That’s Bobbie at the center of this Finke family photo, taken in late November, 1961. I’m the two-year-old sitting to her left.

My sister Bobbie died a month ago today. Mike wrote a tribute to her after we got home from her memorial service a few weeks ago. Today I’m sharing an excerpt from an essay we published in my newsletter –it’s about how writing helps me remember her.

My oldest sister Bobbie got married and moved away months after my first birthday. Bobbie was 20 years older than me, and when I was growing up, our age gap prompted people to ask whether she really felt like a sister to me. My answer was always the same. Well, yes – she’s been my sister my whole life!

During the ten-day lag between her death and her memorial service, the Finke nation (I am the youngest of seven and have oodles of nieces and nephews) dug through boxes of old photos to post pictures of Bobbie on Facebook. Friends and family members left comments about memories those photos evoked. You can well imagine that I would like to be able to see those photographs, too, but rest assured that my own reminiscences of Bobbie are not diminished by my inability to see them.

I owe that to writing.

When I think about Bobbie now, the episodes I’ve written about her are by far the most clear and vivid in my mind. Perhaps it’s the result of writing and rewriting, getting just the right verb, working and reworking each piece until it’s as true as I can make it. Maybe the saying is backwards.

Maybe a thousand words are worth a picture.

In writing my memoir Long Time No See, I revisited a short stay at Bobbie’s house while recovering from eye surgeries in 1985. That was a difficult exercise. But because I took the trouble to get it as right as I could, I can still feel the warmth of the sun on my skin, breathe in the mix of dirt and foliage from her garden, savor the taste of those breakfasts she made me every morning, hear the laughter and voices of my other sisters gathering with us there, and feel my little niece Jennifer’s hand guiding me so, so carefully to the bathroom, placing my hand on the toilet roll when we got there so I’d know where I was.

Writing about that time again now reminds me of how courageous my oldest sister was. I was seven years old when diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes. Bobbie was diagnosed a year after that, when she was 28. Years would go by before complications set in, and when I was losing my eyesight, Bobbie was valiant enough to take care of me in her home. That, even though it meant facing what could possibly be her future.

As the saying goes, she didn’t blink.

Mike and Seeing Eye dog Whitney flew with me and my sister Bev to the memorial service in South Carolina a few weeks ago. Two members of the Finke nation flew in from Brooklyn. Others flew in from Orlando, and more drove in from Louisville, from Indianapolis, even as far away as Minneapolis. We all loved Bobbie, and for me, writing helps to hold Bobbie especially close.

John Craib-Cox is one of two writers who will join me on September 6.

Writers who are featured in Writing Out Loud come along to book events to read their own published essay from the book, and I am really looking forward to having Regan Burke and John Craib-Cox up in front with me at Women & Children First bookstore in Chicago next week. From the Women & Children First web site:

Author Reading: Beth Finke, WRITING OUT LOUD
For this event, Beth Finke will discuss her new book Writing Out Loud: What a blind teacher learned from leading a memoir class for seniors. In this memoir, readers learn the inside story on how one call from Mayor Daley’s Department on Aging changed Beth’s life and the lives of her students. John Craib-Cox and Regan Burke, two students from Beth’s memoir class, will join her to read excerpts from Writing Out Loud, too. The reading will be followed by a Q&A.

Beth Finke is an award-winning author, teacher, and journalist. She also happens to be blind. Beth’s Seeing Eye dog, Whitney, leads her through airports and hotels to events all over North America to speak on memoir writing, disability, workplace accessibility, and overcoming adversity. Beth leads writing workshops at Northwestern University Summer Writers’ Conference and at Chicago’s Printers Row Lit Fest. She is the recipient of a writing fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and the ASPCA’s Henry Bergh award for children’s literature. The Lisagor Award Beth won for a radio piece about the Chicago White Sox makes her the only blind woman in America to be honored for sports broadcasting, and she appeared on the Oprah Show in a short segment about working as a nude model for university art students before her writing career took off. Beth is married to Mike Knezovich. They have one grown son, Gus, and live in the Printers Row neighborhood of Chicago.

Event date:
Wednesday, September 6, 2017 – 7:30pm
Event address:
Women & Children First
5233 N. Clark St.
Chicago, IL 60640

Regan Burke, another writer from my class, will also join us.

About the writers appearing with me: John Craib-Cox has lived in Chicago’s historic Lincoln Park neighborhood since 1974. Known for his dapper dress style and the color of his socks, John has spent years as an interior designer retrofitting older buildings to bring them into compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act while honoring the Guidelines for Historic Restoration.

