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.

Here in Chicago it’s beginning, at last, to feel like January. Yesterday, a sunny Sunday, the temperature only hit 18 at its peak here near the lake, and it was more in the 10 range out in the suburbs. But we dodged what looked like a bad storm—we got rain and not snow and ice before things got cold, and really, given how mild it’s been, we’re already playing on house money. That is, usually by now, I’m fatigued by constantly walking in stooped, careful fashion over packed ice and snow for weeks.

If you haven’t figured it out yet, well, all this talk about the weather means I really don’t have a cogent post in me at the moment. There’s just too much craziness out there and a universe of random thoughts are fluttering around my brain like butterflies. I’m having a hard time collecting them all, so I’ll just share a few and hope you find one or another interesting.

Lori K found this Web site dedicated to taverns (in Chicago and Madison) that have no TVs.

Trumpenstein is all over everywhere, of course, either blabbing himself or being blabbed about by talking heads who don’t really seem to have any more insight than a stuffed animal. But a friend shared this article which takes a novel and useful point of view on Trump’s constituency, and the ramifications for the Republican Party—and our two-party system.

The everlasting gun debate rages on, fueled last week by the President’s speech. We’ve reached the point where Bill O’Reilly is asking the NRA to be reasonable about background checks. But one of the most interesting reads was in here in the Guardian. After Columbine—remember Columbine?—the Clinton administration negotiated with Smith & Wesson and the company agreed to some changes advocated by gun control advocates. The company was excoriated and boycotted by the NRA, it’s sales plummeted, and had to eventually back out of its agreement with the government.

If you’re up for something both meaty and spectacular, read this essay called “Anatomy of the Deep State” at Bill Moyers site. (It’s a couple years old, but I think his description of the state of the government remains valid.) Now, if you lean right and can’t stand Bill Moyers, don’t let it stop you—the author was a stalwart GOP Congressional staffer for nearly 30 years. On the other hand, if you think because it’s at Moyers’ site the piece will be kind to liberal icons, you’ll be disappointed—but should read it anyway. It’s fascinating, superbly written, and the author—in addition to his own considerable experience, supplies substantive documentary support.

It’s also a long and serious piece, so if you need a relief, we can help, courtesy of Lori K. Lori weighed in awhile back on my post asking for suggestions of bars without televisions. She returned just this week to weigh in with a new resource:

The Screenless Tavern League is a Web directory of establishments without TV screens.

Great places to go and not watch the news.

Our regular blog readers will remember the You read that out loud in class?” guest post Regan Burke wrote for us about the value of honesty in memoir-writing. Regan is a civil rights activist,and she’s enrolled in the memoir-writing class I lead at Grace Place in Chicago. When I discovered she’d been at that same Itzhak Perlman presentation I attended Wednesday, I asked if she’d write about it from her point of, ahem, view. Here she is:

That’s Regan, today’s guest blogger, peaking out of her hood at a Chicago bus stop.

I stepped off the bus thanking the bus driver for lowering the step (as I always do) and in the silence of the moment paid homage to whoever it was who included my old knees in the Americans with Disabilities Act.

It was a sunny climb up the Randolph Street sidewalk toward the Harris Theater just before noon on Wednesday, January 6. My friend Marca Bristo — President and CEO of Access Living — was about to interview Itzhak Perlman marking the end of a year-long celebration of the 25th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act.

I wondered how she got to be so lucky.

Accessibility to the floor seats at the Harris Theater is via an elevator at the end of a long hallway. My elevator mates were three: one mink-draped, Channel-No.5-soaked human statue; a cheery diminutive, bow-tied middle-age man with leg braces; and a talkative cherub of a woman whom I pegged as having one of those not-so-silent “silent” disabilities.

We were escorted to our seats. No stairs. The Harris is a dark place even with the lights up, but this day the half-full theater was lit with happy chatter.

I thought, this is our guy and he is here to talk to us. Itzhak Perlman. Mr. Violin. Talking to us. Us! What a deal.

Marca Bristo rolled to center stage in an exuberant flash. She calmed herself to introduce the maestro and we erupted in joy and gratitude. He sped on the stage in his chic motorized scooter, dressed in an Italian black blazer, navy trousers, light blue shirt, no tie. That black curly hair we first saw on Ed Sullivan when he was a kid has turned foxy grey. We gasped at the sight of his beauty.

Thank you Maestro. Thank you for who you are, what you’ve accomplished, how you’ve helped us with your music, your joy, your love. We love you.

True to her grassroots advocacy, Marca posed the first question of the interview from an Access Living FaceBook follower.”This is our time with you, Itzhak. We have a few questions,” she said, starting with the first on her list. “Did you take a lot of selfies at the White House with Barbara Streisand and Stephen Spielberg?”

Marca added that Perlman received the Presidential Medal of Freedom award in November with Streisand, Spielberg, and others. Dear Itzhak bypassed the question and told us what a privilege it was to be with fellow honoree Willie Mays.

Oh how we loved that. Our maestro is a baseball fan.

He told us implementation of the ADA needs constant vigilance, that “steps were the curse of the world” for him. He never thought of himself as disabled until the media described him walking on stage with crutches early in his career. As a child he “filled the air with notes” to make his parents happy that he was practicing his violin. And for our brief time together his orchestral voice filled the air with words that made us happy, too.

Bravo Maestro.