It never fails. Every time my Seeing Eye dog Whitney and I visit a school, one of the kids comes up with a question I’ve never been asked before. Here’s my favorite from a trip we took to suburban Glenview earlier this month. “If you were never blinded, which would you rather be: a cat person, or a dog person?”

I’ll let you guess my answer.

The fifth graders at Glen Grove school.

The fifth graders we were visiting at Glen Grove Elementary that day are working with the Nora Project that I wrote about here earlier this month. They’ve already been paired with a student who has special needs. Now the fifth graders seem excited – yet understandably nervous – to start interviewing their buddy’s family members and others who spend time with their buddy outside of school. Maybe the best way to see how their curiosity about my blindness intertwined with their concerns about the upcoming interviews is to look over some of the questions they asked:

• You say in your Safe & Sound book that you take your dog’s harness off when you get home. How do you get around your house by yourself?
• What would be the best questions to ask to get the best answers from the Nora Project parents?
• You can’t see, so what sense do you rely on the most?
• If you tell your dog to sit, and you can’t see the dog, how do you know it’s sitting?
• What did it feel like when you found out you were blind?
• You and your husband were both working when you found out you were blind, and then they fired you, so what was that like with money?
• How do you know what you’re wearing?
• How can we ask questions to get long answers?
• Do you remember what your childhood was like?
• What do you do if someone answers your question wrong?
• When you’re asking somebody something, how can you tell if the question is a rude question or a curious question?
• You look great in that shirt!

That last one was a statement, not a question, but I didn’t correct the student who said it. I just thanked him…and blushed.

These students will be using iPads to record video of the interviews they do. Soon they’ll combine footage from the interviews with video of their own interactions with their buddies. The documentaries they create from all this footage will be presented at an assembly towards the end of the school year.

I just love this project. Playing a very small part of it during that visit earlier this month was an honor. To learn more about the Nora Project, visit thenoraproject.ngo. Documentaries produced by students from previous years are available there under the Nora Friends tab.

Another benefit of the 500-word limit I impose on writers in the memoir classes I lead? Magazines, newspapers and blogs publish short pieces like that.

This week I asked some of my writers for 500 words on “Witnessing Love.” Sharon Silverman was so pleased with the poignant piece she wrote about witnessing the love in her uncle and aunt’s relationship that she submitted it to the Chicago Tribune.

And guess what? Sharon’s essay, When Memory Fades, Love Remains was published in today’s paper in honor of Valentine’s Day.

In class, and in the memoir-writing workshops I lead, I am often asked how to get work published. My response is a simple two-word sentence: Submit it. “If you don’t send it in, it’ll never get published!” I say with a laugh. I turn more serious when advising them to read submission guidelines before submitting. “That’ll tell you whether or not your essay is what that publication is looking for.”

So of course I’m extremely pleased that Sharon Silverman’s piece is in the Chicago Tribune today, but I’m especially proud of her for taking the time this week to submit it there.

Happy Valentine’s Day to our Safe & Sound blog readers, we love you all. As a gift, I’m sharing Sharon Silverman’s published work from today’s Chicago Tribune.

When memory fades, love remains

by Sharon Silverman

My aunt and uncle were strawberries and cream, apples and honey, enhancing each other with sweetness all the days of their lives. They still held hands walking down the street after 50 years of marriage.

Then my aunt started forgetting. “Where did I put my glasses?” “What’s the name of that place we visited yesterday?” Just small memory lapses, not uncommon in later years. Some mild senior moments. Or were they?

My uncle provided the answers she couldn’t retrieve. “We went to the Art Institute yesterday and saw the Monet exhibit. You loved the water lilies. Remember now?”

“Oh, yes,” she replied. “I enjoyed it so much.”

A few hours later she’d ask again, “What’s the name of that place we visited yesterday?” He calmly answered again.

Her mind was failing. His worry was growing. The dreaded diagnosis — Alzheimer’s — invaded their lives.

She retreated into powerful plaque and stuck synapses. He advanced into caretaker mode. Buying groceries, making meals, laundering clothes, dressing her, bathing her, taking charge until he couldn’t. It was too much.

My uncle succumbed and moved my aunt to the now-necessary nursing home. He joined a support group for those caring for loved ones who can no longer care for themselves. He wanted help with the loss and the grief of seeing my Aunt Ruth disappear.

Instead, he became more depressed.

He was lonely at home and moved to an apartment in the independent living section of the nursing home, only four floors away from her. She descended further into incompetence and incontinence. She cried in pain without relief.

He stroked her forehead, held her hand, kissed her cheek and prayed, “Please, let her die.” With steadfast love, he wrapped himself in memories of traveling the world, attending the symphony, walking down Michigan Avenue arm in arm in quiet harmony.

Only dissonance remained. It was unbearable. For her. For him.

She was hospitalized. He never left her side. The attending physician suggested not treating the infection. My uncle asked, “Is that really allowed?”

With an affirmative nod, the doctor answered his prayer.

