Every September our city honors five Chicago artists and cultural institutions at a free “night of stars under the stars with live performances and videos” at Millennium Park. I feel a far-fetched fondness for one of this years honorees. You might be surprised to find out which. Is it:

• Blues legend Buddy Guy
• Photographer Victor Skrebneski
• Improv and sketch comedy theater The Second City
• Actress, educator and theater founder Jackie Taylor, or
• Museum founder and educator Carlos Tortolero?

Well, my winner is…Victor!

That’s Matt on the lower right.

How could a blind woman have a fondness for a photographer? I’ll try to keep my answer short.

One of my best friends from high school was Matt Klir. We met when I was 16. I could still see then, and I was the librarian for our high school band. Matt was a year younger, played the drums, and he’d signed up for “summer band” that year. When we discovered we both were bicycling from miles away to attend summer band practices, we started riding together. A friendship was born.

Matt’s house became my second home. He and his two sisters were beautiful. His parents were divorced, and the three of them lived with their young vivacious mother in a fancy 1970s sprawling home. Every single time I visited (and that was lots of times!) I’d venture into their dining room, edge around their tres modern glass dining room table and gawk at the huge black and white photos displayed on their walls.

Matt and I were together constantly in high school,but we didn’t “date.” We never even kissed. I graduated in 1976, and on prom night that year we pooled our money and bought Elton John tickets instead. Front row. I wore the polyester red, white and blue halter-topped bridesmaid dress from my sister Marilee’s Bicentennial wedding that year. Matt wore a powder blue leisure suit. He brought a dozen roses along, and when I handed them to Elton John’s lyricist at the end of the concert, Bernie Taupin said, “Thanks, love.”

Matt and his two sisters had been childhood models. News of Victor Skrebneski’s honor tonight motivated me to contact Janine and Crystal to reminisce. When I asked if either of them still had a copy of the huge b&w photo Victor took of Matt, they knew immediately which one I was talking about.

“I remember when Matt was at that shoot,” his older sister Janine wrote in an email. “Victor’s studio was so home-like. Lots of ladies and other people hanging around, comfy couches, along with his impressive photo studio in the main room.” Janine found the photo of Matt in her basement workshop. “It was rolled up in a box with other old pictures.” she had the photo straightened and scanned, and here it is.

I can no longer take in the photo Victor Skrebneski took of Matt back in the early 1960s for a Marshall Field & Company Christmas ad. Victor’s work is very memorable, though. I can still easily see my friend Matt as a youngster. He’s in his safari hat, surrounded by stuffed animals.

Matt died of AIDS 24 years ago, on September 17, 1992. I still miss him. I’ll be at Chicago’s Millennium Park for the 7:00 event tonight honoring my friend Matt — and the photographer whose work is still so clear to me. Thanks to Victor Skrebneski’s gift and his keen eye, I can still picture young Matt.

Vividly.

Beth and I and our Printers Row neighbors are in a kind of mourning. We learned a couple days ago that Hackney’s, our corner tavern, is closing after tonight.

The owners plan to reopen it—and their signature burger will be the centerpiece of the food operation. There will be tables and you can even order beer, wine and cocktails—but you’ll order at a counter, and there will be no bar, and no bartender. For us, the bar was where the action was. Blame industry trends.

We started coming to see Billy Balducci, and we just never left.

All the regulars gathered at Hackney’s on Friday night as word got out. We’d all hoped that it was a false rumor, but no, it was for real. The evening took on the feel of an Irish wake, a cocktail of celebration and sadness.

It may seem silly to mourn the end of a tavern—it definitely counts as a first world problem. But if you’re a regular reader, you know that for Beth and me and our friends and neighbors, Hackney’s has been a part of the fabric of the neighborhood and, really, a part of the rhythm of our lives.

Whenever Beth and I get home after a few days away, we drop our bags, read the mail, tend to whatever needs tended to then we head to Hackney’s—the ritual makes it official that we’re back home, where we belong.

Similarly, our friends Jim and Janet—who do a fair bit of international traveling—make it a habit to stop in on the evening of their return from overseas, no matter how jet-lagged. They have a drink or two and make themselves stay up until 10 to get back on central time.

