In the dozen or so years I’ve been leading memoir-writing classes, I always pretty much assumed that getting life episodes down on paper is good for your brain. Now studies are starting to prove it.

A Creativity and Aging Study by the National Endowment for the Arts shows that writing memoir can result in the formation of new dendrites, the brain’s communication channels. Other studies show that the social engagement writers get by sharing their life stories in memoir classes like mine can prolong life and enhance healthy aging. Arts programs like writing classes for older adults have been linked to lowered blood pressure, reduced levels of stress hormones, and increased levels of endorphins — a “happiness hormone.”

Memoir can reunite people.

But who knew writing these little life episodes for class might serve to reunite people with family and old friends, too? Not me.

Early on in my memoir-teacher career a writer named Jean told me she had lost touch with her only brother. Nothing nasty had happened, they just didn’t feel they had much to talk about anymore. “But once I started these classes, I needed to call him every week to make sure I was remembering everything the way he did,” she laughed. “Now he calls every week to ask me what the assignment is.”

Seems any essay read in class about an old school chum or a long-lost relative is greeted with a chorus of, “Are you going to send that to them?” Most writers listen to the chorus. They send the essay. Weeks later, we hear stories of a get-together, or back-and-forth letters, or a series of phone calls exchanged with the person in the essay.

Four years ago our Safe & Sound blog published a post here about an essay a writer named Mary wrote when I assigned “Feeling Homesick” as a prompt. Mary had spent her junior year of high school on a study abroad program in Japan, and in her homesick essay she mentioned an American friend she met in Japan that year.

Mary had heard that her friend had developed Alzheimer’s disease, and on the urging from her fellow memoir-writing students, she sent a copy of her essay his way.

“He was still able to send me an email, and he told me my essay sparked a memory for him,” she told us later. Mary’s essay motivated her friend to write his own piece about an experience during his year as an exchange student in Japan.

After he finished his essay, his wife sent a letter telling Mary that her Japan memoirs had not only motivated her husband to write, but also motivated him to try using a computer again. “She said it was the first time he had used the computer in two months,” Mary told me, reaching over to pat me on the thigh. “So look what these memoirs produce!”

This week I got word about a new PBS series that debuted Tuesday, January 23, 2018. Hosted by Ann Curry, We’ll Meet Again is all about the value of reuniting with people from the past. Airing on PBS on Tuesdays from 8:00-9:00 p.m. Eastern time until the end of February, 2018, the show is described as “reuniting people with someone they crossed paths with during pivotal moments long ago.” Gee whiz. The memoir-writers in my classes could have written the script!

I’m not quite at full speed, as I have contracted the cold from hell that I’d managed to avoid—until last week. I’ve thought I was over the hump more than once, but the virus just won’t take a hint.

This post links to some very good reading, but if all you need is a laugh, just skip to The Onion.

So, with my thinking and writing faculties compromised, I’ll just share a few pieces by some people doing some heavy lifting when it comes to the thinking and writing.

On the heels of yesterday’s marches, I was reminded of this piece from a few weeks ago. It’s called “White women overwhelmingly supported Roy Moore. We shouldn’t be surprised.” There’s been all this hand-wringing about how on earth white women could vote for Trump. Or for Roy Moore.  Well, probably for many of the same reasons men did. The notion that women would vote as a bloc is kind of simplistic at is face, and bigoted in its own way. But beyond that, there seems to be a belief that white women would lean more left than men, and are somehow intrinsically less racist than men. Anyway, hope you’ll give it a read.

Along those lines, uproar about immigration and hatred for immigrants ain’t nothing new. I think most of us know this at some level, but in this age there’s a tendency to think everything we’re experiencing—good and bad—is unprecedented. This piece in the NY Times traces a long and not particularly shining record of how Americans have behaved through various phases of immigration. The melting in the pot hasn’t ever been a gentle process.

Another piece I bookmarked a few weeks ago looks at how financial aid is increasingly going to students who don’t need it, while the people who could only attend with financial aid are getting less of it. It’s in The Hechinger Report, which routinely does very good work on education, and this is a typically well-reported piece.

And finally, if your head hurts after reading any or all of these, two words:

Perverted lobsters. (Caution: language.)

A lot of folks who read my Love Letter to Cultural Arts post last week about the panel I was on at Chicago’s Shedd Aquarium asked me to write about the answers we gave to the questions provided. Your wish is my command, but first, a review.

The Shedd.

