In 1975 I was 18 and the world was my oyster. Actually, back then I’d never had an oyster, but you know what I mean.

I was a freshman in a triple dorm room that was pretty much identical to a double room except it had a bunk bed and three closets. Forbes Hall was all male, heavy on scholarship athletes, and each floor shared two communal bathrooms and showers.

And it was the absolute best. I’d finally gotten out of high school, away from my BORING home town, living away from home, at the University of Illinois, back then a stone cold bargain at under $500 for tuition. I was scared stiff and excited all at the same time. To me, Champaign-Urbana was the very best place in the world.

The UIUC Quad in February. Nutty.

A lot besides the tuition has changed on campus. Chain stores and restaurants and high-rises have replaced familiar old dives in campus town. The dorm complex I lived in has been demolished and replaced with digs that we would have considered palatial.

But still. My visit there this past weekend felt so familiar. To start I saw Barry, a Web developer whom I met at a job eons ago—before there was a Web. We played catch-up and I met some of his swell friends for the first time. Then there was Hanni (Beth’s 16-year-old retired Seeing Eye dog)—I stayed with her and Steven and Nancy one night.

Saturday morning Steven gave me a lift to visit another long-time friend, Jeff, who recently moved to new digs. Jeff showed me his in-progress renovation projects and we caught up effortlessly over coffee and homemade banana muffins. From there it was a healthy hike to Jim and Judy’s—friends and former neighbors—where we sat on their grand front porch and soaked in unseasonably warm weather and a springish breeze while we shot our own breeze.

It was so nice outside that walking was a pleasure, so I decided to hike the mile or two to downtown Champaign (which itself has transformed from a hollowed out ghost town to an entertainment district dense with restaurants and bars and music clubs).

The walk took me through campus—past some familiar sites like 60s era residence halls that looked exactly as I remembered them. The Krannert Center for the Performing Arts looked in good form. Designed by famed architect (and UI graduate) Max Abramovitz, Krannert is a one-of-kind place. One theater has superb acoustics and has been used by the likes of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra for recording. And there were some ancient houses that had long ago been converted to university offices and somehow survived.

And then through the center of it all, the Quad.

So much has changed but as soon as I reached the Illini Union at the north end of the Quad, I realized not everything has. It could’ve been 1975. It was 65 degrees and students were out in droves, in premature shorts and summer outfits. Quad dogs. Ultimate Frisbee. Blankets and picnics on the grass.

Instantly, intimately familiar. But there were no familiar faces, and so I felt, at once, totally at home and also like a ghost visiting my past.

The experience, though a tad unnerving, was ultimately comforting. Things change. There is loss. But some things—the feel of a cool breeze on the skin, friendships—abide.

Here she is, DJ Mermaid, with her first guest post.

Everyone knows the rule: Only post on the Internet if you won’t have it bite you back later. That includes your personal information for some people.

I am one of them.

This is because I did a StoryCorps interview that went on NPR and then I wrote a post for the Easter Seals national blog. Those go alllllllll over the country and take comments, and I worry about negative comments and social media backstabbing.

So I wanted a pen name.

DJ Mermaid and family doing their best Mary Poppins.

I happen to love mermaids and music (preferably Taylor Swift and Julie Andrews). Now let me give you a little back story on why I like these two things.

The whole mermaid obsession started when I was about two — roughly. I was at my grandparent’s house and I was watching The Little Mermaid with my young aunt. Of course I immediately fell in love with Ariel, the youngest mermaid princess of King Triton. I loved her because at the time I couldn’t really walk and she couldn’t really walk on land either. This made this my favorite movie up until I was six and saw The Sound of Music (more on that later).

About DJs: A DJ is someone who plays music and has a deep passion for the artist/band they like. This is me because I love parties, music, and the pops style.
I got into Taylor Swift when I was about 7-1/2. My friend Emily loved her music and I decided to give it a listen.

I listened to the song “Love Story,” a modern take on Romeo & Juliet. I read the play after I listened to the song. I decided I like her music a lot.

I went to Taylor Swift’s 1989 album World Tour at Soldier Field last summer. I had a lot of fun. While Taylor Swift was singing, two teenage girls sitting in front of me moved out of their seats so I could see Taylor (and her chic outfits!) super-clearly.

My parents and I were up past midnight that night. I was belting out the songs and my dad was just drinking beer and margaritas.

Julie Andrews is probably the best classical singer of all time. I loved her in her role as Maria, the nun from the Salzburg Abbey in The Sound of Music. When I was in kindergarten, my whole family dressed as the Mary Poppins cast because I loved the movie so much and because my favorite actress was in it. (I loved her and her role in both of the movies mentioned!) I was Jane Banks. I wore braids and a Victorian dress.

Well, that’s the end of my post, folks! Bye.