We’ve all shared toasts on New Year’s Eve—no over-the top-celebrations—just a countdown, a sip of champagne and some kisses and handshakes.

Hackney’s brought together a whole slew of wonderful characters who you might otherwise think of as strange bedfellows. A Russian-born mathematician and computer scientist. A Manhattan native with a Ph.D. in linguistics who leans communist but works in IT for a stock trading company. Dealers in exotic camera equipment. Bee keepers. Wealth managers. Corporate lawyers. Artists. Architects. A man with cystic fibrosis who is alive because he received a double-lung and a kidney transplant and who spends every single day paying tribute to his organ donors—and to his wife, who got him through it. Gadget loving software programmers. Carlos, the retired iron worker who never misses a top jazz performance. A WGN radio news announcer. A retired art curator who used to rub elbows with the likes of Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein. A group of afternoon regulars that included a woman who is a native Chicagoan and a Sox fan and managed to get along with an Alabama native who grew up loving the Cubs—and he worked as an usher at Wrigley Field. There was two-beer Tom, aptly nicknamed because he never had one more or one fewer than two beers. Ever.

Black. White. Straight. Gay. Young. Old. You name it. Of course, lots of these folks I mention have been women, some with partners, others who are completely comfortable coming to the bar solo because it’s been that kind of place.

There have been the tourists and business travelers who wander in from local hotels with whom we have long, strangers-on-a-train conversations. These things don’t happen at restaurant tables—they happen at the bar.

And I can’t forget the staff, which has always included a bunch of millennials who, as I mentioned in an earlier post, give lie to negative stereotypes about their generation. They’re hardworking, polite and personable young people putting themselves through school, supporting themselves after graduation until they land (as the famous bartender Billy Balducci put it) big-boy jobs. Others are actors and performers working to support their artistic work.

They’ve helped keep Beth and me young in spirit—and they’ve patiently helped us keep in touch with modern trends. We’re going to miss them. A lot.

Many of the staff and patrons of Hackney’s Printers Row have become dear friends, and I know we’ll stay in touch. But it’ll take more effort, and at this point in my life, I also know that no matter all of our intentions, not all of us will stay in touch the way we could when we could just stop by Hacks to see who’s there.

We’ll all do fine—we, after all, have been part of what made the place special.

But it won’t be the same.

When Prince died in April, I asked the older adults in the memoir classes I lead to write about someone they didn’t know personally whose death made them really, really sad. Mel Washburn spent years as a dedicated firefighter before receiving his J.D. from the University of Wisconsin. I was very moved by his essay, and he generously agreed to let me share it here with Safe & Sound blog readers on the 15th anniversary of 911.

Memoir: Mourning someone I didn’t know

by Mel Washburn

Twenty years ago, the deaths of my parents left me with a hollow feeling that lasted for years. And nowadays the death of a friend makes me sad for weeks, whether we just met recently or we were friends from long ago.

But the death of a celebrity, such as Princess Diana or the pop singer Prince, hardly affects me at all. I didn’t know that celebrity. We had no personal connection of any sort. I can open the newspaper any day of the week and read the obituary of some ordinary person whose life story has more meaning for me than that of the Princess or the Prince.

NY Times, September 23, 2001, with photos of first responders who lost their lives.

Only once has the intersection of celebrity and personal tragedy really affected me — this was the death of 340 New York firefighters in the collapse of the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001.

Before they died, they were just ordinary men with ordinary jobs. When they died, however, they became celebrities. For months after their deaths, the media published their photographs, reported on their funerals, interviewed their friends and families, and talked about the circumstances of their deaths.

All through October and November and December, I couldn’t stop thinking about them. Their photographs, in particular, fascinated me. The New York Times published page after page of them in columns and rows, little one-by-three pictures of their heads and shoulders, each of them in uniform, usually wearing their uniform caps. They were young or middle-aged. Most of them were trim, but some were heavy-set. A lot of them wore the mustache that, for many firemen, is like a part of the uniform. They looked like the guys I used to work with when I was a fireman.

On September 11, the first airplane struck the towers at the time when the firemen were changing shift. Many of the men who had been going off duty put on their turnout gear and climbed onto the rigs to ride to the scene with the on-duty shift. They had no idea what they were getting into.