Regan Burke is a lifelong civil rights activist and was Bill Clinton’s scheduler during his presidential campaign. She left Chicago to work in his administration for a few years before returning back home.

We’re expecting a number of other writers from the memoir classes I lead to be in the audience, too, so don’t miss this opportunity to schmooze with these senior stars. And just to be contrarian, when it comes to the guest readings, I may have John go first.

Sometimes I think we, as a culture, are learning and improving. Other times, I’m pretty sure we are all going to hell (WAAGTH).

For example, on one hand, I feel—totally anecdotally—as if more people know better than to have a loud conversation walking down a public sidewalk, exposing fellow pedestrians to TMI. (My favorite awful example as I walked down Dearborn: “Don’t tell anyone, but she has cancer.”)

But then I observe Beth and Whitney nearly colliding head on with an oncoming walker who’s looking at her cell phone or texting. Or I get on an elevator and instead of good morning, there’s a guy with headphones who’s pretending hard that I’m not there, all while I can hear his shitty music leak out of his ears.

So yeah, it brings out Mr. Grouchy Mike.

I don’t begrudge their enjoyment, it’s not the end of the world. Or, maybe it is.

I was thinking about all this the other day and I remembered an essay by Jonathan Franzen that I read many years ago, and which he wrote many years prior to that—1998 to be exact. It was a most interesting take on what was then a new concern: a loss of privacy, particularly in the context of the then nascent Internet age.

He argued that privacy is hardly at risk. That we can isolate ourselves and be more private than ever in many ways. That in a small town in 1892, the shopkeeper knew everyone’s business, and really, that everyone knew everyone’s business. That today, small families live in giant homes where everybody has their own room and even bathroom. And that we are inflicting our personal privacy on everyone else.

I can’t do his full thinking justice—you can read an excerpted preview here, and I hope you will. It’s called” Imperial Bedroom” and it’s in a collection of his essays called “How to Be Alone.”

Anyway, what Franzen rued more than privacy was a loss of the public space as he (and I and many of us) have come to understand it. That a sense of order and decorum in public spaces that has served us well is breaking down. An excerpt on walking down a public sidewalk:

All I really want from a sidewalk is that people see me and let themselves be seen, but even this modest ideal is thwarted by cell-phone users and their unwelcome privacy. They say things like “Should we have couscous with that?” and “I’m on my way to Blockbuster.” They aren’t breaking any law by broadcasting these breakfast-nook conversations. There’s no PublicityGuard that I can buy, no expensive preserve of public life to which I can flee. Seclusion, whether in a suite at the Plaza or in a cabin in the Catskills, is comparatively effortless to achieve. Privacy is protected as both commodity and right; public forums are protected as neither. Like old-growth forests, they’re few and irreplaceable and should be held in trust by everyone. The work of maintaining gets only harder as the private sector grows ever more demanding, distracting and disheartening.

That rings true to me. That we care so much about our privacy and our little virtual gated communities, that we ignore the person three feet away.

Franzen again:

A genuine public space is a place where every citizen is welcome to be present and where the purely private is excluded or restricted. One reason that attendance at art museums is growing is that museums still feel public in this way.

And here I had been debating whether to renew my membership to the Art Institute. Debate over.

WBEZ (Chicago Public Radio) had me come to the studio yesterday morning to talk about using the Eclipse Soundscapes app to experience Monday’s solar eclipse. If you missed it, you can listen to the 12-minute interview online here. I was relieved when host Tony Sarabia opened the interview saying he’d tried the app himself and found it cumbersome.

It was.

I didn’t want to have to say that, though, and Tony’s opening let me off the hook. “It’s a work in progress,” I explained, pointing out how cool it is that the likes of NASA and the Smithsonian and the National Park Service are working together on something like this, making things more accessible to people with disabilities. “I’m kind of flattered they’re even trying.”

The app was a success in one very important way. It got me outside Monday to be with other umbraphiles (a word I learned from someone in the green room before my 12 minutes of fame). Can’t you just picture me alongside strangers in sunglasses and neighbors using DIY pinhole eclipse cameras made from cereal boxes?

As the eclipse neared it’s 87% high mark for Chicago, the delivery guy from SRO, our downstairs take-out joint, offered to lend his special sunglasses to Mike to take a look. Mike could say “Yes!” without feeling obliged to dote on me and describe the goings-on around us: while he was trying out the special sunglasses, I was busy swiping my iPhone. That, or putting it up to my ear to listen — as I told radio host Tony Sarabia, “Some people must have thought I was an idiot, talking on my iPhone while they all were looking up to the skies!”