Alone together, he stroked her head. He held her hands. He laid next to her, embracing her body — the body he had known for over 50 years. The body that must leave him now. The mind that had already disappeared.

She’s finally free and so is he. Only the love remains.

Hi all. Well, yes. it’s Tuesday. I committed a cardinal sin: I missed my deadline. In my mind, former editors, bosses, and professors have formed a chorus to chastise me.

But I have a note from Beth, who was present at the disaster. On Saturday morning, we headed out for coffee with our laptops in tow, looking to have breakfast while catching up on stuff.

I opened up and powered on, and I noticed that I had only 5% power remaining. That was odd, given that I’m certain it had been left plugged in overnight. I hadn’t brought my charger, so I closed up and settled for doing the Times Saturday crossword (the hardest of the week, no contest) while Beth pecked away.

Eventually we packed up, and at home I plugged back in. Power was down to 1 percent. It didn’t shut off, but even while plugged in, it didn’t increase the charge level. I looked up various remedies that didn’t work, and then decided on the age-old remedy: Restart.

Mistake. It hasn’t powered up since that fateful decision. On to the sleek new Apple store on Michigan Avenue. It took a couple of hours (I was a walk-in) to learn that it’d be $750 and they’d have to send it out for three days. Somehow, some gunk had gotten into the power port. I have no idea how or when. But they showed me and yes, there’s gunk in there.

It was ugly.

I call Beth, we do the math, and I settle on a new MacBook Pro. I used to get excited when I got a new computer. I used to enjoy driving, too.

That was just the beginning. Luckily, I had a fairly recent backup and things went swimmingly, until they didn’t. A bunch of stuff simply didn’t make the trip from the old to the new computer. So, for about 48 hours I was wrestling and cajoling and entering settings until I have gotten this machine and my life mostly whole.

I had another topic in mind for yesterday, but it’ll wait til next Monday.

In the meantime, I’m wholly salved: Pitchers and catchers report to spring training camp, and it’s Mardi Gras.

Laissez les bons temps rouler!

The essay Maggy Fauché wrote for our “The First Time I Laid Eyes on You” prompt last week was about a teenage crush. When I wondered out loud how she managed to capture those long-ago feelings so beautifully, she gave all credit to Orhan Pamuk .

Orhan? I thought the crush was on a guy named Curtis.

Maggy kindly informed me that Orhan Pamuk is a Nobel-prize-winning novelist from Turkey. I’ve long believed that reading other works can be the best inspiration for writers, and Maggy agreed. “His descriptions of love — and obsession — are so beautiful,” she said, explaining how she’d just been reading Pamuk’s book The Museum of Innocense. “I guess he inspired me.” Hearing that recommendation inspired me to download the audio version of Pamuk’s book, and with Valentine’s Day coming up, now Maggy’s essay might just inspire me to write about a schoolgirl crush, too.

by Maggy Fauché

The first time I saw you, Curtis, sitting on the other side of the school library with your pals, something expanded in my chest and cut off my air supply. My hands felt clammy and my head got really hot. When I was finally able to swallow, a huge lump rolled down my throat straight into my stomach.

At fourteen years old, I had never seen anyone so handsome outside the pages of 16 Magazine. You were tall, slender, with chocolate brown skin, a beautiful smile, and a glorious Afro that defied the school administration’s restrictions on student hair length.

After you left it took a few minutes before my heartbeat returned to normal. I couldn’t focus anymore on my homework. I slowly collected myself and headed for home. On the subway I kept seeing your face. On the walk home I frequently stopped in my tracks, unable to move whenever your image flashed into my mind.

For a while I kept your existence a secret until that day I saw you on the boys’ side of the cafeteria. I poked my friend Frances hard in the ribs. “You see that guy?” I managed to whisper

“Who? Who?” she squeaked, sensing romance in the air.

My mouth went dry. I could barely nod in his direction.

“Oh that guy? He’s cute! Who is he?” Frances said, turning to announce to the group of bookworms/theater kids I always sat with. “Hey everybody! Maggy likes that guy over there!”

I had to beg them to calm down, be quiet, and stop staring. “Go talk to him, Maggy,” someone suggested.

Talk to you! Unthinkable! You were a demigod, and I a mere mortal. Plus any chance of a relationship was doomed by my parents’ rule that I could not date until I was eighteen.

With my friends’ help I found out your name, that you were a senior, and that you were on the yearbook staff. I was prepared to spend the rest of my life worshipping you from afar until the day Kim visited our lunch table and I told her about my crush.

“Oh you like Curtis? I know him. He lives on my block. Come on and talk to him!”

Before I could stop her, she ran to your table. I saw you both talk, look in my direction, and smile. Kim practically skipped back towards me. “Come on, he wants to talk to you!”

My body had turned to stone. The weight in my stomach made me feel nauseous. “No”, I moaned, but my friends pushed me towards what they were certain was my romantic destiny.

I don’t remember what we talked about. I do remember you were kind. And gracious. You somehow put me at ease. I was able to talk to you without getting sick.

