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.

I’ve already written a post here about how people who have visual impairments can use Siri to send text messages and make calls on iPhones. Now, after having broken some fingers in my left hand, I’ve started toying around with another dictation feature on my iPhone: the microphone on the keyboard.

So far, for me, dictating long emails and text messages using the microphone has been more accurate than using Siri. Don’t get me wrong, though. The microphone still comes up with some mischicvious typos.

Or would those be “talkos?”

A few examples. I thanked a friend for sending information on “that Jamaican author” and the text she received thanked her for sending information on that “Jamaican offer.” Maybe the microphone was suggesting I take a trip to the island.

And then, when I texted my sisters to assure them I was trying to keep my spirits up with this dang broken hand of mine, I wrote, “Eyebrows up!” The message read, “I grows up.” The microphone is a smarty-pants, reminding me that as the youngest of seven I remain a spoiled brat — I still have growing up to do.

By far the most embarrassing dictation mistake came when I wrote my boss at my Easter Seals job to tell her I was going to hear Itzhak Perlman give a presentation about disability and the arts in downtown Chicago at noon today. I suggested I might write a post about that event for the Easter Seals blog. The message she received? It identified the renowned violinist and conductor as “It sucked.”

My boss has a sense of humor, but odds are that she will not welcome me dictating any  posts soon.

And odds are you blog readers will not welcome a blog post where I just talk on and on and on and on and on and on, either, but if, after reading all this, you are still interested in giving dictation a try, here’s how :

1. Go to Settings.
2. Swipe until you get to “General.”
3. swipe to Siri, and then turn Siri on. (Even if you don’t want to use Siri at all, you need to turn it on for any speech recognition to work.)

From now on, any time you see the small microphone icon next to the spacebar on the iOS keyboard, dictation is available. . . Tap anyplace you can type text, and then tap the microphone icon to start dictating. When you’re finished, tap “Done,” and…viola!

Oops. I meant, “voila!”

Sigh.

If you are blind and use the speech synthesizer VoiceOver (like I do), listen for the space bar on any keyboard that appears, and swipe left once. You’ll hear the word “dictate.” That’s where the microphone is. Double tap there to start dictation, and then two-finger double-tap to finish.

For everyone, sighted or not, if you want to include punctuation in your dictation, all you need to do is say “exclamation mark” or “period” or “comma” and so on. You can say “new line” to dictate a return character, and “new paragraph” to add two returns. Best of all: if you are using the microphone rather than Siri, you can always go back to the QWERTY keyboard to fix typos or add a word or line the old-fashioned way. Now only if I’d done that when I wrote to my boss that the violinist sucked…!

That’s young Esther Knezovich, nee Latini.

Awhile back I mentioned these holidays have been harder for me than usual. I’ve always loved them, but this year, I’m happy to see them go.

Here’s why: Beth broke her hand. That sucks for both of us. I miss my mother, my father, and my sister. And in the past few weeks three people I care about and I like a lot lost a parent. Two of those parents were not spring chickens, one was too young. But what’s too young? It sucks. It hurts. Your world is different from that point on.

And all this reminded me of my mother, who died December 9, 1992, two days after her birthday. And that reminded me of how my mother would get a little psycho every holiday season. Well, a lot psycho. And that reminded me of learning why—or probably why.

Esther’s first husband (my father was her second and last)–Belden Anderson, a strapping guy from Oklahoma who’d I’d give anything in the world to spend ten minutes with, was badly burned in an oil refinery fire in Bakersfield, California before Christmas in 1953. Third degree burns, most of his body. He told my mother that he had a knife in his jacket pocket. He asked her to find the jacket, and the knife, and use it to kill him. He lived two or three weeks that way. My sister was six months old. I didn’t exist.

My mom was the craziest, toughest person I’ve ever met. And that’s saying something.

Happy holidays!

Seriously, though, back to our friends who lost parents and how their lives are different forever now. One of them is about the age I was when I lost my father. The others are contemporaries. But again—is there a good time?

Thanks Roy and Company

Then last night, we went to The Jazz Showcase. Roy Hargrove—on whom Miles Davis has nothing—was playing an all-ages show at 4:00 p.m. So there were kids. And all colors, and all ages. A packed house.

Roy comes at the end of every year for a kind of residence. It’s a gift.

I have never ever seen a better live performance. Any genre. Any club. Any arena. I’m not kidding. The individual virtuosity combined with unselfishness, well. I don’t know how to put it. Beautiful. It about brought me to tears. It was human-made awesomeness on par with The Grand Canyon. Or the ocean. I’m not kidding. You can ask Beth.

And I thought, it’s not all bad. It’s worth striving. It’s worth practicing.

Happy New Year friends, and keep at it.

I fell this past week and broke bones in my left hand. Ouch! Not going to be easy typing blog posts with one hand in a cast, but today, to celebrate the New Year, I thought I’d give it a try with this very short poem.

I’ve got two fingers for hunting-and-pecking with my left hand, but I stuck with just the right for this work or art.

Right-handed Love Poem

by Beth Finke

I.

My.

Only my & I.

Huh.

Only my & I?

Ummmmm, no you?

No link-up? No hook-up?

Loony! Loopy!

No jolly.

No pop.

No jump.

No joy.

Oy!

Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmm…

You & I?

Uh-huh.

You & I.

Jiminy.

You & I!

Mmmmmmmmmmmmm.