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.

While looking over (okay, listening to) stats from this year’s Safe & Sound blog, I discovered that more people visited here on May 10 than any other day in 2015. No surprise, really. That’s the day we published Mike’s very moving post called “Our version of all right.” The post was part of his weekly Mondays with Mike series, and I’m republishing it today for any new readers who missed it the first time. Those of you who read it back in May might want to read it again, too — it’s that good.

Beth

Mondays with Mike: Our version of all right

Originally published May 10, 2015

A couple weeks ago as I walked to a sandwich shop I was stopped in my tracks by the sight of a boy in a wheelchair and a man, presumably his dad, collecting themselves on the sidewalk. They had clearly just unloaded from the car parked nearby, and were readying for a walk.

We had a nice visit.

It wasn’t the kind of wheelchair designed to be propelled by its user. It was, instead, focused on holding the boy—who clearly had substantial physical disabilities—in proper posture, with a headrest, and foot rests arranged for that purpose, and with high handles to make it easy for someone else, in this case his dad, to push. Seeing it was a flashback to my own rituals of outings with our son Gus.

The father made a last round of adjustments to the boy’s ball cap, to his seatbelt, and then gathered himself to push his son on a walk.

For a moment, I wanted to walk up to him to say something like, well, I didn’t know what. That it’ll be all right? What the hell did I know about whether it would be all right? And as a frog the size of Alaska grew in my throat, I thought better of saying anything to him just then, because well, a stranger walking up and breaking into tears might not lift up his day.

By the time I left the shop with my sandwiches, and I was more composed, the man and his son were long gone.

This past weekend Beth and I traveled to Wisconsin to see our son Gus, who is 28 and living in a group home with three other guys. The weather was nice, and—though Gus did eventually learn to propel his own wheelchair, I supplied the horsepower this time, pushing him with Beth holding onto my arm. (Whitney stayed in our hotel room, as she is either jealous of or unnerved by Gus; a little of both, I think.)

We had a happy, uneventful visit, like we always do, and are always grateful to have. We took our Zipcar back to our Milwaukee area hotel, visited with a friend who moved up there recently from Chicago, and spent a quiet night.

The next morning, we headed to the Amtrak station and boarded right on time. We sat up front in the disability seats so Whitney had room to stretch out. A woman who was sitting in the disability section across the aisle from us noticed the dog after we settled, leaned over and asked whether we wanted her space, as it provided more space for Whitney.

After a few seconds, she realized we had the same kind of spacious accommodations and said, “Oh, I didn’t see you already have room.”

Minutes later, after the train eased out of the station, she leaned over and said to Beth, “Can I be so bold as to ask how long you’ve had that dog and how it’s working for you?”

Well, 20 minutes later we’d learned that she’d lost her sight in one eye and the other was in bad shape. All to diabetic retinopathy—the same thing that got Beth’s eyesight decades ago. That she was a couple years older than us, and that she’d been diabetic for 50 years. A nurse herself, she’d always been praised by her doctors for being a model diabetic. But that’s not always enough.

She and her husband’s situation is a lot like Beth’s and mine had been some 30 years ago. She’d had good doctors and bad doctors and doctors who had the bedside manner of Attila the Hun. She can see some out of one eye and is in that awkward phase where she is doing just well enough and badly enough by herself to annoy or frighten the people around her. She isn’t blind—yet, but she wants to get ready in case total blindness comes. But how? She needed help but didn’t want to drag down her husband with endless needs, nor did she like losing independence and needing his help. For his part, her husband, a “type A” as she put it, seemed to be struggling not to over protect.

Her experience rang so familiar that it gave me that feeling I had when I saw that man and his son. This time, though, Beth could carry the conversation while I reset myself. Eventually, as Beth and I related our experiences—and how similar they were to our new acquaintance—it seemed almost revelatory to the woman across the aisle.

On her request, I wrote down the title of Beth’s book and said, “I added my email address, too” and let her know she could contact us. We said goodbye and I followed Whitney as she led Beth off the train. An Amtrak redcap came to assist our fellow traveler.

I would’ve liked, I suppose, to tell her everything will be all right. The same thing I guessed I’d hoped to be able to say to the young father on the street.

But I didn’t. Because I couldn’t, honestly. Beth and I are better than all right. But it isn’t the all right either of us had in mind. And it was harder than hell to get to our version of all right. That’s what the father and his son on the Chicago street and our stranger on the train face. Even if they have great friends and family and resources, it’s going to be really hard.

What I realized, though, was what I saw in that woman’s face was not so much a revelation as relief, relief in knowing, even briefly, that she wasn’t alone.

And if I ever see that man and his son again, that’s what I’ll tell him. You’re not alone.