Last Tuesday I sat on a panel at Chicago’s Shedd Aquarium with Brian Balcam (a theater director who uses a wheelchair), Rachel Arfa (a lawyer who is deaf), and Laurie Viets (a mother of two children on the autism spectrum). Lynn Walsh, the Manager of Accessibility and Inclusion at Shedd Aquarium, asked the four of us to talk with Shedd’s Guest Experience team (the staff members who greet groups, sell tickets and memberships, man the information booth, welcome guests to the 4-D Theater, Oceanarium, Tide Pool, Sea Star Touch, Sturgeon Touch, and so on) about ways museums and cultural institutions can be welcoming to all visitors — including those of us with disabilities.

Last week’s post listed the questions Shedd Aquarium asked us to think about before Tuesday’s presentation, and today, I’m providing some of the answers we gave.

• What do you like about Shedd/the collection? When thinking of accessibility and inclusion, what do we get right? Laurie, the mother with the kids on the autism spectrum, said she appreciates access to the quieter areas of the museum. “Those picnic tables in the basement? They’re great!”
• Can you give us examples of accommodations that made your experience a self-conscious one? Rachel, who uses cocular implants, said she’d been to the Dolphin Show at the Shedd with friends, but without live audio captioning she felt left out — she wasn’t able to take it in the way others did. Eyebrows up! The panel discussion we were giving Tuesday did have live captioning, and the Shedd is planning to offer more in the future.
• Can you give us examples of accommodations that have made your experience at a cultural organization amazing? Brian, who uses a wheelchair, said he likes knowing that any museum that welcomes kids will be accessible to him. “In this chair, I’m like a five-year-old.” Of course I had to ask if he meant intellectually, or height-wise. “Sometimes, both!” He laughed, explaining that any time a kid-friendly museum plans a new exhibit, he feels confident he’ll be abel to access it — they arrange everything so a kid who’s the height of a five-year-old can see it.
• Do you have any examples of times someone got it wrong?
  Laurie said the family-friendly bathrooms near those quiet picnic tables in the basement are terrible. “The automatic dryers make my son with autism freak out,” she said. “And the toilets flushing by themselves scare him, too.” Her answer gave me a chance to point out how different our needs are, and how museums and cultural institutions have their hands full when trying to please the variety of guests who have a disability. “As for me? I love the toilets that flush themselves,” I said. “That way I don’t have to feel around to find the lever!”
• Can you give us examples of accommodations that have made your experience at a cultural organization amazing? I said I don’t mind at all when people ask if I need help — I can always say no if I’m doing fine. “But I especially like it when the person asking lets me know who’s offering,” I said, encouraging Shedd staff to introduce themselves out loud to visitors who are blind or have a visual impairment. “A lot of you here have let me know right away that you’re on staff, too. I like that.” All three of the others said that if they walk in the entrance and a staff member greets them with a welcome smile, it makes their day.

I posted last week about watching the documentary “The Most Dangerous Man in America,” about Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers. In that post, I noted that it reminded me that as unsettling as the current times are, our current times have got nothing on that era. Along those lines, this piece in the NY Times—which imagines what 1968 would look like if you received news alerts on your smart phone back then—makes the same point about that uproarious year.

He had the courage of his convictions, no pun intended.

Back in 1968 I was going on 11 years old. But I’ve always been an old soul, and I grew up with a politically informed and outspoken mother and an older sister who was already volunteering for presidential campaigns at age 16. So I probably paid more attention to the news then the average kid my age did. Which is a longwinded way of saying, I was a bit of an oddball.

But an earnest one. I honestly tried to make sense of what was going on around me. I grew up in a suburb south of Chicago that was heavily populated with families who’d left the city of Chicago during a great wave of white flight.

Through grade school, junior high, and high school, I never had a single black classmate. There were tons of ethnicities, but none black. The”n” word and “n” jokes were thrown around frequently and loosely. Classmates talked of how scary their old neighborhood had become after it “changed.” There were hair-raising tales of being threatened and beat up. Some were pretty obviously exaggerated for effect, but some were undoubtedly true.

My classmates, of course, were often repeating what they’d heard at home. And they carried an anger, resentment, and hatred. Certainly, raw racism drove a lot of the exodus—white people in and around Chicago had essentially rioted more than once and terrorized people to keep their neighborhoods white. They didn’t succeed but they didn’t know, and I didn’t know, that back then, they and many of the black people who’d replaced them had both been victimized by some greedy slime balls who engaged in blockbusting, and bad government and institutional policy that produced redlining.

In my own home, there was no such sentiment about black people. My parents, first generation Americans, had landed in our town to follow job opportunities. My dad had gone to college on the G.I. bill, did a short stint as a teacher, and then got hired into a management-training program at a steel mill in East Chicago. My mom got a job teaching in the local school system.