The Harvard Solar Astrophysicist behind eclipse soundscapes is Henry “Trae” Winter, described as a scientist with a penchant for scientific engagement projects. He was building a solar wall exhibit for museums when he first noticed that the only thing some of the so-called accessible exhibits included was the item’s name in Braille. Other exhibits — including his own — had no accessibility component at all.

“Winter began to brainstorm an astrophysics project that would use a multisensory approach to engage a larger percentage of the population, including the visually impaired community,” the app says.  “The ‘Great American Eclipse’ of August 2017 seemed like the perfect opportunity.”

As the eclipse progressed Monday, I sensed the air feeling a bit cooler. The wind seemed to pick up a bit as well. The app advertised a “rumble map” that was supposed to vibrate and shake to let me feel different features of the eclipse, but I was never able to get that feature working. The sound on the eclipse soundscapes app did work, though, and any time I ran my pointer finger over the screen I’d hear a whir that sounded like a low-pitched kitchen blender. When the blender ran faster, the pitch would go up, indicating the light was really bright there. When my finger slid over the moon, the kitchen blender turned itself off — completely dark.

The app narrated the eclipse’s progression in real time, too, and during my WBEZ interview Tony Sarabia read a snippet of an eclipse soundscapes description out loud in his own voice:

Projections of light from the sun’s outer atmosphere called helmet streamers extend in all directions from behind the moon. In contrast to the black, featureless moon, the pale, wispy streamers appear as delicate as lace. The largest streamers have a tapered shape that resemble flower petals.

Notice how it’s written using things we can touch, like lace and flower petals? On air I pointed out that the description he read was “poetic.”

Mike and I were out there Monday for about a half hour. I took iPhone breaks from time to time to eavesdrop on the people next to me discussing where they’d looked for their special sunglasses, how long the line at the Adler Planetarium was that morning, what they’d found on the NASA site, and what they were seeing through the sunglasses they eventually managed to get their hands on.

It was all pretty cool, until a TV news helicopter decided to perch overhead. My little eclipse soundscapes app didn’t stand a chance. With all that real-time whirring going on above us, I couldn’t hear a dang thing!

Have no idea what I’m talking about here with this eclipse soundscapes thing? I don’t blame you! Link here for part one of my explanation of the app.

When I moved to the D.C. area in the late 1970s, I was flabbergasted to routinely run across vestiges and glorifications of various Civil War figures. I mean, a guy from the Land of Lincoln can be uncomfortable driving on Jefferson Davis Highway. That’s when my naïveté about what the Civil War had accomplished—and how far we had come—began to crumble.

There are still people who will argue that the monuments are about history, blah, blah. And you may have found yourself on the fence about Confederate monuments out of a vague sense of wanting to be fair or nice or wanting to pick your fights.

Read this piece, Southern Comfort, and then we can talk again. Note: It’s from the NY Review of Books, and it was written in 2001. And it’s as timely today as ever. (H/T The Beachwood Reporter.) It isn’t short—but it’s well written, well researched, and well reasoned. So I hope you’ll settle in and give it a read.

Speaking of the unreconciled aftermath of the Civil War, here’s another piece I ran across at Christianity Today about how one, as a Christian American, should confront the awful history of lynching and moreover, the terror tactics to enforce white supremacy during Jim Crow. It, too, requires an investment in time that I found worthwhile.

Bryan Stephenson managed not to get shot by the police.

There’s also this piece that begins with a terrifying first-person account of nearly being shot by the police–Presumption of Guilt was written by Bryan Stephenson, the founder of the Equal Justice Initiative. He builds on his harrowing personal experience and writes about the complexity of the forces that came together to put him in that spot. It isn’t preachy—no matter how you think about these matters, I think you’ll learn something. Give it a read.

Finally, I’ve mentioned Roger Wallenstein’s weekly White Sox Report at the Beachwood Reporter. This week’s column isn’t about baseball. Roger is Jewish, and he reflects on feeling something different and unwelcome about being Jewish, something he’d never felt in his 70+ years until watching what happened in Charlottesville. It’s called The Plot Against America – And Me.

In the aftermath of Charlottesville—and in response to this sense of being in a constant state of national emergency the last several months—I get caught up in the pithy social media memes, and the echo chamber that I and like-minded people can get caught up in. I get enraged, feel self-righteous, and then return to sort of an empty and pessimistic state.

And then I bump into people—like the people who wrote these articles—who are wrestling with things the way a lot of us are. They give me comfort in knowing I’m not alone, in reminding me that memes are not knowledge or reasoned arguments, and that it’s incumbent on all of us to start at the start: Read. Think hard about what you really believe—and be honest about it. And then express it, respectfully, even if it takes more than 140 characters.