1987. A hot, humid day in Champaign, Ill. Mike and I are perched on stools at the Esquire Lounge. My folded cane sits atop the bar, forming a rigid white line that separates my beer glass from Mike’s. The discussion? How can I get to the pool on my own to swim laps.

The stranger sitting next to me interrupts. Her name was Jean, she said, and she couldn’t help but eavesdrop. “Are you talking about getting to the pool on campus?” she asks. I nodded. Newly blind back then, I didn’t have a Seeing Eye dog yet. I could hardly make it to the mailbox down the street. How was I going to get to the bus stop on my own? Not to mention the locker room, then to the edge of the pool to swim?

That’s our friend Jean in her writerly book jacket photo. Click on the photo for more on her and her books.

“That’s easy!” Jean said. She was a swimmer. “I drive over to the campus pool every other day. I’ll just pick you up and take you with me.”

And that’s how I met Jean Thompson. During our drives to the pool, I found out she was a writer. A real writer. A really good writer. She taught creative writing at University of Illinois. Jean was a natural-born teacher, really — she knew when to set me free, let me try taking the bus and handle the pool on my own.

I’ve been swimming on my own ever since. I’ve been Jean’s friend ever since, too. And what a generous friend she’s been to me.

So it came as no surprise to hear Jean helped a man who was homeless — the real surprise is that an essay she wrote about doing so was published in the New York Times today. She didn’t tell me! Mike saw the piece, though, and read it aloud to me. You can read it online here.

I hope you do — you’ll see why I feel lucky to call her my friend.

My Seeing Eye dog Whitney had a birthday yesterday. While reminiscing about our years together, I came across the Puppy Profile the 16-year-old who raised Whitney wrote about her as a puppy. 

She’s lucky 7.

Seeing Eye puppies are born and bred at the Seeing Eye breeding station in New Jersey. When they are six weeks old, they go to live with a volunteer for a year. Puppy raisers give the dogs affection, teach them basic obedience, and expose them to social situations they might encounter as Seeing Eye dogs.

When these wonderful, generous, selfless volunteers return the dog they raised to The Seeing Eye campus for formal training, they’re asked to write up a Puppy Profile to give to the blind person who is eventually matched with the sweet puppy they raised.

Today, in honor of Whitney’s birthday, I am sharing Whitney’s Puppy Profile with you, our loyal Safe & Sound blog readers. Those of you who have had the honor of meeting Whitney will see that many of her childhood behaviors endure — I take her youthful attitude as a sign she’ll be around for a long, long time to come.

Puppy Profile

Whitney was raised in rural New Jersey by myself ( I am a 16 year old girl) my sister, parents and my grandmother. We live in a large house that sits on almost two acres of land. She could access a lot of the property and we also took her for walks in the woods every chance we got.

Whitney had a very strong relationship with our 2 year old Golden Retriever and they were best buddies right from the start. Whitney also wanted to be friends with the cat in the beginning but the cat was not into that. It took a while but they did become friends after some time.

We were able to take Whitney to most places we went. She especially loved gatherings of friends or family because she loves attention. She has also been to the movies, the mall, the post office, of course Petco, because it is where the pets go, club meetings and the county fair.

Whitney loved to chew her Nylabone and of course loved plush toys but would ALWAYS destroy those. She is a very bright dog and was extremely obedient. When given the command to lay down, sometimes she would aggressively go right to the ground, others she would do a bunch of circles before going down with a grunt. She doesn’t like to have her head pet but loves to be scratched on the chest and rubbed under her jaw.

Whitney has always been impressively smart. We have had many dogs but none as smart as her. When you ask her a question she will actually look at you as if she is pondering an answer.

When she needs to go out to the bathroom she sits quietly by the door until someone notices her, if that doesn’t happen she will start to whine as if to say, I need to go out! She will always park on command and will even squat if she doesn’t actually need to pee.

Happy birthday, Whitney, and many, many thanks to you, Whitney’s teenage puppy raiser. How can it be that you’re a 22-year-old young woman now? Whitney hasn’t aged a bit!

A couple of stories caught my eye this past week. One is from the Chicago Tribune on Illinois’ system for funding schools. The way we fund schools in Illinois is nothing new, and it keeps not changing thanks to dysfunctional politics, but the short of it is that Illinois relies to an unusual degree on local property taxes to fund schools. One result is that affluent districts—the ones with enough money to also pay for test prep courses and other aids—are willing to pay out the nose for good schools. For those who think there’s a crisis in public education, it isn’t in these places.

But its residents pay out the nose.

And it gives poor areas short shrift—even with Federal programs designed to attempt to balance the deficit poor localities face when it comes to education compared to rich areas. Anyway, it’s a long piece, but if you’re an Illinoisan, or you just care about education, it’s worth the read.