I think of them—born to immigrants, children during the Great Depression, my mom taught Marines’ kids during WWII, my dad served overseas. And then Vietnam, civil rights, bra burnings, drugs, the sexual revolution, moon shots, TV, touch-tone phones!—and I realize now that they had to be just as bewildered back then as I can sometimes feel now (I really don’t want an Internet of Things, thank you).

There was no “n” word in our household. My dad did use the now politically incorrect “colored” to identify black people. But he didn’t have a hateful bone in his body. I think that Martin Luther King made them uneasy. Between civil rights and his opposition to a war they weren’t sure about themselves, I think they  found MLK unnerving. For me, it seemed kind of simple: Every time I saw King on TV, there seemed to be some trouble and unrest around him.

So, to the 10 year old, he was simply a troublemaker.

And then he was murdered. And a lot of the country went up in flames. More than one classmate uttered something to the effect that King had gotten what he deserved, undoubtedly echoing a parent’s sentiment.

And I stayed up late to watch special news reports about King’s life and his work. It was the end of a certain kind of innocence.

Jeez I thought, he went to jail, he risked his life. He’s not the troublemaker I thought he was. I’ve had it all wrong. Things are not as they appear.

It was at once disconcerting and liberating. It changed how I looked at the world forever. It made me more skeptical about what I thought I knew and about what I was being taught in school, what people around me were saying. It made me angry and disappointed about my own country—and myself. But the story of his courage and resolve also made me hopeful. King and others had made a substantial difference. Courage and resolve were power. It’s worth fighting the good fight.

For all that, today, I say thank you Dr. King.

This Tuesday afternoon I’ll be sitting on a panel at Chicago’s Shedd Aquarium with a theater director, a mother of three school-aged children, and a lawyer. Theater director Brian Balcom uses a wheelchair, one of Laurie Viets’ children is on the autism spectrum, attorney Rachel Arfa is profoundly deaf and uses bilateral cochlear implants to hear, and me? I’m blind.

So what do we all have in common? We all enjoy plays, go to concerts, visit museums and attend other cultural events in Chicago.

There I am lounging on a ruby red couch shaped like lips during a touch tour of the Pop Art Design exhibit at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago a few years back.

And now Lynn Walsh, the Manager of Accessibility and Inclusion at Shedd Aquarium, has asked the four of us to talk with staff there about ways museums and cultural institutions can be welcoming to all visitors — including those of us with disabilities. All staff and partners of Shedd have been invited to this session, but the main audience will be the Guest Experience team (the staff members who greet groups, sell tickets and memberships, man the information booth, welcome guests to the 4-D Theater, Oceanarium, Tide Pool, Sea Star Touch, Sturgeon Touch, and so on).

Shedd Aquarium’s Lynn Walsh is also co-chair of the Chicago Cultural Accessibility Consortium (CCAC), a Chicago non-profit organization encouraging cultural institutions to become more accessible to visitors with disabilities. CCAC offers a free accessible equipment loan program for institutions throughout Chicagoland, coordinates monthly professional development workshops for cultural administrators, manages a Google CCAC volunteer group for those interested in volunteering at an accessible event, and maintains a running calendar of accessible programs and services offered by Chicago-area cultural organizations.

The Chicago Cultural Access Consortium was founded in 2013, and in five short years it has established Chicago as a leader in providing accessible arts to those of us with disabilities. Thanks to them and all the Chicago-area cultural institutions who participate, I’ve been able to enjoy everything from architecture walking tours to live theater to outdoor music events as much as my fellow Chicagoans do. Maybe even more! The list of questions the Shedd Aquarium asked us to think about before Tuesday’s presentation strikes me as a helpful list other institutions (cultural or otherwise) might want to consider when it comes to accessibility:

1. What do you like about Shedd/the collection?
2. When thinking of accessibility and inclusion, what do we get right?
3. Where would you like to see improvements — at Shedd or at cultural organizations in general?
4. Do you know of a place that knocks it out of the park? What do they do?
5. Can you give us examples of accommodations that have made your experience at a cultural organization amazing?
6. Can you give us examples of accommodations that made your experience a self-conscious one?
7. What are some tips for service industry folks regarding how to find out what accommodations are needed?
8. Do you have any examples of times someone got it wrong, but then recovered well?

Kudos to Lynn Walsh at the Shedd Aquarium for putting Tuesday’s event together–I already know I’ll be learning a lot from the audience members and my fellow panelists there.