It’s Wanda Bridgeforth’s 94th birthday, and without telling Wanda, I asked her fellow writers in the Wednesday “Me, Myself and I” to surprise her with essays on “What I Learn from Wanda’s Wise Words” and read them aloud to her this morning. Here’s mine.

Bee-you-tee-full

This is what our street looked like on the night of the 2011 blizzard. (Photo courtesy Lora Delestowicz-Wierzbowski.)

Wanda Bridgeforth has taught me the meaning of beauty. More specifically, the meaning of the word “Bee-you-tee-full.”

Nearly five years ago the Chicago Cultural Center had to cancel our “Me, Myself and I” memoir- writing class due to a blizzard. I dialed Wanda’s number that day to see if she was weathering the storm. When she heard my voice on the phone, she excused herself to turn down the radio. “I’m tired of hearing all those people calling in anyway,” she said. “All they’re doing is complaining about their long waits for the bus or the train, or the way the city didn’t shovel their street.”

Wanda will be 94 years old this month, and she is not a complainer. She credits her own upbeat attitude to her hardworking mother and her beloved uncle, Hallie B. “Hallie B. always told me that people who sit and mope with their head in their hands, well, they never see the good things coming their way.”

On that phone call in 2011, I asked Wanda to describe the storm that everyone around me was complaining about. She started out by using her favorite four-syllable word. “Bee-you-tee-full.”

That’s Wanda from way back on her 90th. Photo courtesy Darlene Schweitzer.

Wanda has lived in more than 50 different apartments or houses in her lifetime. Her mother was a “domestic” and had to leave Wanda every Sunday to take off and live at the houses she took care of. Wanda lived with one relative one week, a friend the next, and sometimes, with complete strangers. “I tell you, Beth” she said to me once. “I could share stories with you about growing up that would make the hair curl on a bald man’s head.”

These days Wanda lives alone, perched in a small apartment in a South Side Chicago high-rise that overlooks Lake Michigan. She writes her essays for class while sipping on coffee, looking out her kitchen window and watching the birds and boats on the lake. “There was absolutely no horizon during the storm,” she told me during that blizzard in 2011. The sky was white, the ground was white, the lake was white. “Like someone had draped a fuzzy white blanket over my window.”

Wanda woke up at 3 a.m. the night of the storm and sat staring out of her window for hours. She’d never seen anything like it. It was stunning. “I drank coffee until I was drunk!” she laughed. “It was bee-you-tee-full!”

Happy 94th, my friend. Without you, I might be tempted to look at my own days as stormy, but having you in our memoir-writing class (and, more importantly, calling you a friend) makes my life bee-you-tee-full.

Wanda’s classmate Sharon Kramer compiles essays by writers in the “Me, Myself and I” class on the Beth’s Class blog. Look for essays by — and about –Wanda there.

Remember the last mass shooting? It’s been a whole 10 days, which is seeming like a long time between such tragedies. (In fact, FBI stats put the average length between mass shootings, defined as resulting in four or more deaths, at two weeks.)

After each one, this Onion headline always springs to mind: No Way To Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens.

It does seem insane that we seem unable to change anything as these incidents pile up. I don’t have a lot original to say except that I support more public safety measures such as background checks for every fire arm sale, every where. I can’t promise it’ll stop things, but I believe it would help cut the number. And it would be worth trying, and worth the minor inconvenience.

But I also don’t think it’s just about guns. Even Michael Moore, who strongly supports stricter gun laws, acknowledged this in Bowling for Columbine. Canadians, as that film points out, love their guns, and they have a lot of them. But we don’t see the craziness from the Canucks. Clearly, there’s something different about the United States, and it isn’t a good different.

I read two or three things this past week that I found constructive and that connect our societal failures—and individual failures—to these horrible events.

One of them is by a blogger named Mark Manson. I can’t vouch for him overall, don’t know much about him, but I thought his thoughts here are worth everyone taking to heart. He suggests that in the predictable aftermath of each incident, we miss something: An excerpt:

And while we’re all fighting over whose pet cause is more right and more true and more noble, there’s likely another young man out there, maybe suicidally depressed, maybe paranoid and delusional, maybe a psychopath, and he’s researching guns and bombs and mapping out schools and recording videos and thinking every day about the anger and hate he feels for this world.