-DJ Mermaid

I published a post here last week about some of the writers I recruited to put together guest posts about love and relationships for Easter Seals (I have a part-time job moderating the Easter Seals national blog). One writer I didn’t mention in that post is the nine-year-old daughter of a health professional I saw eight years ago after I hurt my rotator cuff. This girl was only two years old then, but she remembers visiting her mom’s clinic once when I was there and petting Hanni, my Seeing Eye dog. “She was soft!”

I visited her public school in the suburbs a while back, and she and I have been email pen-pals ever since. She agreed to write a post for the Easter Seals blog about how much she loves her Dad, and after she sent the finished piece my way, I emailed her to let her know I’d be writing a short introduction for it. “Remind me –do you use a walker? A wheelchair?” I asked. “Without being able to see you, I don’t know.”

And here’s where that nine-year-old became the teacher. She wrote back with a question. ”Why do you need to know about how I move? Because this is a Valentine’s Day post and it’s supposed to be about my relationship with my Dad.

The nine-year-old writer and her dad

Good question.

I told her I needed to know how she gets around because the place I work –Easter Seals — is an organization that helps people who have disabilities. “So the posts are all about people who have disabilities, or legislation that involves people who have disabilities, or services or treatments that help people who have disabilities.”

I wrote her as if she was an adult. I told her I don’t particularly like thinking of myself as a person with a disability, but my job with Easter Seals pays me. “In general people who are blind have a hard time convincing employers to hire us if we can’t see,” I said, pointing out that over 70% of Americans who are blind are unemployed. “And so, when Easter Seals offered to pay me to moderate their blog, I accepted the job.”

I explained I get paid to lead memoir-writing classes and to write books and articles and make presentations, too, but my Easter Seals job is steady work, and my work writing and doing presentations and leading classes comes and goes. I told her it’s good to have one paycheck to count on week after week, so I accepted the job.

“All to say that I will *totally* understand it if you don’t want me to mention anything about disabilities in my introduction, but if I don’t mention a disability, it won’t qualify to be a post on the Easter Seals blog and they won’t let me publish it there.”

She thought long and hard about all this, and we worked on the introduction together. In the end, the introduction to her post on the Easter Seals blog describes her as an attractive nine-year-old who plays piano, writes stories, and loves to bake. “She has a physical disability that doesn’t stop her from doing anything she wants to do,” the intro says, and that’s absolutely correct! I was happy with the outcome, and even happier to learn a lesson in advocacy from a nine-year-old.

The two of us worked so well together that after her guest post was published on the Easter Seals blog, she asked her mom if she could take a writing class with me. “Not sure how this could work,” her mom wrote. “But she has some time now if you do.” Turns out my young writer is home from school for the next six to eight weeks while they try a casting program — she has casts from her hips down to her ankles, on both legs.

I had time.

My Seeing Eye dog Whitney and I took a train to visit her for our first class a few weeks ago, and after a quick hour of discussing our writing and our goals, I gave her an assignment to write a guest post for our Safe & Sound blog here. Our plan is for her to work on one blog post every week and email it my way when she’s done. I’ll use my talking computer to read through her rough draft, come up with comments and questions, call her every Friday, and we’ll discuss the edits together out loud. She’ll make the revisions she agrees with, email the post back to me, and…voila! This up-and-coming young writer will be published on our Safe & Sound blog. She’s working on revisions to her first piece now. It’s about how she came up with her pen name, and that means you lucky Safe & Sound readers will soon be reading a guest post here written by…DJ Mermaid!

I didn’t see the broadcast of the Grammy Awards on TV Monday.

I heard it.

And that means I got to hear Stevie Wonder sing the lead to Earth, Wind and Fire’s “That’s the Way of the World” in memory of the band’s co-founder Maurice White. And as if that wasn’t enough, I also got to hear him give what has got to be the one and only speech about accessibility ever, ever given at a national awards show.

Stevie Wonder was tasked with announcing the winner of the 2016 song of the year on Monday. After struggling to open the envelope, he read the winner’s name to himself. “Uh-huh,” he said quite seriously, then held the winning name (written in Braille) up for all to see. “So, y’all can’t read this, huh?” he continued, amping up to mock the audience like a schoolkid at recess. “You can’t read it, you can’t read braille, nananananana!” The audience loved it, and so did I.

Truth be told, I’m not proficient in Braille myself. I can read Braille, but I’m very slow at it.

I read Grade One (uncontracted) Braille. That’s the sort where every Braille cell corresponds with a certain letter of the print alphabet. I can make out numbers on elevator panels, and I can poke out simple labels for file folders and CDs at home. Stevie Wonder – and most people who were born blind –  use Grade Two (contracted) Braille, and I’d bet you the price of one of those Grammy statues that the card he held in the air as he teased the audience Monday was written in Grade Two.

