I wrote here last month about my friend (and baseball organist) Nancy Faust donating her home practice organ to an auction benefiting Chicago White Sox Charities. Boston Red Sox organist Josh Kantor placed the winning bid on the Hammond Elegante Model 340100, and earlier this month a slew of his Chicago musician friends picked up a rental van in Chicago to deliver it to Kantor in Boston.

The organ juuusssst barely fit in the van.

The musicians took a pit stop at the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown along the way, and a story in the Chicago Reader this month reported that the trip almost didn’t happen at all: They measured ahead of time, but when they got the rental van, the organ didn’t fit. “The crew managed to Tetris it inside,” the story said. Singer Kelly Hogan was on the moving crew and told the reporter that the musicians who drove the organ to Boston all have many, many miles in band vans between them, and that it was “pretty normal” to be resting her arm on an organ as they were traveling.

The story said Josh Kantor was overwhelmed by the scores of people who called and e-mailed and texted him asking what they could do to help get the organ to his home in Boston. “A friend sawed a metal railing off the entrance of Kantor’s house so the organ could be moved inside,” the story said. “Another donated a Nancy Faust bobblehead, which became a focal point of videos documenting the trek.”

Nancy was vacationing with her husband Joe in the Southwest while the organ transplant took place, but she emailed me a few times to send clips of stories and interviews with Josh Kantor about his new musical Instrument. “Here is a link to this morning’s interview on 670 the score with Josh Kantor who bought the organ,” one note read.  “What a gracious guy. The ballpark has enabled me to meet the nicest people.”

Nancy sent me the Chicago Reader article I’ve been quoting in this blog post, too, along with another note. “Hi Beth, This is a rather long, very inclusive account from today’s Reader about my ‘organ transplant,’” she wrote. “Josh Kantor has been far too kind but hopefully gained the best memories, friendship bonds, and the Red Sox recognition from the whole adventure. Love, Nancy.”

Me and Mike with Nancy Faust at the Green Mill awhile back. Nancy showed Mike her World Series ring.

The Nancy Faust-Josh Kantor mutual admiration society was formed when Kantor was hired as Red Sox organist in 2003. Over drinks and Hammond B3 music at the Green Mill in Chicago last month, Nancy told me how Josh flew to Chicago to see her when he got that job at Fenway. “He spent the day with me,” she said, and that story in the Chicago Reader quotes Kantor saying, “That was one of my favorite days ever!”

Kantor told the reporter that during that visit, among other things, Nancy urged him to keep updating his repertoire. “If you want to do this for a long time and not turn into a dinosaur like a lot of other organists have, keep learning new songs.” More from the Chicago Reader story:

His fascination with her process helps explain why he was so interested in purchasing this particular organ. “To me, the organ that was in her home for 35 years, that was her practice instrument, was as interesting—if not more interesting—because that was the lab instrument, basically. That was where she did all her homework,” he says, laughing. “That was where she concocted all her genius.”

Baseball organists are a dying breed – MLB reports fewer than a dozen ballparks still hire organists, and many of the musicians are only allowed to play a few times throughout the game and “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” in the seventh inning. The Chicago Reader story called Kantor one of the “most vocal proponents of organ music and its role in baseball,” and it sounds to me like he’s doing a great job. He couldn’t help but notice how open and accessible Nancy Faust was to fans at White Sox Park, and he said he tries to do the same, with a modern twist: He takes song requests via Twitter (@jtkantor) at Fenway.

First, to all our friends in the Middle Atlantic and Northeast, hang in there. Don’t try to be a shoveling hero. Walk safely. Drive safely if you have to drive. The storm itself is always kind of fun if you don’t have to be out in it. It gets the adrenaline going.

It’s the days and weeks after that are a big old drag. So just know: Here in Chicago, we feel your pain.

But about that storm. On Saturday night, as Beth and I were leaving Hackney’s, we stopped to say hello/goodbye to some friends on our way out. Since the storm had been on multiple TVs behind the bar, on my computer screen pretty much any time I looked at a news site during that day, and even on screens in the elevator at the gym, I was just kind of stormed out. And so, I said to our friends in my best sarcastic tone, “Did you hear there’s a big storm out East?”

This Onion parody is too close to the truth. (Caution, language, NSFW.)

Two of them laughed, but one immediately piped up in anger. Apparently I was the third person to have said something like that to him. And he wanted to make clear that he believed it was a serious event worth taking seriously. (I might add he lived in NYC for many years and was being honorably loyal to the New Yorkers who were getting buried.)

But my problem wasn’t with the storm being covered per se, but just the way it—like so, so many things in modern American life—was being over-covered. There really was not minute-to-minute news worth reporting. Still, national cable channels flashed on snow banks, radar screens, empty grocery shelves, etc. It’s the kind of footage they could probably get away with recycling from last year’s snow storm video.

