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.

It’s been happening steadily and gradually, and…Beth and I are busy again.

Busy as in going to plays, hearing music, joining friends for dinner—we went to see our son Gus a week ago and stayed overnight in Milwaukee.

We forgot how exhausting being busy can be. Fulfilling, but exhausting. (Play along and imagine that it has nothing to do with being two years older back when we were busy before covid.)

So last week we resolved to commit to nothing for this past weekend. Even if one of us brought up something that sounded kind of good, the other would scold: “We agreed not to schedule anything!”

And we ended up with a very enjoyable and full weekend. On Saturday—the nicest day of the year here in Chicago so far, our friend Colleen drove in from the burbs. We lunched at Roots, a place that opened just down the street from our place right before covid and somehow managed to survive. It was the first time Beth and I sat on the second floor—noteworthy because the place has an honest-to-god retractable roof. And it was retracted. It was glorious.

We spent the lunch catching up and enjoying a stiff breeze and the sunshine. It really is pretty cool up there. During lunch I got a text from our friend Jim. He was headed out to a local park to set up and test out a swell new tent he’d just gotten. But he ran into our friend Shannon, who was in town from the burbs with her toddler.

The rest of Jim is in there somewhere.

Toddler isn’t quite right. Sprinter is more like it. I saw him flying around at a distance but didn’t recognize him. He was bigger and faster. We hung out at our little plaza/park next to our building, and then headed to Dearborn Park, a proper park with lots of grass, to put Jim’s new purchase to the test.

Now, you should know that Jim is at least 6’5”. When he went looking for a one-person backpacking tent, that dimension was critical. And he found the perfect solution. An especially loooonnnng one-person tent.

The best thing about the tent? The name. It’s called the SoLong. Get it? Solo. Long. Solong! Turns out the tent itself is as clever as the name. It uses trekking poles for supports. Beth and Colleen and I watched as Jim assembled it, occasionally holding things down in a stiff wind.

I would call it’s maiden voyage a success. Hello SoLong! Beth and Colleen headed off for a walk and my backpack and I headed to the grocery store. Everywhere people smiled and laughed. Every outdoor café was full and buzzing with conversation. After what seemed like weeks of grey and cold, we were all liberated.

Some neighborhood friends had tickets to the Sunday 4:00 show at Jazz Showcase; they couldn’t use them. But we could! And did. And we heard a fantastic group: the Tom Harrell Quartet. On the walk in, a sign said that “at the request of the group’s management, we ask that you voluntarily wear masks.” We did, as did most in the crowd. Turns out that the bandleader, Tom Harrell, has both a heart and respiratory condition. In fact, he never stood up and played. He sat in a chair, bent over with his horn pointing downward. He’s 75, and clearly facing challenges. You might think that all sounds sad, but if you’d heard it, you’d have found it both remarkable and inspiring.

So an empty weekend turned, extemporaneously, into a busy and splendid one. There’s still a ways to go, but it’s fair to say, I think, that Chicago is back. And so are we.

Luna and I had a great time at Oak Terrace.

Yesterday our friend Ruth drove Luna and me to Highwood, Illinois to visit third graders at Oak Terrace Elementary, a school that participates in an Educating Outside the Lines Disability Awareness Week program. Every day that week someone with a disability comes to talk with them about their disability and the “helper tools” that let us do the things we like — or need — to do. My goal yesterday was to talk with the kids about being blind, what service dogs do, how a talking computer works, and answer their questions:

• Did you get to pick which dog you got, or were there not that many to choose from?
• Are you the only one in your family who is blind?
• Did you know I have a bunny named Luna?
• How do you eat?
• How do you shower?
• What is that metal thing on your dog’s back?
• So do you ever use that white stick anymore?
• Do you have a husband?
• Did your dog ever hurt itself and then cry so you knew?

I had to think a second before answering that last one. ”You know, we’ve been lucky,” I finally said, explaining that in the three years I’ve been working with Luna, she has never gotten hurt. “The only time I hear her cry is when she’s asleep having a dog dream.”

One kid there found this astounding. “Dogs dream?”he asked, but before I could respond, one of his classmates did. “Everybody dreams!” he said matter-of-factly.

Once my presentation was over, the kids told me that earlier this week a guy named Mac came to talk with them. “He only has one leg!” they told me. “A shark didn’t eat the other one, he was born that way.” Patty O’Machal, the founder of Educating Outside the Lines, was there with us and asked the kids what they learned from Mac that surprised them.”I never knew that someone with a disability could play football,” one boy said. “And basketball,” another one chimed in. “Fortnight, too!”

A girl raised her hand then. “I learned that people with disabilities can do things we do, they just find different ways to do them,” she said. “And they have fun.” Patty and I beamed. Disability Awareness Week was working.

“Except for one thing,” a boy in class reminded us. “Mac can’t do the hokey-pokey.”