than whites. This was true even when correcting for multiple factors including income.

Now, one factor not included was credit score. The lenders, when questioned about potentially discriminatory practices, all defended their practices and said that the missing link in the study was credit scores. The Center had requested scores (in aggregate, not identifying individuals, of course)—something the lenders resist, making it impossible to verify their stance. And making me smell a rat.

And even if the scores were made available, there’s this passage from the piece:

At the same time, studies have found proprietary credit score algorithms to have a discriminatory impact on borrowers of color.

The “decades-old credit scoring model” currently used “does not take into account consumer data on rent, utility, and cell phone bill payments,” Republican Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina wrote in August, when he unveiled a bill to require the federal government to vet credit standards used for residential mortgages. “This exclusion disproportionately hurts African-Americans, Latinos, and young people who are otherwise creditworthy.”

One of the findings of the study was particularly disheartening: Geographically, the imbalanced lending practices more or less followed boundaries set by the old government-endorsed redlining system that operated from 1937 to 1968.

It’s like stacking the deck is in our and our institutions’ DNA.

Back when I had the leasing job in 1986, I was naïve enough to think we were past all this stuff. I would never have predicted that today, apparently, we still aren’t.

A piece in today’s New York Times caught my eye.

Am I Going Blind? was written by columnist Frank Bruni, who describes waking up one morning late in 2017 unable to see clearly. “The affliction that stole my vision, or at least a big chunk of it, did so as I slept,” he writes. “I went to bed seeing the world one way. I woke up seeing it another.”

Bruti’s artful account of living with his deteriorating vision would make anyone feel empathy for him. For me, I was struck by some uncanny similarities to my own experience decades ago.

His diagnosis (nonarteritic anterior ischemic optic neuropathy) is quite different from the diabetic retinopathy that stole my vision, and at age 53, he is precisely twice as old as I was when my eyesight began to diminish. Those two facts aside, his other accounts of early vision loss are so similar to my experience that it’s downright uncanny. Let’s start with this excerpt, where he describes his first symptoms:

On that first morning, several hours passed before I accepted that something was seriously wrong. I figured that I was just groggier than usual. Maybe I needed more coffee.

As I sat at my computer transcribing a long interview that I’d just done, I repeatedly took off my eyeglasses to clean them, convinced that the smudginess of my vision was some streakiness on the lenses. When I finally gave up on that, I rinsed my eyes with water — to no avail. It was as if someone had deposited a blob of petroleum jelly in my right eye and nothing would dislodge it.

As for me, I first noticed spots in my eyesight on our honeymoon in Scotland whend Mike had to stop the car to let the sheep cross the road. Here from my memoir Long Time, No See:

Maybe sheep in Scotland have spots on them. Or maybe my contacts were dirty. I took out my contacts, gave them a quick wipe, and put them back in. Still the spots. I rubbed and rubbed and rubbed my eye. Still the spots. I looked up at the blue sky and saw it suddenly go cloudy. I closed one eye, then the other. I could see fine out of the right eye, but in the left eye the spots were spreading into spider webs.

Bruni mentions not just one, not just two, but yes, three injections directly into his eyes. I, too, endured three such injections. He is involved in a research study and may have been given a placebo. Same with me. He was told only 20% of people with his disease lose their eyesight completely. Those were my odds, too, and for nine months after my initial diagnosis I woke up just the way Bruni describes in his article: “It was the same every morning: a stab of suspense, then a gale-force sigh of relief. I could still see.”

And then, one day, I couldn’t.

But that happened to me 30+ years ago. Science, technology, and research are all on Bruni’s side, and I hope–and expect–his remaining eyesight will be saved. And of course I approve of his coping method in the meantime: writing a personal essay about it. He includes some strong reporting in addition to his personal descriptions,too, and I hope you’ll give the piece a read.

February is Love Your Library month, and I’m celebrating in style: The Library of Congress Talking Book Service just released an audio version of my new book Writing Out Loud free of charge to Americans who are blind or visually impaired.

The Library of Congress administers the National Library Service (NLS) a talking-book and Braille program available for free to those of us whose low vision, blindness, or physical disability makes reading regular print difficult. When surgeons told me in 1986 that the eye surgeries hadn’t worked and I’d never see again, one of my first concerns was how I would survive without being able to read books. NLS came to my rescue. Woman’s Day Magazine published an essay I wrote a few years ago about the talking Book Program, and that essay is still available on the American library Association’s “I Love Libraries” web site if you’d like to link there and learn more about how NLS works.

Back in the 20th Century NLS mailed cassette players and tapes free of charge. Now they offer free downloads. I am over the moon that so many more people will now have access to Writing Out Loud,and to that end, I’ll end this post with the description and call letters necessary to order the book from the National Library Service. Happy listening!

Writing out loud: what a blind teacher learned from leading a memoir class for seniors DB89064
Finke, Beth. Reading time: 9 hours, 55 minutes.
Read by Celeste Lawson.

Disability

Journalist who chronicled her loss of sight from diabetic retinopathy in Long Time, No See (DB 56482) reflects on teaching a memoir-writing class to older adults in Chicago. Discusses living in a new city, describes challenges she faces as a teacher, and shares excerpts from her students’ work. 2017.