And no one is paying attention to him.

He notes that these onerous school slaughters—Virginia Tech, Sandy Hook, and on and on…they’re not impulsive outbursts. They’re well planned, often for months or more. The killers are methodical in their preparation. They’re alienated and very unhappy. They want to make a very big splash on their way out. And the killers almost always give off plenty of red flags well in advance.

That’s the Cliff’s Notes—the full piece is worth the read.

The other thing I read comes also from someone I know almost nothing about—a musician named Jonathan Byrd. He grew up using guns, travels a lot in other countries and has some pretty keen observations about what’s different between them and us. A snippet:

More interesting to this essay are other countries I’ve been to regularly: The Netherlands, Germany, Denmark, and Switzerland. Canada is notably similar in that there are a lot of guns, but not much gun violence compared to the U.S. Almost every grown man in Switzerland has an assault rifle issued by the military. They have gun festivals with shooting competitions for the kids.

All these countries also take care of their citizens.

The pieces differ substantially in their approach, but there is an intersection: How we treat one another here in the United States (pretty poorly) is at least a part of the problem. The Byrd piece happened to be a Facebook post that someone shared—about the most thoughtful thing I’ve ever seen on Facebook.

Anyway, you can read it here—and I hope you will.

Four more days and we’ll hit that two week mark.

The Cubs win over the Pittsburgh Pirates last night means they’ll be in Chicago Monday to play the St. Louis Cardinals, but a fan who uses a wheelchair says she isn’t going to bother trying to see the game at Wrigley Field – it’s inaccessible for her.

A jumbotron in left field was part of renovations at Wrigley.

Lifelong Cubs fan Marla Donato started using a wheelchair two years ago after undergoing multiple surgeries to repair a shattered leg and ankle. “Even if the Cubs’ season continues, I won’t be angling to go to more games,” Donato writes in a post on the CityLab blog called I Love Wrigley Field, But as a Wheelchair User, I Sure Wish It Was Easier to Navigate. “It’s too hard to navigate the ballpark in a wheelchair.”

In her post, Donato said she’s been root, root, rooting for the Cubbies at Wrigley Field her entire life, and she figured it’d be no big deal going there in a wheelchair. “After all, this year marks the 25th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act,” she reasoned. “We’ve come a long way with accessibility issues.”

Here at the Safe & Sound blog I’ve been publishing a lot of posts lately about the 25th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act. Saturday morning I’m taking a special tour of downtown Chicago for people who are blind that the Chicago Architecture Foundation put together to celebrate the anniversary, and I’ll head right from there to the first-ever touch tour put on by the Goodman Theatre — I’ll see (well, I’ll hear!) the production of Disgraced after I tour the stage. We’ve come a long way in terms of accessibility, but 25 years later, many public spaces remain inaccessible or inhospitable to people with disabilities.

In her post, Donato wrote about the $575 million budget Cub owners have to update Cubs Park and the surrounding area — she assumed upgrading accessibility would be high on their to-do list. “But instead of, say, getting the elevators running by even halfway through the season, the ballpark’s brass concentrated on installing big Jumbotrons and an ear-splitting audio system by opening day.”

The game Donato attended at Wrigley over the summer was her first “fun” outing after doctors had to re-break her heel during a recent surgery. Some of the challenging issues she encountered during that fun day:

• Inaccessible bathrooms. She couldn’t brace herself to stand up on her own in a stall, so a stranger helped pull her pants up and down.
• Elevators out of service. A spokesperson for the U.S. Department of Justice (which oversees compliance with the Americans with Disabilities act) pointed her towards regulations that stipulate that elevator repairs “must be made as quickly as possible.” The regulations do not specify how quick “quickly” has to be, and they say ramps are okay in the meantime.
• Ramps are steep. Some “historic properties” are held to different standards when it comes to things like the steepness of ramps. Donato’s husband and a “young, strong usher” struggled together and finally managed to push her up the long series of steep ramps at Wrigley.

