Yesterday, we celebrated the Fourth of July on the third of July: We traveled to Glen Ellyn Illinois and spent the afternoon with lovely friends in one of their lovely backyards. We noshed and drank, we talked SCOTUS (and then drank some more) and laughed a lot. In spite of SCOTUS.

We took the Metra commuter train from downtown Chicago to the little bucolic downtown of Glen Ellyn. It’s a sweet little berg in the western suburb, and an affluent one. One of our friends picked us up at the station, and on the route she pointed out something I’d never seen before: The streets was lined with blankets and camp chairs. In Glen Ellyn, people call dibs for spaces to view the Fourth of July Parade—a day in advance. They leave their stuff out overnight. This would not work in my neighborhood. But it was sort of delightful to see.

Then, today the regularly scheduled program on WBEZ (our local NPR affiliate) was interrupted bu a report about a shooting at a Fourth of July parade. Details were sketchy. It was in Highland Park, which is very much like Glen Ellyn, but located on the North Shore area of Chicagoland.

As I write, the death toll is 6 and the shooter is still at large.

We have enormous problems and our institutions aren’t just not finding solutions, they’re working against solutions.

Today, I find it hard to feel patriotic pride. I guess I’m just grateful that my mother and father are not around to see this.

We all have a lot of work to do.

Hi all, apologies for radio silence—and thanks to those who’ve asked Beth about my well being because they weren’t getting posts. That’s very kind and appreciated.

I’m fine but I’ve been short on anything worth saying. I’ve also been extremely busy at work and just plain bushed sometimes. Speaking of work, my job at Phius brought me to A’22 last week at Chicago’s McCormick Place. It was this year’s American Institute of Architects meeting/conference/expo. Phius had a booth there and I was one of the staff.

If you’ve been to such events you know the drill: Some schmoozing, some actual learning and relationship building. This event is huge! Phius’ own annual conference draws several hundred, this thing drew thousands and thousands and the exhibit hall was enormous.

And, you know, AIA is big enough that they can get some heavy hitters as speakers. As in, President Barack Obama was the closing keynote.

In real time, I wasn’t the biggest fan of President Obama. Today, of course, he looks like an amalgamation of FDR, Winston Churchill, JFK, Mother Teresa…. He sat down with the current president of the AIA, Daniel Hart, in a relaxed, often funny, and sometimes deadly serious conversation.

And boy, it’s been six years since Obama left office and it felt like a hundred. Back in the days of relative order. He was asked the usual questions people like him get: What was the high point, and what was the low point?

“When I passed the Affordable Care Act,” he answered quickly about the top event. He recalled the Herculean effort it took to get it through, acknowledging it’s limitations, but clearly glowingly proud about the tens of millions of Americans it added to the insurance rolls.

Then he got quiet. He paused, and physically gathered himself. When a bunch of 6-year-olds were murdered at Sandy Hook. “That was a low point in waves. There was the shock of what had happened. There was me traveling to try to comfort parents to whom this had just happened,” he said. “It was the only time I saw Secret Service members cry on the job.”

And he recalled that it was the first of many such visits he made. And that Congress’ failure to act brought him close to cynicism, for the first time in his career.

He fought that off—and said “No Cynicism” was apparently a mantra in the White House with stickers to that effect on file folders, desks, etc.

He talked a great deal about the development of the Obama Center, and gotta couple laughs when he said he had to sit on the architects to keep them on budget.

Friday was a tough day for a great majority of Americans in light of the SCOTUS news. Obama  took pains to remind the audience that on that day, the Senate had also made a step, a small one and hopefully just the first, toward sane gun safety.

Apparently, never cynical. I’m trying.

Luna and I had a great time in Highland Park.

Any time I publish one of these “Questions Kids Ask” posts listing the questions I get at the school presentations I do with my Seeing Eye dogs, our friend and neighbor Mel Theobald hounds, excuse the pun, me to tell him what my answers were. And every time he asks, I come back with the same response: “Wanna hear the answers? You’ll have to come to a school presentation and find out!”

And guess what? Last Thursday he took the bait! He and Jan Devlin, another neighbor and friend, drove Luna and me to Highland Park, Illinois to visit third graders at Sherwood Elementary, a school that participates in an Educating Outside the Lines Disability Awareness Week program. Every day that week someone with a disability came to talk with Sherwood Elementary School students about their disability and the “helper tools” that let us do the things we like — or need — to do.

Luna guided me to two presentations for third graders Thursday morning. At each one I talked with the kids about being blind, what service dogs do, and how I use a talking computer to write books. As my Black Lab and I were readying ourselves for the question-and-answer part at one of the presentations , the teacher there gushed over Luna. “She’s sooooo pretty!” I took my cue, turned to the third-graders and told them I hear that a lot. “I just pretend they’re talking about me!” I laughed, then the questions started pouring in:

• Do you cook your own food?
• How do you, like make your breakfast and your cereal and stuff?
• How can you eat, then?
• How do you know where someone is if you can’t see them?
• Did you ever get robbed because you are blind?
• How do you know what earrings or necklace to wear when you’re getting dressed?
• Have you ever lost your dog when you were walking?
• Can you see in your dreams?
• Can you swim?
• What was the last thing you ever saw?
• How does your dog know where you are when you go on a walk?
• This is not a question, it’s a comment. You’re very pretty. And I mean you, not the dog.
• How old is your dog in people years?
• How can you ride a bike?
• Did your dog ever run away and you didn’t know where it went?
• Is it hard to know which way to go when your dog goes around a tree?
• How do you swim?
• How do you drive?
• When you call someone, are the numbers in Braille?
• Have you ever lost your dog when you were walking?
• How do you get on your bed?
• How does your dog know where you are when you go on a walk?

