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.

I have a part-time job moderating a blog for Easter Seals National Headquarters, and in honor of Valentine’s Day, Easter Seals HQ is devoting the month of February to stories about “love and relationships.” My mission? Recruit people with disabilities (or those who love or have a relationship with someone who has a disability) to write guest posts on the subject.

I started by contacting a writer in one of my memoir classes. She often mentioned her fondness for a brother-in-law who’d been born with developmental disabilities back in the 1940s. Gerald died in December, and when I contacted this writer to see if she had any interest in writing about him for Easter Seals, she emailed back and wasn’t ready just yet. “Would it be okay to pass the opportunity on to my daughter Katie?”

Katie Irey started her Tribute to my Uncle Gerald post explaining that her Uncle Gerald was a lifelong Trekkie. “I didn’t know my uncle when he was a child, but I imagine he may have found some comfort in this TV community where it was okay to be different,” she wrote. “In fact, it was celebrated.”

Katie was a teenager in 1995, when “Star Trek: Voyager” introduced Captain Kathryn Janeway, its first female commanding officer. “Whenever we were together, Uncle Gerald never failed to remind me that the Captain of the Voyager and I had the same name, Kathryn, that she was the first female Starfleet commander, and that maybe I could be a commander, too,” she said. “This I believe was my uncle’s way of encouraging me to pursue my dreams, and letting me know how proud he was to be with me on my journey.

Another guest post on the Easter Seals blog was written by Bryan MacMurray, a friend I met at the University of Illinois. Bryan is blind, and he’s married to a woman who uses a wheelchair. Lots to say about all that, so Bryan’s essay was split into two. One part is about Bryan and Joanna’s lives now, after retiring to Arizona. The other part is called Every love story is beautiful, but ours is my favorite, and it explains how the two of them met in an elevator. “I realized right away this sweet-sounding girl with the slight accent was in a manual wheelchair,” he wrote. “That was fine by me — I am just a couple of inches over five feet tall, and I tended to like girls who didn’t have a big height advantage.”

Today the Easter Seals national blog published a piece by Bernhard Walke, whose five-year-old daughter has cerebral palsy (you might remember the post we published here on the Safe & Sound blog when Elena dressed as a bulldozer for Halloween).

Elena, the bulldozer.

Bernhard is an administrator at a high school situated in a Chicago neighborhood that has a long history of gang activity, marginalization, poverty, and other social problems. His wife Rosa is a teacher there, too, and his guest post is about the kinship their high school students have formed with their daughter.

I encourage you to visit the Easter Seals blog to read Bernhard’s thoughtful post in its entirety, and I’ll leave you here with a sneak preview I know will leave you wanting for more:

As I pulled into my parking spot, assembled Elena’s wheelchair, and planted her in it, I heard the 3:30 dismissal bell chime. I grunted and bemoaned that I would have to navigate my way through hundreds of high school students at dismissal in order to pick up my wife.

As I began to make my way through the halls, though, one of our senior boys who is typically very quiet and has a meek personality noticed me pushing my five-year-old through the crowded halls. He sprung to action, clearing a path like a border collie through the halls. He admonished other students,”Hey! Get off your phone and pay attention! Mr. Walke is trying to get through with his daughter.” “Javier! Can you get the door and hold it open for Mr. Walke and his daughter?” “Mrs. Walke! Mr. Walke and your daughter are both here.”

I thanked him for his unsolicited help and we were on our way to Elena’s appointment.

As we were driving back home, I marveled at the selfless love and care that this student demonstrated toward a young five-year old that he had just met. I also remembered that this student had lost his mother at a young age. It was just him and his father at home. I like to think that we both realized that life doesn’t often go as planned, but it doesn’t mean that there is any less love in it.

On the last day of January, Beth and I finally made it to see blues guitarist Buddy Guy play at his eponymous club. I say finally, because we’ve lived roughly three blocks away for 12 years, and we’ve been to Buddy Guy’s Legends, but we’d never seen the man himself play at his own place.

Hanni just turned sweet 16.

Well, we had seen him play, but only at a big outdoor venue. But every January — every night, all month, Buddy Guy and his band play at his club. It’s a kind of residency. And hearing him in a venue like that is different. Tickets go fast, and people line up at noon to get good seats (it’s all general admission). Beth and I weren’t up to such a vigil, so we took our chances and ended up with standing room space.

Which was just fine, because who wants to sit still, anyway? Going on 80 years old, he can still play one-of-a-kind riffs, and he can sing, and he’s a great showman. All I could say afterward was, “I’ll have whatever he’s having.”

And then this past weekend we were treated by our generous friends Jim and Kathy Zartman (octogenarians themselves) to a special performance by Erwin Helfer and friends. Kathy’s a student in one of Beth’s memoir classes, and her husband Jim is kind enough to drive Beth to and from class. About Erwin Helfer: He’s an accomplished blues/boogie woogie/jazz pianist who’s something of an icon here in Chicago. The performance, at the Old Town School of Folk Music, was in celebration of his 80^th birthday. It was a pretty wonderful night all around, as this account in the Chicago Tribune makes clear.

And then, down in Urbana, Hanni the retired wonder dog just turned 16. Her human companions, Nancy and Steven, celebrated by treating her to fried eggs for breakfast and then took her out to a local forest preserve where she likes to run. And run. And run.

Sometimes I don’t much like this getting older stuff. It’s not about the so-called milestone numbers, it’s more the aches and pains, the little diminishments that are just part of the deal. But to Buddy, Kathy, Jim, Erwin and Hanni—thank you for providing proof that life not only goes on, it can go on with style and grace.

I think I’ll go fry myself an egg.