Ali and Joe.

The Blind dating the blind guest post my 23-year-old pal Ali wrote for us Sunday got a great response from you Safe & Sound blog readers, so we’re rewarding you with another guest post by Ali. In today’s post, she describes Sunday’s date with her boyfriend Joe at Chicago’s Jazz Showcase.

by Alicia Krage

Beth and I started arranging to meet at Chicago’s jazz showcase for a Sunday show, and when I told her my boyfriend Joe is the one who got me started listening to jazz, she suggested I ask him to come, too.

I barely got the question out before he very enthusiastically agreed to tag along. Our next step was to work together on train times and coordinate schedules — something we are now very good at after a year of practice and visits back and forth between his dorm at Northern Illinois University (NIU) and my house in the suburbs.

The plan was for Joe to get on the train at Elburn, and I would join him at my train station. After the two of us chose a date that would work for us, I used VoiceOver, the speech synthesizer on my iPhone, to email Beth and confirm the date would work for her and her husband Mike to meet us at the train station in Chicago.

On the day we’d be heading off to jazz showcase, I could barely contain myself. I probably didn’t even need the morning cup of coffee —that’s how excited I was. Joe and I had been texting each other (he uses VoiceOver, too) all morning about how excited we were and counting the hours until we were on the train. In the midst of all that excited chatter was also some planning. We had agreed that once he was on the train, Joe would inform the conductor that there was a passenger getting on later who was also blind, and we’d like to sit together. All went well there.

Next was actually finding each other. Even though Joe had informed the conductor to help me find him, I texted Joe from home to make sure I knew where he was seated just in case something went wrong.

My dad drove me the five minutes from our house to the station and waited with me until the train arrived. My dad always makes sure to lead me to a conductor when I get on a train — that way I can let the conductor know where I’m getting off and that I’ll need help.

This time was different, though. Before we got off the train, I wanted to be able to find Joe and sit with him for the ride to Chicago. After spotting a conductor, Dad told him I was meeting up with another blind passenger. The conductor took over and my dad said goodbye. “Have fun!” he added — he is always encouraging and enthusiastic about my independent travel.

Then the journey began. The conductor led me through maybe four or five cars before we reached the very front, where Joe was seated. The automatic doors between cars made me anxious sometimes. I felt like I needed to rush so the door wouldn’t close on me — not so easy to do while navigating the step up and down into each car as well. We made it, though. We found Joe.

After greeting each other and getting situated, Joe and I never stopped talking. He asked me all kinds of questions about Beth: when we met, where we met, what she spoke about, how long it took to write her book, how often she goes to the Jazz Showcase. It was great to have someone to ride the train with and just talk to.

What wasn’t great was that the stops weren’t being announced out loud. If you’re blind, and you want to travel independently, you learn to be resourceful. I used a GPS app on my phone to track our progress. Time flew amongst all the excited chatter, and before I knew it, we were at the Ogilvie train station in Chicago.

A conductor helped us off the train, we met up with Beth and Mike and we left the train station by creating a train of our own: Mike held out his elbow to guide Beth while Beth held out her elbow to guide Joe while Joe held out his elbow to guide me. Joe and I were used to “the blind leading the blind.” This was normal for us, but a first for Mike and Beth.

We took a cab to Jazz Showcase, and we used our new found guiding skills to navigate inside and snake our way to our seats. As excited as I was, I wasn’t sure what to expect. I’d never been to a jazz club before —I’d just started to get into jazz music this past year after Joe took me to one of the NIU jazz concert events.

I must say, I was very pleasantly surprised. The band was outstanding, and before the event was over I knew I wanted to go back to Jazz Showcase again sometime.

We had dinner afterwards at Hackney’s Tavern. Beth had used her talking computer to email me the menu ahead of time, and I had gone over it with Joe. I had already chosen what I wanted ahead of time, which helped a lot. It was a fun dinner filled with laughter and questions from Beth about college life, and fun stories about how Joe and I met and how we started dating.

Mike and Beth went with us back to the train station, and after I bought my train ticket and requested assistance on the train, we all said goodbye. An agent guided Joe and me to a seating area, where we proceeded to wait for a good 45 minutes (I thought it best to get there early). She returned for us once the train had arrived and almost put us in the first car. We told her we couldn’t hear the stops called out when we were on the first car during our trip into the city, so we were placed in the second car in the front instead.