Once in their assigned area, Donato’s wheelchair was placed along with others behind the last row of seats at the very top of the Terrace. “Were we all actually expected to sit completely in the main aisle and become an obstacle course for drunken fans on hotdog and beer runs?” she asks in her blog post. “Wasn’t that a fire code hazard? An emergency exit violation?”

Cubs spokesman Julian Green told Donato later that her assigned seating was perfectly legal, that sitting completely out in a main aisle without any protective barrier satisfies ADA regulations as long as the aisle is considered wide enough.

Donato’s post goes on to spell out countless other problems she encountered at the game this past summer, and how she learned that when it comes to making accommodations for people with mobility impairments there are a lot of gray areas — even after the passage of the Americans with disabilities Act. From her post:

It tends to be easier to get around newer parks, built after 1993, which are held to different standards. And there are some allowances for “alternative standards,” such as the steepness of ramps for “historic properties.” Those are ones “eligible for listing in the National Register or Historic Places, or properties designated as historic under State or local law.”

If any of you blog readers know how Fenway Park in Boston dealt with these sorts of issues, or if you have stadium stories of your own to tell, please leave them here in the comments.

In the end, Donato and her husband left the game early – they wanted to avoid navigating her wheelchair through the crush of fellow Cub fans on the steep ramps towards the exits. “We missed the Cubs’ ninth inning fall from grace and then the team’s tenth inning game-winning home run,” she writes. “Now I’ve added stadiums to my list of fun things I took for granted before I had to navigate them this way.”

Sometimes I just want to talk to somebody. It could be an old  friend, an acquaintance, or maybe even someone I haven’t met before. Taverns used to be the best place to pick up a conversation, but it’s become nearly impossible to do so these days without the
omnipresent, glowing, flashing distraction of TVs. And not just one small TV at the end of the bar–now they’re multiple behemoths, tuned to multiple events–usually sports but sometimes talking heads. Sometimes the sound is on, and when it’s not, there’s loud music playing.

I think it started in the 80s, with MTV, cable channels, and 24-hour sports channels. And it’s crazy now.

Hackney’s, our local watering hole (food’s good, too), is usually relatively quiet, but the crowd there was boisterous after yesterday’s Bears win. Our friend Brad, whom we’ve mentioned here before, came in and despaired at how difficult it is now to find a quiet place to have a drink before dinner.  When an out-of-town guest visited him last week, Brad brought him to the Coq d’Or, an old-school, wood-paneled cocktail bar in Chicago’s vaunted Drake Hotel.

A good choice, I thought. Beth and I used to go to see the piano player there, Buddy Charles, who at the time was a local legend.

Well, apparently the Coq d’Or still has the clubby wood-paneled feel-but it also has TVs. Wide screen TVs. When Brad and his friend were there, all the TVs in the bar were tuned to some news story about a police raid in the Chicago area. One wide-screen was on the wall right next to Brad’s head, he told us. “Everyone was staring my way, not at me, but at the TV!”

The three of us, as well as Sean, the Sunday night bartender at Hackney’s, were hard pressed to come up with bars in Chicago that don’t have TVs. Sean did come up with one: the California Clipper at the corner of California and Augusta. So we have a list of one, and I’m hoping there are more. I’m pretty sure that a list of such places in various major cities would become a valued part of any travel guide.

So, got any secret TV-less taverns to wet your whistle and/or grab a bite to eat at the bar? Whether it’s in Chicago or elsewhere, please leave it in the comments section.

Because we all need a little respite from phosphorescent screens from time to time.

I’ve learned a lot about baseball from my husband Mike Knezovich over the years, but one aspect of the game that still confounds me is pitching. Which direction do curve balls curve? What’s the difference between a slider and a cutter?

Thanks to our generous friends Don Horvath and Juli Crabtree, we were able to enjoy last night’s White Sox win against the Detroit Tigers. Fans were given “Stretch Sale toys at the door to commemorate White Sox pitcher Chris Sale’s single-season record-breaking 270 strikeouts. I fondled my Stretch Sale throughout the game, and now I finally understand why legendary Los Angeles Dodgers baseball announcer Vin Scully refers to him as “Mr. Bones” and others liken the 170-pound 6’7” left-hander’s wind-up to a strained inverted w “ akin to a scarecrow.”