The other story was about how selective enrollment schools haven’t had the positive impact hoped for when it comes to kids from lower income areas who get in. In fact, the story explains how attending the likes of the vaunted Walter Payton High School actually hurts their chances of getting into elite colleges.

Education is always in the news. Charter schools are always a controversial topic, and they’re going to be even more so in the near future. In my view, selective enrollment schools and charter schools are flip sides of the same coin. They represent an abandonment of the very principle of public education; they are gimmicks to subvert public education, and they run from root problems.

Here in Chicago, you may have heard we have a gun violence problem. In my view, we have a neighborhood poverty problem that has worsened in my lifetime. And, in my view, a big cause has been collective loss of interest in the notion of common interest, of shared interest—public interest—as manifested by our support for public education.

When I grew up (here comes the get off my lawn part), schools were a part of the fabric of our neighborhoods and of our community life. That they were healthy made a big difference.

What we have in Chicago, as best I can tell, is a system that siphons many of the best students—the kind that can help anchor a healthy school culture—out of their neighborhood schools.

I’m no Ph.D., but that would seem to make it harder to maintain a healthy school culture, and easier to hollow those schools out, write those schools off and eventually close them.

And the neighborhoods suffer for all that; it’s a slow painful bleed. And I don’t think anything’s going to get better until we recognize our common interest in making sure kids on the South and West sides get a good education—in their own backyards.

That’s OJ, Jen’s first guide dog.

I’ve made plenty of heartwarming connections through my Safe & Sound blog, but one I find particularly touching is my connection with Jennifer Doherty, a young guide dog user in Ireland. I have never met Jen face-to-face, but I feel I know her well by reading her Paws for Thought blog. She’s been blind her entire life, she’s in her early 30s, she loves music and goes to tons of live concerts, she owns her own home in Buncrana in Donegal (which she says has been voted the “coolest county in Ireland”), and a while back she was laid off from her job.

That’s when she decided to make a change. “After experiencing lots of office politics and organisational changes in the places I’d worked,” she wrote in a blog post, “I was beginning to like the idea of working for myself.”

Here’s an excerpt from that post, Being My Own Boss, where she describes her recent visits to her local “enterprise office”:

There were meetings, conversations, questions, forms, things to be clarified, lots of uncertainty on my part, and a judging panel, but last week I was given the go-ahead to operate JD Audio Transcription as a business.

Jen keeps up with blind bloggers from all over the world, and I find it so interesting to learn what services are available in different countries and how they affect our lifestyles.

Here in America, a majority of the people I know who are blind and have jobs are self-employed. We don’t start out wanting to be our own boss, but when no one will hire us, we hire ourselves. “I wouldn’t consider myself a business person,” Jen says in her blog post. “But I know I’m hard working and responsible, and I’m up for the challenge.”

Amen!

If you Safe & Sound blog readers find yourselves needing interviews, lectures, focus groups, workshops, conferences, seminars or radio programs transcribed from audio, please consider contacting JD Audio Transcription.
My own work leading memoir-writing classes exposes me to people looking for someone to transcribe personal stories from audio to word files – what a delight it will be now to refer them to a hard-working, reliable new business owner.

“I have lots of ideas in my head, I just have to find ways of advertising them and getting them out there.” Jen writes. “If anyone could like the Facebook page or pass it on, I’d really appreciate it.”

Hope you had as good a Thanksgiving holiday as we did. We mostly hunkered down at home, and I cooked a lot.

I did not make Thanksgiving dinner—we went to some generous friends’ for that. But I did make some chicken broth from scratch, and used part of that to make some yummy beef barley soup. (Yep, the recipe called for chicken broth, not beef broth.)

Success!

Chicken broth seems like such a simple thing—but I’ve never been satisfied with mine. Until this weekend, that is, thanks to advice from our friend Jim, who’s a chef. The key is simple—use more chicken parts and less water to concentrate the flavor. Doh. Jim directed me to a great site called Serious Eats, which includes some nice tips for making a good broth.

I followed the Serious Eats recipe, and the result was an apartment—actually, an entire hallway—that smelled like comfort for hours. The next day, it was the same, only this time the aroma was beef and barley.

I’ve been cooking since high school—my mom taught me a lot, especially about Italian cooking. But I didn’t really fall in love with cooking until Beth and I were married. In our early days, money was tight, so going out to eat was a luxury we couldn’t afford. Plus, having friends to dinner was a way for us to thank them for all the help they provided in the days after Beth lost her sight and after Gus was born.

Apart from all that, cooking is therapeutic for me. When I get stuck in my own spinning brain (which happens a lot), cooking slows things down and gets things in order. The process—chopping, measuring, stirring, simmering roasting—is calming and gratifying in itself.

And when everything turns out like it did this past weekend, it doesn’t hurt that it’s awfully good to eat.