“Smiling face with squinty eyes.”

That’s what my talking iPhone called out after the Cardinals beat the Cubs in the first NL playoff game a few weeks ago. The text message came from Tom, a St. Louis fan who’s a friend from Hackney’s. He’s been known to say some goofy things after imbibing a few too many Anheuser-Busch products, but “smiley face with squinty eyes?” It just didn’t sound like Tom.

Life imitates emoji.

And that’s when the lightbulb went on over my head. He’d sent me one of those pictures you can text to show how you feel.

Wait. I need to look up how to spell it.

Pause.

Ah, yes. Here it is. It’s called an “emoji.”

Two years ago I published a post here about how some people who are blind access a program called VoiceOver to use an iPhone — VoiceOver parrots every letter we type into a text, but it wasn’t until I upgraded to IOS 9 last month that I came face-to-face with an emoji.

A key next to the space bar on the iPhone keypad lets users choose from lists and lisps and lists of emojis to use with texts. VoiceOver reads the images out loud for those of us who can’t see them, and to show you what I mean, here’s a sampling of what I hear when choosing from the list of “Smileys and other people” emojis:

• ”Smiling face with sunglasses”
• “Unamused face”
• “Winking face with stuck-out tongue”
• “Sleeping face”
• ”Nerdy face with thick horn-rimmed glasses and buck teeth”
• ”Neutral face”
• ”Excited face with money symbols for eyes and stuck-out tongue”
• “Expressionless face”
• “Smiling face licking lips”
• “Slightly smiling face”
• ”Smirking face”
• “ Face with rolling eyes”
• ”Face with no mouth”
• “Flushed face”
• “Thinking face”
• “Angry face”
• “Pouting face”
• “Disappointed face”
• ”Grinning face with clenched teeth”

Wait. Can a person clench their teeth and smile at the same time?

Pause.

I guess you can! But would I ever want to see a picture of that on a text message? Dunno.

After the powers that be added 150 new emojis to their operating systems last week, the British Broadcasting Corporation’s Ouch blog asked Damen Rose, a BBC reporter who is blind, to demonstrate what emojis sound like on his Smart Phone. I listened to the podcast and found myself agreeing with Damen when he lamented how the emoji craze is just one more example of how the technological world is becoming more and more visual. “We’ve sort of arrived at this glance culture, haven’t we, where we take in so many things at a glance on a screen,” he said. “We’re supposed to keep up with various events, understand different memes, get the references, et cetera, and it all happened soooo quickly and sooooooooo visually.”

I gotta admit, I do feel left behind sometimes. People doing quick smart phone checks for sports scores or news. Looking real quick at Facebook. Checking text messages at a glance. I just can’t keep up. Without being able to see, I’m not part of the “glance culture.”

But wait. Maybe there’s an “Eyebrows up!” emoji, and if there is, I need one right now. I mean, maybe I can’t just glance at a written description of an emoji, but isn’t it pretty incredible that technology companies have come this far with accessibility? That they actually found someone somewhere to write hundreds (thousands?) of emoji descriptions for people like me, who can’t see them?.

If there isn’t an “eyebrows up!” emoji yet, I nominate my nine-year-old great niece to be the one to describe “eyebrows up!” once it’s added — she’s already pretty good at describing emoticons. I’ll end the post here with the closing of an email message she sent to her old blind Great Aunt Betha recently:

“Love, FLOEY :);) (smiley and winky face) I<3U (that means “I love you.”)

Ah, I remember my twenties when I was attending one friend’s wedding after another. But just barely. Because now I’m of that certain age – when you attend your friend’s children’s weddings.

This past weekend, I attended the third such event in the last three months. And it was splendid. Our friends’ son is a wonderful guy, and we’d already spent enough time with him and his future spouse to get that good feeling you get about people who match up well. They both have great friends, thoughtful, smart young people who make you optimistic about the future of the world. Of course, hanging out with his parents and their friends and family wasn’t bad, either.

Nothing beats wonderful friends. Or a live band, with horns.

The topper: No DJ. A live band! An eight-piece ensemble with a horn section and multiple vocalists who traded off leads and harmonized and there was Earth Wind and Fire and Chicago and Motown and R&B and modern pop stuff and everything.

As Beth will quickly and emphatically tell you: Nothing beats a live band. (Or a real piano, but that’s another story.)

In the midst of all this joy, though, I had a few moments of sudden and inexplicable melancholy. Not paralyzing, mind you, but real. And at those moments, I took quiet leave to take a walk outside or sit alone in a side room. And eventually, I figured it out: It was an old feeling—one that I thought I had retired, oh, decades ago—tapping me on the shoulder.

In a word, it was grief. Beth and I both dealt with it first when she lost her sight, and we realized that the life together we envisioned was not going to happen. And then when Gus was born with a genetic anomaly, and we realized, well, we weren’t going to have the child we thought we would. Of course, since then, there have been the inevitable losses of parents and loved ones that are just part of the deal.