The Chris Sale action figure I got at last night’s game.

Mike is always around to answer my baseball questions, and good radio announcers like the Brewers’ Bob Uecker, the Tampa Bay Rays’ Dave Wills, and Giants’ Jonathan Miller have been a big help in my understanding the game, but I am still left to wonder how it is that baseball fanatics and skilled announcers can accurately predict that the next pitch will be a change-up or a braking ball, or more simply, a strike or a ball.

And so, at this time each year, as we enter the playoffs, I turn to literature to help me better understand how pitching works. And year after year, literature has disappointed me.

Perfect I’m Not by David Wells taught me more about beer, brawls, and backaches than about pitching a baseball. I found Jim Bouton’s Ball Four, annoying, probably because Jim Bouton reads the audio book himself, and he’s pretty arrogant. Author Buzz Bissinger follows the St. Louis Cardinals through a 2003 three-game stint against the Chicago Cubs Three Nights in August. The book was entertaining because I’d listened to that three-game series myself on the radio (2003 was the year Mike and I moved to Chicago) but I would have learned a lot more about pitching if Bissinger’s book had focused on Cardinal pitching coach Dave Duncan’s decision-making rather than fawning over Tony La Russa.

I’d just about given up learning anything about pitching from reading books when I opened up my daily Writer’s Almanac online on Saturday, September 19 and learned it was Roger Angell’s birthday that day. The almanac said Angell was born in New York in 1920, and his mother and stepfather were well known in the literary world. His mother was Katharine Sergeant Angell, the longtime New Yorker fiction editor, and his step-father was E.B. White, the essayist and children’s author.

The almanac said Roger Angell started working for The New Yorker in 1956 and is best known for writing about baseball. “He was 79 when he published his first full-length book, A Pitcher’s Story.”

What? A Pitcher’s Story? I looked for Angell’s first “full-length book” on BARD, the Library of Congress National Library Service that provides audio books free of charge to people who are blind or visually handicapped, and bingo! A Pitcher’s Story was available. It did not disappoint.

Example? In Chapter 7 (called “Get a Grip”) Angell is sitting in the Yankee bullpen and asks pitcher David Cone to describe how he holds a baseball for each pitch, and what he expects to happen next. He asks readers to put down their book and “root around the house for an old baseball.” I did as I was told and found mine in my top dresser drawer, signed by White Sox pitcher Roberto Hernandez after I met him in a sports store in the late 1990s and asked to feel the circumference of his upper arm with my two hands. Oh, my.

But back to Roger Angell’s “A Pitcher’s Story:

The ball, it will be seen, keeps representing a horseshoe curve of stitches when rotated. There are four of them. If we grab a horseshoe so that the first and middle-finger fingertips just slip over the top broadmost curve of the stitches, a red row of stiching will appear to run down the aver side of both fingers, as if to frame them. With these two fingers slightly parted, the odd conviction comes that you’re on top of the ball.

”This is the two—seamer,” Cone tells Angell in the book. “You’ve got it!” Cone describes how to adjust the two-seamer into a four-seamer, and how four-seamers are meant to cut the wind, while two-seamers tend to sink. “The one-liner is just a variation on the two-seamer,” Cone says. “Let your finger slip a little toward the wider white area of the ball, and you press down more with your forefinger.” “They moved on from there to the curve, the slider, the splitter, and Angell acknowledges that he’d hoped to sit down with Cone before one of his starts so Cone might go over one of the other team’s batting orders, describe each batters’ strengths and weaknesses and let Angell know his plans. “It was a dumb idea,” Angell concedes, and while I get back to playing with my Chris Sale doll, I’ll leave you with Roger Angell explaining why that was so dumb:

Each hitter and turn at bat presents the pitcher not with a fixed offensive array, but with something fluid and conditional, a cloud chamber of variables. The count, the score, the inning, the number of outs, the position of base runners, the umpire’s strike zone, capability of the outfielders, the quickness of the catcher, how much you can trust this particular receiver to handle the splitter in the dirt, the runner at third, how this next hitter was swinging in his last at-bat and the one before that.

Let the playoffs begin!