Fires in high-rise buildings are usually contained to one floor. If people die, it’s usually from smoke inhalation. It’s usually not firemen, who are trained and equipped to deal with heavy smoke. And high-rise buildings don’t fall down. When firemen die in a collapsing building, that building is usually two or three stories tall.

These guys didn’t expect to die on 9/11. They expected to climb a lot of stairs and rescue some civilians and maybe, at worst, fight a really nasty fire in really greasy black smoke. They didn’t think it would be easy, but they thought it wouldn’t be much different from fires they’d fought before.

Fate played a really dirty trick on those guys. To this day, I feel sad and hollow when I think of them. I’ve never felt this way about any other public event. I probably never will.

Last month I happened to catch a story on Weekend Edition and heard NPR’s Rachel Martin talking with Lisa Fenn, the author of Carry On: A Story of Resilience, Redemption, and an Unlikely Family. The two athletes Lisa Fenn profiled in her book and in a documentary for ESPN’s Outside the Lines program were present at the interview, too: Dartanyon Crockett and Leroy Sutton.

Watch the ESPN video.

Dartanyon Crockett is competing in the Paralympics in Rio this week. He is legally blind and was one of the best wrestlers on his high school team. Leroy Sutton lost both legs in a train accident when he was 11 years old. Leroy transferred to Dartanyon’s high school and took up wrestling, too.

Soon Dartanyon was carrying his new friend Leroy to practices and wrestling meets. Lincoln-West High School had no elevators, so they took high school classes together, always sitting side by side. “Dartanyon would get up to sharpen Leroy’s pencils,” an ESPN story reported. “Leroy ensured Dartanyon could read small print.”

I’ve never been in a wrestling match (unless you count the Three-Stooges-inspired arm wrestling matches my big sister Bev always won when we were kids!) but like Dartanyon and Leroy, I’ve benefitted from cross-disability help in my life as well. After losing my sight, I trained to volunteer for hospice. A lot of the work would involve counseling and matching resources to needs. I could do that.

The agency seemed thrilled to have my Seeing Eye dog Dora and me at the weekly sessions. They introduced us to visitors proudly, practically making us the poster children for the volunteer program. Soon after graduation, everyone in my training class had been assigned a patient — except me.

When I called the agency, they admitted their reluctance. “I don’t know, Beth,” the volunteer coordinator told me over the phone. “We’re just afraid the families might see you as needier than they are.”

I kept my name on the volunteer list, and a year later the agency finally gave in. Ernie, my first hospice patient, was an uncommunicative and eccentric old coot. None of his friends or family was willing to take care of him at home, so when his cancer got bad enough he was forced to check into a nursing home.

“We usually don’t send volunteers to nursing homes,” the volunteer coordinator told me. “But the home called us asking for someone. Apparently Ernie won’t talk to them about dying. Actually, he won’t talk to them about anything.”

Other volunteers had turned down this assignment. I took it and visited Ernie three times a week. At first, I did all the talking, but after a few weeks, he finally tired of listening and spoke up.

By the end of two months together, Ernie and I had hatched a plan to rent a wheelchair so I could push him onto one of the local riverboat casinos. I’d never been gambling, and he wanted to show me how.

Hardly a Paralympics game achievement, but ever since Ernie and I hatched that plan of ours, I’ve wondered why people with disabilities don’t pair up like this more often. Ernie’s health declined quickly, and the two of us never did get a chance to try out the slot machines together. During visits, however, he let me hold his hand. When he was transferred from the nursing home to a hospital, Dora and I were given family status at the ICU. We were allowed to see Ernie as often as we wanted. Mike came with me and Dora to Ernie’s wake.

Decades later, especially recently, I’ve experienced a peculiar sort of lift from providing and receiving help from someone with a disability that’s different from mine. My new boss at my Easterseals job uses a wheelchair, and at a recent conference she helped me find an empty seat in a crowded lecture room. I picked up a folder she dropped during the presentation. Actors who used wheelchairs guided Whitney and me to our spot on stage during our debut at Victory Gardens last month, and I helped them with physical tasks on stage that were difficult to do from a chair. It feels good to help — and be helped.

