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!”

Check out this free online presentation I’m giving next week:

Unlocking Memories and Uncovering Stories<

Sponsored by the Oak Park Public Library and the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators (SCBWI) Oak Park Illinois Network

DATE: Thursday, May 12

TIME: 7 to 8:30 pm central time,

Author, journalist and teacher Beth Finke will lead a discussion on ways writing memoir and first-person narratives could apply –and benefit — the writing you do for children. Presentation is online and free to members and non-members of SCBWI.

Through observation exercises and writing prompts, Beth’s workshop will answer common questions about getting started, the difference between autobiography
and memoir, exposing family secrets, using pen names and pseudonyms, finding and working with publishers.

A fun and easy-going workshop to discover ways friends, family, celebrations, milestones, moments and place can be catalysts for unlocking memories and uncovering stories.

That’s the official invitation. Now back to me about how I got this gig. Children’s Book Author and Illustrator Sallie Wolf attended the Memoir-Writing Workshop I presented online for Chicago Public Library last winter and liked it. So much so that she contacted me afterwards to see if I’d do something similar for children’s book writers – this one sponsored by the Oak Park Public Library. “I’m hoping you could base it on the exercise you did in the memoir writing class I took,” she said.

The request was flattering, but a little perplexing. That winter workshop I gave was about writing memoir. Why would people who write children’s books want to know stuff about memoir-writing?

And then it came to me. I’ll ask children’s book author Sharon Kramer to present with me! Sharon Kramer’s book Time for Bubbe was published by Golden Alley Press! Many of you know Sharon from my mentioning her in Saturdays with Seniors blog posts here. She was a writer in the Me, Myself & I memoir-writing class I taught in downtown Chicago before COVID, and her Time for Bubbe book is a perfect example of how unlocking memories can lead to children’s stories. When I was still teaching Sharon’s memoir class and assigned “Write About a Grandparent” as a prompt, she came back with a story written in the voice of her grandson talking about visiting her mother (his great-grand-Bubbe). We all loved the piece and thought that, with a little revision, it’d make a great children’s book.

So Sharon got to work. She revised and rewrote, sent the story to publishers, Golden Alley Press took it on, a Yiddish glossary and Bubbe’s recipe was added, illustrator Michael Sayre gave it his special touch, and voila! Sharon’s masterpiece, Time for Bubbe is now available to order from independent bookstores or on Amazon.

I’ll be interviewing Sharon Kramer about her children’s book journey during the latter part of my presentation next week, she’s smart, thoughtful , witty and we always have a lot of laughs when we’re together. Join us! Link to the SCBWI event page for information on Zooming in at 7 pm central time on Thursday, May 12, 2022.

Today’s guest blogger, Armand Cerbone.

The last assignment I gave my memoir-writing classes before we took our spring break was to choose one of the movies nominated for an Oscar for best picture this year an have its title be the title of their essay. “You don’t have to see the movie,” I assured them. “Just use one of the titles.” A writer who’d vacationed in Northern Ireland came back with 500 words about their time in Belfast; a few wrote about disastrous events after telling someone, sure, you can Drive My Car; and many chose The Power of the Dog to write about their pups.

Today’s guest blogger, Armand Cerbone, was one of the very few who chose CODA. A board certified clinical psychologist, Armand has been advocating for affirmative mental health care and policies for LGBTQ+ individuals and couples for more than 40 years. He celebrated his 80th birthday last July and then celebrated again two days later by marrying Michael Zartman, his partner of 27 years. With classes starting up again, timing is perfect for Armand’s CODA essay, a lovely ode to memoir-writing.

by Armand R. Cerbone, Ph.D., ABPP

Coda: Something that serves to round out, conclude, or summarize and usually has its own intertest.

Each week in class we accept a prompt to summarize coda-like: a meaningful moment in a 500-word snippet. We pull a page or two from our past and make the past live again, if only for a minute. Stringing these memoirs together week after week, I am forming mosaics of lives lived more fully than I might ever have imagined, all about people I might never have known if not for the artifice of this class.

I wonder, too: if not for this class for the aged and aging, would we bother to engage one another in this way? Would we bother to engage ourselves if not for the mandate to call up a short scene from a much larger story? Would a beer or wine over dinner prompt us to tell the same tales we tell here in class?

Someone said that the young dream about the future, and the old dream about the past. As I draft the coda to my life, I dream about what I can yet do while I can do it. And how to keep myself fit enough to do what I can do now. I seek to marry the me that was with the me that might still yet be. That feels like the roundness implied in a coda.

I also wrestle with how to live for tomorrow and tomorrow and maybe not tomorrow. A fearful or morbid endeavor? Not at all. The awareness of limited tomorrows keeps me living as fully as I can today, and the five-hundred-word memoirs help. Your essays assure me you are marrying rich pasts with implicit promising tomorrows, too.

A friend in L.A., a victim of a different plague than the one threatening us now, used to call on Saturday mornings, knowing I would be in the midst of a hundred must-dos. Every call was the same. “Armand,” he would ask provocatively. “Are you making every moment count?”

Life has changed, of course. I can no longer multitask without risking life or limb. But trying to achieve as many as I can safely do reassures me that I am at least answering my morning prayer, “God, save me from complacency.”

And why do we draft memoir after memoir and share one after another? From what I can see, we share to connect and connect to share. Memoirs don’t let me forget that the importance of yesterday was learning how to connect, the importance of today is to enjoy and nurture connections, and the importance of tomorrow is, well…we’ll just have to wait and see.