Contracted Braille has a bunch of shorthand symbols (contractions) for commonly used words and parts of words: There’s a cell for the word “and,” another for the word “the,” and so on. Prefixes like “con-“ and “com-” have their own Braille cell, and some suffixes do, too.

Most of the letters of the alphabet are also used as shorthand for common words in contracted Braille. If the letter “b” stands alone in contracted Braille, it means “but,” “c” is for “can,” “d” is for “do,” “e” is for “every” and so on. Kind of sort of like texting, but there’s no auto-correct. That means you can’t make as many mistakes!

The Braille version of my children’s book Hanni and Beth: Safe & Sound is produced in Grade Two as well, and that’s a form I’ve never been able to master. That means that when I read Safe & Sound out loud at schools, I rarely get past the first page.

But let’s get back to Steview Wonder, shall we? Five years ago I took an extremely unscientific Stevie Wonder poll at Hackney’s and published my results in a post here:

Question: What do you think of when I say the name “Stevie Wonder?”

Answers:

• My Cherie Amour
• Music
• Gangsta’s Paradise
• Signed, Sealed, Delivered

That’s a remarkable array of music. And Stevie Wonder has had a remarkable career. What was truly remarkable, though, was that not one single person I polled mentioned that Stevie Wonder is blind.

Only 2% of Americans are totally blind. No Wonder, ahem, people sometimes stare at us. Our blindness makes us unique. So unique, that sometimes blindness is the first – or the only – characteristic people remember about us.

Unless you’re Stevie Wonder, that is. The fact that he can’t see is an afterthought. Stevie Wonder is in an enviable position. He could dismiss his disability if he wanted to. But Stevie Wonder is cooler than that. By playing that little joke at the Grammy Awards Monday night, he was acknowledging to the star-studded audience there and the millions watching at home that yes, of course he is blind. And human. And funny, too.

Once the applause and laughter for his taunt died down, Stevie Wonder spoke up again. “I just have to say, before saying the winner,” he said, bringing the audience back down to earth, “that we need to make every single thing accessible to every single person with a disability.”

I adore Stevie Wonder. Isn’t he lovely?

Sometimes, it’s good to feel miniscule and in total awe of a much larger world. It’s liberating. It’s enthralling. So that news last week about physicists detecting gravitational waves was good for the soul and the imagination.

Shine on you crazy dolphins.

Sure, it’s healthy to be reminded of our importance, of our power and responsibility to make a difference for other people in our day to day lives. But it’s just as important to be reminded that we and our problems and our elections and our strident righteousness don’t amount to a hill of beans. That we are a pimple on an elephant’s … well, you know what I mean.

In the old days I described myself as a periodical reader. I’m not sure what label to apply now. I do read voraciously. But it’s news, essays, political analysis, economic stuff and baseball. And mostly online.

I enjoy reading print books, but they’ve always been second fiddle. Inspired by the gravitational wave discovery and needing a break from my own habits, I cracked open a Christmas gift from Beth, “Voices in the Ocean.” It’s about dolphins. I have a dolphin thing, owed largely to our time on the Outer Banks of North Carolina. A singular, profound pleasure was sitting with coffee, watching the rhythmic coordination of pods of dolphins moving along the shore. If there’s a higher power, I’m certain these creatures are one of the best manifestations of it.

And I’m of that certain age who was watching TV when Flipper was popular.

I’m only a quarter or so into the book but loving it—and I’ve learned that the popularity of Flipper was not an accident, entirely. An enigmatic guy named John Lilly, who seems to have been a sort of blend of Hunter S. Thompson and scientist, became entranced with how dolphins navigate the world, communicate with each other, and the prospect that dolphins and humans could possibly learn to communicate with one another.

Lilly pursued some good science, but also perhaps ingested too many psychedelic drugs. In fact, he was the basis for a 1980 Ken Russell film, (written by Paddy Chayefsky), starring William Hurt, called “Altered States.”

But Lilly was onto something, and the scientific community and the U.S. Navy, among others—became interested in dolphins in the 1950s and 1960s. And dolphins rightly became a thing; hence Flipper. Research continues, and the more we learn, the more intriguing those dolphins become. The more we know, the less we know.

Einstein was right, again. This video is a nice bit of “Gravitational Waves for Dummies.”

Which brings me back full circle—and how it’s important to also be reminded that it’s worth our tiny slogs in this giant universe. An acquaintance had this to say upon the announcement of the detection of gravitational waves:

Hey gang: If you work in a big bureaucracy and ever wonder whether your work will add up in the long run, take heart from this. When my dad was at NSF in the 90s, he fought hard to sponsor and protect the project (called LIGO) that just achieved this huge breakthrough.

We are small and inconsequential. We are important.

Both.