I’d be getting off the train long before Joe would reach his destination, and all the way to my stop Joe’s excitement was at an ultimate high. He couldn’t stop talking about how exciting the whole day had been. He loved the food, he loved the concert, he loved the city, and he loved the company.

His energy was contagious, and I smiled right along with him and happily agreed, responding with, “We need to come to Chicago more often!”

A hand-addressed envelope from a long-time friend showed up in our mailbox Saturday. Dianne had been my supervisor when I interned at Washington Consumers’ Checkbook magazine as a hayseed college junior. She was also kind of a cruise director for me and another intern, making sure we got something out of the work experience and also from living in the Capital of the United States.

Old school technology, timeless sentiment.

Dianne was there again when, after I graduated, I moved for real to D.C. to take a job at Checkbook. That was a tough time for me— I was homesick, felt lost and found myself literally lost virtually every day. The work required a lot of driving, and though D.C. proper was designed in logical fashion by Pierre L’Enfant, suburban Virginia and Maryland never got a whiff of the grid system.

Dianne was a steady force, helping me grow into my professional role, and to stick it out on the personal side. And she introduced me to her friends who became my friends—and are to this day.

Eventually, she was tagged to establish Checkbook’s second magazine, this one in the Bay Area. When she moved, I wrote her a letter expressing my appreciation for all that she’d done for me, and my general admiration.

When I opened the envelope from Dianne, that letter was inside with a sweet note from Dianne saying, “Obviously it meant a lot to me given that I’ve kept it 35 years.”

Just seeing the letter was powerful. The yellow legal paper (I couldn’t be bothered with stationery). My handwriting actually being legible (it no longer is). It transported me to my early 20s, and all of that period rushed back.

I was almost afraid to read the letter, but mercifully, it was pretty well written. And it sincerely reflected my abiding gratitude for all she’d done for me.

I still write emails like the one I wrote to Dianne way back then. But I wondered if these kinds of pen-and-paper experiences will be entirely lost to the digital age.

My uncle George Knezovich (left) and my pop, Mike Knezovich on the right. Thanks Aaron.

Then this morning, I received a text message from my nephew Aaron. He was going through some belongings and happened onto a photograph of my father with his brother, my Uncle George, at a brothers reunion during WWII. That photo was attached. The twinkle in my father’s eye just kind of dropped me in my tracks. And handsome George’s unmistakable jaw line. And their uniforms.

Beyond those memories, it was Aaron, very much in the present day, letting me know he was thinking about me.

So maybe it’s really not about the medium—legal paper and postage stamps and ink vs. pixels and jpgs and cable modems.

Maybe it’s what it has always been: However you accomplish it, never underestimate the power of making clear to people in no uncertain terms what they mean to you.

Ali and Joe.

Mike and I are double-dating this afternoon with a 23-year-old friend of mine named ali and her boyfriend Joe. Ali and Joe and I are blind — Mike will be the odd man out!

I met Ali years ago when she and her mom attended a presentation I gave at a “blind and low-vision fair.” Ali was an 11-year-old squirt back then, and we’ve kept up with each other ever since. She’s grown up now and will be joinging Joe at Northern Illinois University when she transfers there from College of DuPage in the fall. Here she is with a guest post about some of the challenges and joys of being  — and dating — someone who’s blind.

by Alicia Krage

In March of last year, as Joe and I lingered somewhere between friends and a couple, I’d often reflect on my friends’ questions about whether I’d prefer dating someone who can see, or someone who is blind.

I thought about what the challenges were with both, and in the end I realized that being blind and dating someone who is blind is honestly not as hard as it sounds. Transportation becomes a problem sometimes — you can’t exactly stay out until 2:00 a.m. and drive home  — but working on things together like figuring out schedules for trains and buses has helped me gain a different sort of independence.

I visit Joe at his college every other weekend, and I take the train back and forth to Northern Illinois University by myself. I’m much more confident on my own now than I was before I met Joe.

We go on dates a lot, and restaurants are very good about walking us to our seat, offering us Braille menus (if they have some), or reading off some of the selections. If we know where we’re going ahead of time, we use our speech software to look up the menu online before we go.

We’ve talked about experiencing other things on dates, like going to concerts, and I think we’ll be doing more of that together soon. He’s the kind of person that motivates you to be better, the kind that urges you (politely) to step out of your comfort zone a little bit.