The first time that Gus-grief tapped me on the shoulder was when he was an infant. And, for some reason—I don’t remember what triggered it—it dawned on me that I’d never play catch in the backyard with Gus like my dad did with me for hours on end. And I just lost it. Big puddle of sobbing, quivering goo.

And then I chided myself for being such a limp noodle, stiffened my upper lip, and carried on. Besides, in those days, I just couldn’t spare the time or energy to get stuck in a funk. Crisis-fueled adrenaline is a pretty good anti-depressant.

I’ve had other bouts with it—when Gus moved away, and I was no longer in constant caregiver mode, I hit a flat spot. I grieve for Beth’s eyesight and that other life we’ll never know about, too, from time to time.

Still, I’ve been to lots of young people’s weddings over the past couple years and never experienced anything like I did Saturday. It may have been because Gus has been on my mind a lot lately, I don’t know. But it doesn’t really matter. It just is.

Years ago Beth volunteered with a hospice program, where she was trained to help facilitate a bereavement group. She’d come home with these little gems of wisdom from the leader/trainer about how this grief thing works. For example, that people who lose a child can go for years without bouts of overwhelming grief and then something as simple as attending a wedding sets them off, realizing their daughter never got to be a bride, and so on.

Those little nuggets—that one in particular—have served us both well over the years. When Beth has a day when she’s just tired of not being able to see, for example, we both know that it’s real, it’s sad, and it’s natural—it’s not a weakness.

And so it was Saturday night. I didn’t panic, or feel bad for feeling grief in the midst of an overwhelmingly joyous night. I looked it in the eye and said, hey, I gotta get back to the party. My friends are out there. And this band is great.

The Chase Bank building (where “Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me” is taped, has slanted columns.

A skyscraper tour for the blind. Isn’t that an oxymoron?

In the past, I’ve been ambivalent about special attempts to make visual things more accessible to those of us who can’t see them. I credit the institutions for trying. I really do. And some special accommodations — like the advance tours before plays — have truly enriched my experience. But I couldn’t imagine how the Chicago Architecture Foundation was going to pull off their special walking Must-Hear 25th anniversary tour highlighting, of all things…skyscrapers.

Sighted people have to step back and look up to take in a skyscraper, don’t they? People who are blind might be able to feel the building on the first floor, but I doubted whether people who are blind or have visual impairments could get any perspective, ahem, of a skyscraper without being able to see it.

The sense of touch is nothing like the sense of sight. Touch is too particular. A fingertip can’t possibly take in the grandeur of, say, a 90-story tower.

But, aha! The Chicago Architecture Foundation docents had thought this through. One hearty CAF volunteer pulled a wagon full of substantial building models behind her on the tour. She’d pull the appropriate one out for us to feel as a fellow docent described the building we were standing in front of, and we used other parts of our bodies, not just our fingertips, to explore the buildings themselves:

• The Monadnock building on the corner of Dearborn and Jackson is the tallest load-bearing masonry structure in the world, and we were encouraged to stretch our arms into the windowsills to get a sense of just how thick the load-bearing walls have to be to hold the building up.
• The Marquette Building at Dearborn and Adams was built in 1895, just years after the Monadnock. We used the palms of our hands to feel the cool terra cotta on the exterior, and our docent explained that terra cotta is fireproof. “It was very popular in buildings that went up shortly after the great Chicago fire.”
• A docent described the mosaics on the ceiling in the Marquette Building’s lobby and encouraged each of us to spread our arms and hug one of the Ionic columns at the entrance to get a sense of the grandeur.
• At Federal Plaza, one of the docents suggested we use our foot to trace the border of the blocks at our feet and explained that the entire complex is based on a 28-foot grid pattern using blocks that size. ”The seams of the granite pavers in the plaza extend into the lobbies and up the sides of the Kluczynski Federal Building.”
• At Chase Tower, we leaned back to get a sense of the way the building slants.

So maybe people who are blind can’t get the entire picture of what a skyscraper looks like, but thanks to the Chicago Architecture Foundation’s Must-Hear tour I know a lot more about the history of some of these skyscrapers and why certain materials were used to build them. I often pass by these buildings and plazas on walks with my Seeing Eye dog Whitney, and gee, I may stop in at the Marquette lobby every once in a while to give my ionic column a hug.

My brother Doug is a jazz trombonist in Louisville, and after retiring from his day job a couple years ago he discovered that when you reach a certain age you can take classes at the University of Louisville free of charge. He’s been formally studying in the jazz program there ever since.

Yesterday’s Writer’s Almanac alerted me it was poet Robert Pinsky’s birthday, and that the U.S. poet laureate had played saxophone in his high school band. Pinsky said: “My first experience of art, or the joy in making art, was playing the horn at some high-school dance or bar mitzvah or wedding, looking at a roomful of people moving their bodies around in time to what I was doing […] The fact that it was my breath making a party out of things was miraculous to me, a physical pleasure.” I wondered if Doug felt the same way, and when I emailed him to ask, he sent back a quick no. “I’m not that deep.” His talented and lovely wife Shelley chimed in then, and her response was so interesting and thought-provoking I asked if I could share it here with my blog readers. I was delighted she said yes, and I think you’ll be, too.

by Shelley Finke

This is timely. It’s cool that a musician would notice the obviousness of the situation (people being inspired to dance by his music) and be moved by it. But Pinsky was really a poet, and that explains his depth, I think all would agree.