Look I get as excited by bad weather that’s somebody’s else’s problem as the next guy (since I lived in North Carolina, I’ve had a thing for hurricanes). And I love madcap snow antics. And the Weather Channel gets a pass. I mean, it’s the Weather Channel.

What really aggravates me is that weather, like a lot of stuff, makes for a cheap story for what are supposed to be legitimate, national news operations. That is, compared to say, a story that requires extensive reporting over a long period of time, it doesn’t cost much. Why spend money on election coverage that has substance when you can plant a reporter in a snow bank? So the big storm is just part of a long and it seems to me worsening process of dumbing down news coverage.

To my point, check out this video from The Onion. It perfectly parodies the kind of TV news coverage I’m talking about. (Warning: Language, and definitely not safe for work.)

I laughed hard. Hope you do, too. And be careful out there.

After the presentation, some of the kids got to see Whitney up close.

Last week was chock-full of school presentations for my Seeing Eye dog and me. I already wrote here about our Tuesday trip to Elmhurst. Two days later, Whitney and I got on another commuter train in Chicago to visit two more suburban schools.

“I’m blind,” I told a group of second-and-third-graders at our last session on Thursday at Barrington’s Countryside School. “Even when my eyes are open, all I see is the color black.” A second-grader’s hand shot up right then with an urgent question. “If all you see is the color black, then how do you know when you’re tired?” The questions went on from there:

• Is it the kind of black you see when you’re sleeping, or the kind of black you see when you wake up and open your eyes?
• How do you drive?
• Do you walk everywhere?
• If you can’t see red or green, how do you know when it’s time to cross the street?
• How long did it take you to get here from Chicago?
• How do you bake bread if you can’t see?
• Do you see different kinds of black, like light black and medium black and dark black??
• What’s wrong with your hand?
• Do you get dressed all by yourself?
• How do you tie your shoes when you can’t see your feet?
• You mean you really can’t see any colors? I feel so sad for you if you can’t see colors.

Read over those questions again. Notice anything? Those Barrington kids asked far more questions about my blindness than about how Whitney does her job.

Know why? Because Cindy Hesselbein, the Reading Specialist at North Barrington and Countryside Schools, volunteers to raise puppies for Leader Dogs for the Blind in Rochester, Michigan. She and her husband and their four children are raising their sixth puppy for Leader Dogs now, and for years she’s brought them along to school every day to socialize the pups and educate the kids about what service dogs are.

Mrs. Hesselbein, the other reading specialists and teachers had also seen to it that the kids had read Hanni and Beth: Safe & Sound before we arrived Thursday. All to say, these lucky Barrington kids know a lot about guide dogs. But what about this blindness thing?

I thanked the thoughtful boy who’d said he felt sad for me and tried to assure him that even though I can’t see, my life is still pretty colorful. “I just have to use my other senses to do things you do with your eyes.” I described how I read and write books, swim laps, bake bread, play piano, go to plays, meet with friends. “And if I wasn’t blind, I probably would have never known what it’s like to love a dog.”

That statement served as a perfect segue to point out how important people like their reading specialist Mrs. Hesselbein and all the other puppy raisers across the country are to those of us who use dogs to guide us. More than a dozen schools scattered throughout North America train dogs to guide people who are blind or visually impaired, and most place their puppies with volunteers like Mrs. Hesselbein until the dogs are anywhere from 14 to 18 months old.

Puppy raisers are not responsible for training dogs to guide, but they do teach important social skills, obedience and how to walk in a lead-out position (not like normal obedience training where the dog is behind you at your heel). Mrs. Hesselbein got a kick out of watching six-year-old Seeing Eye graduate Whitney turn her head left and right to scan the environment as she led me through North Barrington and Countryside Schools Thursday. “They don’t do that when they’re puppies,” she said. “It’s so fun to see the finished product!”

As for the thoughtful boy who’d felt sad for me, he must have really been pondering all this throughout our presentation. Before we left to catch our train back home, he raised his hand to tell me he didn’t feel that sad for me anymore. “Really, you’re lucky,” he said. I was expecting him to add something about how I get to bring my dog along wherever I go, that sort of thing. Instead, he surprised me with a new twist on the lemonade-out-of-lemons notion. “You don’t have to worry about ever getting blind,” he reasoned. ”You already are!”

When Beth broke her hand awhile back, it was bad news for several reasons—

• She would have to wear a cast, which slows typing considerably, and also makes lots of menial daily tasks—already more difficult because she can’t see—even more difficult.
• She wouldn’t be able to swim, which is her preferred form of exercise.
• It was on her left hand. As in the hand that holds Whitney’s harness.

Because her cast left her with only two working fingers—the index finger and thumb (think crab-like pincers), that just didn’t work. Whitney—like all Seeing Eye dogs—was taught to pull firmly when she leads. That tension is a form of communication—if the dog slows, the tension lessens and Beth’s going to slow down.

Besides that, Whitney pulls hard—those two measly fingers just weren’t enough.

Whitney and Beth on their first walk after the fall. Didn’t miss a beat.