And with that, I picked up Luna’s harness, commanded, “Luna, Outside!” and the children cheered as my Seeing Eye dog guided me out of the classroom. “Good dog, Luna!”

Special thanks to Mel Theobald for acting as scribe and writing down all the questions the kids asked last Thursday. Dying to know me answers? Just ask Mel. Or Jan!

The permutations of the circumstances around women’s pregnancies are infinite. I can only speak of Beth’s.

In 1985, shortly after we learned that Beth wouldn’t ever see again, she was enrolled at the Illinois Visually Handicapped Institute, later to be nicknamed “Braille Jail” by Beth. Unfortunately, that moniker is less of an exaggeration than you might think.

That’s my dad holding Gus.

It was a tough few months. Her family who lived in the burbs would spring her on some weekends. Otherwise I’d spring her and hang out for the weekend. Every Monday morning sucked, as I’d drop her back off at Braille Jail and drive home to Champaign-Urbana.

Finally, around Christmas, Beth determined she’d learned as much as she could there, and sprung herself. When she came home, it was a relief, and a comfort. And, well, one evening, we celebrated being together again in a particularly physical way. I was using very natural feeling protection, but the problem was it felt so natural that I didn’t realize when it fell off.

Given our luck over the previous year, we kinda both knew that she was pregnant, and sure enough, she was. Beth had told me about the difficulty of bearing children if you have type 1 diabetes. We’d pretty much decided if we really wanted kids, we’d likely adopt.

So, to be perfectly frank, my baseline thought was that we’d have to run the gauntlet of abortion protesters that were outside the clinic every day. I grew angry just thinking of it—them not knowing a thing about Beth’s circumstances (or mine, for that matter). And I girded myself for self-control and to not give them, if the time came, an object lesson in the difference between murder and abortion.

Beth and I never faced that situation. She saw an endocrinologist who assured us that it was possible to have a healthy pregnancy and birth under the right circumstances and with lots of finger sticks. To start, he said, Beth needed a battery of tests to check on the current state of her kidneys and other health indicators. If any of these came back bad, he said he’d recommend terminating the pregnancy for Beth’s health’s sake.

They came back clean. Which was good, but also put the onus of a decision on Beth and on us. I say us because although yes, it’s a woman’s choice, if she’s in a relationship, it’s not a decision made in a vacuum. She was cognizant of what I thought.

We’d had a hard time for a long time. At first an unplanned pregnancy seemed like bad new, but with Beth’s health new it was suddenly potentially a light at the end of a long tunnel. Beth carried to term.

As many of you know, Gus was born premature, and very nearly died shortly after his birth. The doctor gave him a 50-50 chance at surviving his first night on earth. And he ultimately was diagnosed with an extremely rare genetic abnormality that HAD NOTHING to do with Beth’s diabetes. It left him with developmental disabilities.

I can’t speak for Beth, but for me, that fact that she and we had a choice in the matter made all the difference in the world in how I viewed our son. I almost felt a deeper responsibility to give him a good life..

Gus lives in a group home in Wisconsin now and will turn 38 this year.

And I’ve never supported the right of women to a safe and legal abortion more than I do today. That doesn’t reflect ambivalence about how I feel about Gus. I love him and always have. What would Beth/we have done if we knew what was in front of us? Doesn’t matter, We didn’t.

But, fortunately for us, it was up to Beth and to me.

As always, lots of questions. (photo by Jamie Ceaser)

It’s Disability Awareness Week at Red Oak Elementary School in Highland Park, Illinois, and when we arrived there Tuesday the third graders were eager to learn all they could about what it’s like to be blind and use a Seeing Eye dog. Their questions were priceless. Here are some of them:

• Did you go from being able to see to only seeing in one eye and then being blind?
• How do you eat? Like, do you just smell it and know what is there?
• Are you married?
• Do you have a white stick, and if you do, when do you use it instead of your dog?
• How many Seeing Eye dogs did you have?
• Do they die?
• What were all your Seeing Eye dogs names?
• Is this one your prettiest?
• When you used your white stick and made that mistake, how did you know you were in the road instead of the sidewalk?
• How do you drive?
• Do you know what your husband looks like?
• Is it hard to be a blind author?
• When they told you that you were blind, did you think you would ever be independent again?
• When your dog gets tired of walking down the same street and crossing the same road all the time, is that when you get a new dog?
• How do you know that your dog sat down when you told him to sit?
• Does your dog ever go to sleep?
• Do you know a second language?

That last question may seem out of nowhere until you learn that kids are taught in English and in Spanish at Red Oak Elementary: it’s a dual-language school. And my answer to that question was yes. “Of course I do,” I said with a smile. “I know Braille!”