Doug Finke, the scientartist.

The more I hang with musicians, and my husband, especially, who also writes arrangements, I see they’re more like scientists than artists (in the commonly understood sense) because of the way everything has to work out mathematically and how the various notes have to get along with each other. That is what brings satisfaction to them.

And since Doug writes music, I see that it has to happen two times: first on the paper, and later in the performance. The listeners can tell him how it felt emotionally.

That brings me to the timeliness of your message. Last night Doug played his monthly thing with a local big band. They performed a brand new arrangement of Doug’s: The Summer Knows (the theme to the film Summer of ’42) with lyrics included for a female vocal. His primary concern was how it would come together as a unit, as a collection of sounds, not whether it would move people. So as a musician and arranger that’s what concerned him.

I think back to when he was inspired to write this chart a few months ago and how moved he was at the time by the lyrics being sung by Rosemary Clooney. He talked about that quite a bit to me. At that point he was a total listener. And he was deep. But then he started writing and the science of it began, and I imagine he left the job of moving the audience to the singer, which in this case was one of the most capable ladies in town.

It was a wonderful result! The singer knew how to sell it and the band had a well-oiled chart. Doug spent weeks on it. Taking into consideration past comments he’s made to me about other charts he’s written that didn’t come off as well, I would say that he didn’t try to over complicate it this time.

Doug refers to “crunching” harmonies a lot, bringing the notes of chords together REALLY closely, so you would think they would not sound good (like playing CDEFG all at once on the piano, to my mind). It’s meant to produce a way-out modern sound, though still pleasing provided your ear is comfortable with that. But it doesn’t always work out that way with live instruments.

Doug’s composing software has a very old-fashioned electronic sound when it plays back (not fun for the wife). Sometimes it sounds like a calliope. So it really is a revelation when the musicians play it with their particular dynamics. This was a case of everything working out well, and perhaps of Doug not over-crunching those harmonies. He would have to explain it more, of course.

There must be a parallel in the writing of words. Writers think about rhythm and syllables and how things look on a page (for those remaining who still read that way) as much as the soul of it, or maybe more so. And then there are the technical rules and guidelines which as a freelancer you wrestle with differently for each assignment.

It is very similar to being a musician, isn’t it? You are all scientartists!

Back in 2002, after he turned 16, our son Gus moved to a residence for developmentally disabled people operated by Bethesda Lutheran Communities. I have a pretty good list of “most difficult times in my life,” as we all do if we live long enough. That time is unsurpassed.

Gus was game for a hug–after he finished his Whoppers. With cheese.

But it was made substantially less difficult by the wonderful human beings we like to call staff, or caregivers, or care providers or some other clinical term. I’ll just leave it at wonderful human beings (WHBs). They communicated with us regularly during the transition, sought and found ways to make Gus feel at home, and eventually, he did. And eventually, we could visit Gus, and not cry our eyes out on the 2-1/2 hour drive home.

Then he had to move again. He had lived in a dormitory style building, which was brand new when he moved there—but the movement toward group homes in community settings had become the flavor of the day. And so, Gus moved with three other fellows into a nice little ranch home across from a nice little park. And we held our breath that it would go OK. It did.

You know why? Those WHBs.

Last week Beth and I met Gus and one of those WHBs at a doctor’s office near where Gus lives. Gus has been having some behavioral issues—nothing we hadn’t seen before, but troublesome because they hadn’t manifested in a long time. And so we and the WHB were seeing a doctor about it.

After the appointment, we met Gus and the WHB at Burger King, where he was treated to two whoppers with cheese and French fries. We took the opportunity to chat with the WHB, learned about how and why she worked with folks like Gus, and generally had a swell time while Gus plowed through his lunch.

A month earlier, I’d attended a meeting of parents and guardians of people who are served by Bethesda. Times are hard—they’re facing cuts and budget issues like everyone.

Beth’s mom Flo got to visit with Gus and us at his little house a few years back–she was 93 at the time.

Here in Illinois, the inane budget standoff between people who are perfectly comfortable regardless of how stupid they are, has already taken a toll on everything from literacy programs to health care. Staff are out of work and their clients—who were already out of luck—are just out. On their own.

We’ve got something wrong right now. Really wrong. Forget ideology. Just ask yourself: Is there enough money in this country to pay people who care for people like Gus, or people like Beth’s mom at the end of her life, or people like us when we get there, what they’re worth?

On one hand, I’d say no, because what they do is priceless. But we can pay them more. And we can. And that we don’t is on all of us.

As we chatted with the WHB at Burger King, she thanked us profusely for attending the meetings. “When it’s just staff, the doctors don’t take us seriously,” she said.

Having not been taken seriously by a doctor or two in our time, we completely empathized.

And before we left, we were sure to say, “No. Thank you.”