The few times I saw you after that I could smile and say hi without suffering any symptoms. My life returned to normal.

That’s what the web looked like in 1993.

Sometime last week I happened on an article titled ​“Mosaic’s birthday: 25 years of the modern web”.

The opening paragraph is a story in itself:

In the beginning, the web, or WEB as it was known then, was a mystery. Like gopher and archie, it was a character-based internet tool interface that only the proud, the few, and the early internet users knew about. Then, everything changed. First, the Commercial Internet Exchange (CIX) made it easy for anyone to get on the net, and then two graduate students, Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina, at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, created the first popular web browser: Mosaic.

On one hand it’s hard to believe it’s already been 25 years. On the other, it’s hard to believe that just 25 years ago, we weren’t using email, browsers, social media—or reading blogs.

Back in the early 1990s, when we lived in Urbana, Illinois, I was privileged to be present at the creation of the web. I worked at a spinoff from the aforementioned NCSA called Spyglass. Spyglass developed data visualization software for brainiac researchers in fields like astrophysics, climatology, oceanography and hydrology.

The Cray supercomputer at NCSA back in the day. Not exactly compact.

The genesis: The University of Illinois’ NCSA had acquired a Cray supercomputer. NCSA took applications from scientists around the country to use supercomputing time for their research, and awarded supercomputing time to the best of the lot.

The scientists who were selected and got to run their simulations then faced another problem: They generated unprecedented volumes of data that were impossible to interpret visually with conventional graphing tools. (Hard as it is to imagine, even those color weather maps of temperature/barometric pressure didn’t exist yet.)

Spyglass developed a suite of tools that allowed users to create a bunch of new, colorful kinds of graphics from enormous datasets. Because back then the Mac had superior graphical capabilities, that’s what our products were on (until Windows 95 came out).

Sales sheet for the Spyglass data visualization software.

The products were super cool. I wrote the manuals for them (yes, paper books that were packaged in boxes with diskettes), as well as marketing materials, ad copy, etc. We were, in a word, a pretty lean operation. We had to be. Our market was pretty nichey. We were fighting for our commercial lives. Then one day one of the company founders got an email from Tim Berners-Lee. Berners-Lee was a brainiac with the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN)—this is the joint that now runs the Hadron Supercollider.

The email explained this new thing, the web, with hypertext links. Meanwhile the kids at NCSA—Andreesen and Bina—were adding graphical capabilities to Mosaic. ,

I still remember seeing the web for the first time at our modest little office in Savoy, Illinois. A group of us was looking over the shoulder of one of our code guys as he surfed the small number of web sites that existed—mostly corporate sites of big technology-focused companies. By today’s standards, they were incredibly crude. But back then, it was magic.

Bina and Andreesen—and a lot of their NCSA colleagues—headed to Silicon Valley to seek fortune and fame at a company that eventually morphed into Netscape. The University was left with a successful program, a bunch of browser code, but not much else. Spyglass stepped in, struck a deal with the university, cleaned up the code for commercial markets, and started selling Mosaic.

We had a visionary CEO named Doug Colbeth, whom I’m proud and grateful to still call a friend. He knew that browsers were not a sustainable business. Spyglass sold the code to Microsoft, and it became Microsoft Internet Explorer. Spyglass morphed yet again into a company that was ahead of its time—it created browser code that could be embedded in a variety of devices—anything from TVs to exercise treadmills. Spyglass was talking about the internet of things before the term existed.

When I joined Spyglass, I was one of about a dozen employees. We didn’t have health insurance, but in lieu of such things, we got pieces of paper called stock options. Beth, being practical, preferred cold, hard cash. But I was elated—somebody thought enough of me to make me an owner.

We worked our asses off and got lucky. Spyglass went public in 1995. We celebrated with a big picnic at the Kane County Cougars—a minor league baseball team—in Geneva, Illinois.

But even after that, we couldn’t hold still. Companies were being born and going out of business on a daily basis. One day I’d come into the office thinking, “We’re gonna own the world.” The next, “We might not be here in three months.”

But thanks to Doug’s course correction, we survived. We grew. We had corporate retreats. We had Jim Lovell, of Apollo 13, speak at one of them. We had arrived.

For some of us, the thrill was gone. I was one of those. I left. Those pieces of paper bought me and Beth and our son Gus two seasons on the beach in Nags Head, North Carolina. Every morning I put Gus on the bus, and every afternoon I took him off. I watched dolphins work their way along the coast while Beth and I had morning coffee. We body surfed and took outdoor showers that made our skin feel like we were 12 years old. If we hadn’t spent that time on the beach, I might be retired by now. But I’d do it again in a heartbeat.

Sometime I can’t believe it all happened. But it did. And it reminds me that for all our human faults, there are always people out there pushing the envelope of knowledge just because. It reminds me of the importance of public research institutions. Of collaboration.

It also makes me remember that, although not everything in my life, in our lives, has gone the way we’d hoped, George Bailey has nothing on me.