But back to the athletes. Both graduated from a high school in Cleveland where fewer than 40 percent go home with a diploma. Leroy Sutton went on to college from there, and Dartanyon Crockett moved to the Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs. Coaches there recognized his natural athletic abilities and invited him to learn the Paralympics sport of judo.

He won a Bronze Medal in judo in the 2012 Paralympic Games in London and is in Brazil now to compete in this year’s games in Rio.

NBC Olympics will combine to present more than 70 hours of coverage of the Rio Paralympic Games across NBC, NBCSN, and the NBC Sports app. That’s an increase of 64 hours from the London 2012 Paralympic Games. Coverage begins tonight, Wednesday, September 7, at 7 p.m. ET.

Play-by-play commentators, analysts and reporters are all former Paralympians, and they’ll have their work cut out for them trying to describe what they’re seeing when Dartagnon takes the floor — I don’t know a thing about judo. But trust me, I’ll be listening to every word.

There was a time when people behaving badly could ruin my day and my mood, and lead me to behave in a way that would have a domino effect. Just ask Beth.

I’ll never be accused of being a Zen master, but over time, things have improved. Some of it has been a conscious effort—breathing and self-coaching. And, harnessing the negative force for the good—Nobody is going to ruin my day). A lot, I think, is simply aging and mellowing.

SummerDance cures all.

Still, there are days. This past weekend, Beth and I took a tandem bicycle ride. We took it on a weekend afternoon on a beautiful day. That may sound like it made sense, but we’re talking about the lakefront bicycle path, which is a lovely route along Lake Michigan. But, on busy days, it’s like this: Think of every entitled, self-absorbed, selfish and irresponsible behavior you’ve ever seen—happening in sequence, and repeating.

It’s equal opportunity with bicyclists, walkers, and parents with those enormous Humvee-size child strollers all doing their best to endanger everyone else, without having the first clue that they are.

There was the bicyclist riding at speed (on a Divvy bike) on a crowded Randolph Street sidewalk (today’s human being lesson for her: When you’re on the sidewalk, walk the damn bike).

The little family of four who rented the not-so-little bicycle for four (where they sit two-by-two and the thing occupies both lanes of the path), peddling leisurely and not so much as trying to give way other traffic.

The dog walkers with a little yip dog and a really big black mutt that leapt high into the air and toward each bike as it passed.

The distinguished elderly gentleman who liked to whip his cane in circles, a la Charlie Chaplin, every once in awhile.

The wandering, three- and four- abreast walkers who somehow don’t see the WALKING PATH, DEDICATED TO WALKERS, about 20 yards CLOSER TO THE LAKE.

And the young man, who, as he pedaled out of the part of the path that circles the Shedd Aquarium, wasn’t paying attention where close attention must be paid. He weaved into our lane and almost took out the bicyclist in front of us. He somehow stayed on two wheels as he whipsawed the bike back into his lane just in time. And as we passed, I saw the problem: He was staring at his cell phone.

Words were spoken.

After our ride, we walked to this year’s Chicago Jazz Festival at Millennium Park. Big crowds—all civilized and well behaved—maybe it’s the jazz? We drank a cold beer in the fresh air. We ran into friends who invited us to sit with them, and we saw a terrific act—the Victor Garcia Organ Septet.

Happy Mike was back!

Walking home, we were about to cross a seemingly quiet Wabash Avenue. The light was about to change our way, but I halted and saw headlights oh, about a block south of us. I stopped with Beth on my arm. The roar of the Mercedes sedan’s engine rose explosively fast and the car blew through the intersection, not catching the yellow, at what I’d put at 45-50 mph.

Next thing, we heard the squeal of tires as the cretin driver slammed on the brakes before the next block.

I spent the rest of the short walk home stuffing cranky Mike back into his box.

After that, we took a short but luxurious nap, assembled a picnic to go, grabbed the camp chairs, and it was off to SummerDance to see the Fat Babies.

There we ran into Ellen and Ulrich Sandmeyer, who operate the gem of Printers Row: Sandmeyer’s Bookstore. We talked, relaxed, took in the Summerdance tableau, and Ellen and Ulrich minded things while Beth and I took a couple turns on the dance floor.

Happy Mike won.

Must be the jazz.