And so, we had a couple mopes around here for a while. Well, Beth only moped for about five minutes at the doctor’s office, her being Beth and all. Whitney was fine for a day or two. Until she understood she was stuck with me walking her, and that she and Beth would be going on no adventures together. Well, the three of us did go out together, but Whitney wasn’t leading. Just not the same.

As written more than once in other posts, these dogs are not robots. They sniff when they aren’t supposed to, sometimes they let temptation get the best of them and they go for a good looking hound in the lobby. So sometimes it’s easy to forget that they derive a great deal of satisfaction from working.

So for two weeks, Whitney behaved and looked bewildered, not to mention, well, depressed.

Beth had a follow-up appointment about a week ago. The bad news: She had to keep a cast. The good news: The doc gave her a new smaller one that gave her enough of her fingers back that she and Whitney could ride again.

I went out with them on their trial walk. I should say I followed them on their trial walk. Because Whitney and Beth were at a brisk downtown walking pace, Whitney with her head on a swivel, alert, smiling, weaving around bad pavement, bits of snow—and I can’t know it, but if a dog can look proud, that’s how she looked—proud.

Whitney and Beth have now been through two of these idle periods—the other one much more protracted (not to mention terrifying).

But both cases, after a hiatus, instead of saying “forget this,” Whitney was elated to be back in the saddle—err, harness—again.

We should all love our work so much.

A full house at Lincoln Elementary.

My Seeing Eye dog Whitney and I started our new year of elementary school visits in a big way: we took a commuter train to Elmhurst (The Chicago suburb where I grew up) and gave a presentation to 250 kindergartners, first-graders, and second-graders. All. At. Once.

Whitney usually leads me to the train station in downtown Chicago on her own, but when my gem of a husband, Mike Knezovich, said he’d accompany us yesterday morning, I had five reasons to swallow my pride and accept his generous offer.

1. Freezing temperatures — if Whitney and I found ourselves lost or turned around for just a few minutes, we might have ended up with frostbite!
2. Snowy slippery sidewalks
3. Salt (Mike can spot it on the roads and help us avoid those areas so it doesn’t end up in Whit’s paws)
4. The train we needed to catch left at 7:40 a.m., which meant we’d be approaching the train station precisely when commuters were getting off trains and rushing to work
5. And oh, yeah. I still have a cast on my broken left hand.

My sister Cheryl lives in Elmhurst. She greeted Whitney and me with hot coffee at the train station there, brought an extra-large-sized pair of mittens in the car to fit over my cast, drove us to Lincoln Elementary School, took pictures at the assembly, and then drove us all the way back to my doorstep in Chicago afterwards. Cheryl has always had a way of boosting my confidence, and we have fun whenever we’re together. I grew up the youngest of seven children. Cheryl is fourth in line, and this explanation of middle child syndrome describes her perfectly:

Many times they go in the opposite direction of their oldest sibling to carve out their own place of achievement and relish in the satisfaction of being capable of doing it on their own. They are sensitive to injustices and much less self-centered than their siblings (first born and last born), which allows them to maintain successful relationships. They are put in the position to learn social skills that are extremely useful, not only within their household, but within their social community.

The kids at Lincoln School were sweet, polite, and very curious. The Q & A part of the presentation was entertaining, as always. A sampling of their questions:

• What does your dog like to chase?
• How can you tie your shoes if you can’t see them?
• How long did it take you to learn to read and write Braille??
• How do you write if you can’t see?
• Do you shop by yourself?
• Can you write cursive?
• Does Whitney ever slip on the ice?
• Does your dog keep you safe from other things?
• Do you always have to say your dogs name before you tell her what to do?

Whitney demonstrating her best Seeing Eye manners.

For that last question, I picked up Whitney’s harness and told the kids that when you’re training at the Seeing Eye school they teach you to always say your dog’s name before giving them a command. “If I just say the word ‘right’ like I just did there, Whitney doesn’t even notice, but if I say, ‘Whitney, right’…”. I had to stop talking right there, mid-sentence. Whitney had immediately flipped right and was guiding us toward the hallway! “I guess the Seeing Eye knows what they’re doing,” I said with a laugh. The kids laughed right along. Whitney was a big hit.

The most thoughtful question yesterday was this one: “What is your biggest challenge of the day?” My days have been particularly challenging lately with this cast on my hand, but Mike and Cheryl made my day yesterday far less challenging than it would have been otherwise. Huge thanks to them both, and also to all my other friends and family who have boosted my spirits, many of them by taking me for walks while the cast was preventing me from grasping Whitney’s harness.

Broken hand update: my friend Colleen drove me to a medical appointment Monday and helped me convince the hand experts to shorten the cast a bit to expose the tips of my fingers. It’s a ton easier to hold the harness now. Whitney and I take a train to another suburban school tomorrow morning, and if the weather warms up enough by then to melt some of the snow and ice, we may be able to get to the train station on our own. I have my Fingers crossed — the ones in my right hand, at least.