Some things take more assistance than others, but it isn’t impossible, and there’s no one else I’d rather share crazy adventures with than my boyfriend Joe.

I look back at my previous relationships and question my motives, but in the end, I know those relationships taught me a lot. I learned what I want in someone and what I don’t, what works and what doesn’t, and I took that into consideration.

Joe and I will celebrate our one-year anniversary next week, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Back to me. Ali, Joe, Mike and I will be hearing Trombonist Wycliffe Gordon play with The Columbia College Jazz Ensemble at the 4:00 p.m. show at Jazz Showcase in Chicago this afternoon, a weekly all ages show that owner Joe Siegel refers to as his effort to “save the children” from the pop music they usually listen to. Live nearby? Visiting Chicago? Come join us!

It’s been a busy travel week for my Seeing Eye dog and me. We flew back from our fun-filled Sisters’ Weekend in the Pacific Northwest Monday night and then turned around Wednesday to take a three-hour train ride from Chicago to Champaign, Illinois. The next morning the two of us gave a presentation for an animal sciences class at the University of Illinois. While there, we stayed overnight in Urbana at the home of an old friend: retired Seeing Eye dog Hanni.

There’s Whit with Hanni’s bone during a previous visit to Urbana.

Whitney and Hanni are both Labrador/Golden Retriever crosses, they are both graduates of the Seeing Eye school In Morristown, N.J., and both of them are very, very smart. I had no trouble telling them apart, though. Hanni is a tail wagger — you know it’s her when you hear a thump, thump, thump on the floor. She’s taken on more and more of her Golden Retriever side in these matronly years: she wears her hair long and full. Her coat matches her personality: fluffy.

Whitney, on the other hand, is a lean, mean machine. She’s six years old now, and she no longer shows signs of childish jealousy that she used to on visits with her predecessor.

Sixteen-year-old Hanni is in very good hands with her people Steven and Nancy. She retired five years ago, and she’s slowed down since then, of course.

Hanni no longer runs to greet us when we enter the room. Like the royalty she is, she simply lifts her head and acknowledges us from her bed. The only person she gets up to greet at the door now is her beloved Nancy. At 16 years old (you figure it out in dog years, I can’t do the math) Hanni still gets out regularly with Nancy for walks. Sometimes, when they head to Homer Lake, Hanni even runs.

Nancy and Hanni came in our bedroom Thursday morning to check on us just as I was picking up the Seeing Eye dog harness — it was time to head over to campus for the guest lecture. “Whitney, come!”

“Think Hanni will want you to put it on her instead?” Nancy wondered out loud. I held the harness up, Whitney lifted her head to slide in, and as I buckled her in, Hanni answered Nancy’s question loud and clear. She turned 180 degrees and happily left the room. The girl enjoys her retirement, and who can blame her? It’s a joy to behold.

The writers in the Me, Myself and I class I lead in downtown Chicago entered a contest. If they win, the Lyric Opera of Chicago will help them produce an opera about the class!

Only problem? Writers in that class aren’t exactly computer savvy, and to win, they need fans to vote online. That’s where you Safe & Sound blog followers can help.

Wanda at her 90th birthday party with the writers.

After receiving numerous applications showcasing diverse, compelling and community-focused stories, a panel from the Chicago Public Library diligently reviewed and scored each group based on a predetermined set of criteria. Eight dynamic groups have been selected to move forward as semifinalists, each of which will have video profiles featured online for public voting beginning today.

Me, Myself, and I is one of the eight semi-finalists chosen, and now you can vote online for a 90-second video of writers Wanda Bridgeforth and Audrey Mitchell describing our class.

Three groups will move on to the next round and receive 16 weeks of classes from professionals at the Lyric to create original songs and scripts. Artistic support from Lyric Unlimited will help the finalist present its “fully-realized production” to the public in the fall.

Can’t you just imagine? Ninety-five-year-old Wanda as diva…

In order for this to happen, though, you’ve gotta vote for the Me, Myself and I 90-second video. ?After you vote, please share the link with your friends and family. Members of the public can vote once every day for the story they find most intriguing, and we need you to do just that to stand a chance against the young computer-savvy whipper-snappers we’re competing against. Please vote! Your reward? When we win, we’ll invite you to the opening in the fall.