Brian’s the man behind the camera.

My niece Jen and her one-year-old daughter, who I lovingly call “Toots,” flew in from Florida yesterday. My sister Bev and her family are coming by train from Michigan later this morning. My sister Marilee is flying in from Florida tomorrow, my brother Doug and his daughter Marsha are driving in from Louisville Friday afternoon, and Marsha’s husband and son will drive in from Indianapolis Friday evening.

What’s all the fuss about? Our nephew Brian Miller is in town from Japan!

Now get out your world globe. You’re going to need it to follow Brian’s adventures since graduating from college. After returning from his first trip abroad to Egypt, Brian turned right around and went back to the Middle East for a semester of intensive Arabic in Jordan. Next stop, a study program in Kuwait with the National Council on U.S.-Arab Relations. From there he took side trips through Syria and Turkey.

And then he moved to South Korea. Brian spent six years in Jeju (a beautiful Korean island on the East China Sea) teaching English to kids and honing his photography skills. After The Village across the Sea, Brian’s first book of photography, was published in 2010, Brian moved to Japan.

An example of Brian’s work. Check out his full portfolio by clicking on the photo, or visit: http://baraka.zenfolio.com

He lives in Mie, Japan now, teaching English to adults while pursuing his work photographing the long-traditional female divers of Asia. He’s been published on the National Geographic website twice, once in 2011 for his photo Haenyeo with Octopus and again for Portrait of an Ama in 2013.

Brian grew up describing things visually for his ol’ Aunt Betha (he was only four when I lost my sight) and has a knack for explaining his photos in words. His oreum photo, for example. The word “oreum” is Korean dialect for the island’s parasitic volcanic cones. “Basically, they’re mini-volcanoes,” Brian told me. During breaks from teaching, he’s taken vacations in Japan, and in Cambodia, and in Thailand, and in Vietnam, and in Hong Kong. When Minke (that’s what my mom’s grandchildren call her) died last year she left some money for each of her grandchildren. Brian decided to use his to come home and see his family. Flo’s legacy lives on. She’d be pleased, and we sure are – it’s been a long time since we’ve had Brian here with us!

A portrait of a haenyeo (female diver) on the shores of Jeju Island, S. Korea. The haenyeo dive without breathing equipment to spear fish and gather seafood for market.

Brian spent the early part of this week with his parents and his sister’s family in Michigan, and when they all get off the train at Union Station in Chicago today they’re heading directly to Wrigley Field to see the Cubs play the Milwaukee Brewers– Brian is a big Cubs fan. After the Cubs game, they’re heading directly to Soldier Field for a pre-season game there –Brian is a big Bears fan. Tomorrow Brian and his mom are heading to Sox Park to sit in a skybox and watch the Cubs play the White Sox (did I tell you he’s a Cubs fan?!). Mike and I will treat everyone to some of our favorite South Loop food –Pat’s Pizza and Harold’s Fried Chicken – and we’ll all listen and dance to the Fat Babies at SummerDance in Grant Park.

Saturday’s a pool party at a cousin’s house in the suburbs, and I’ll be with Brian’s six-year-old nephew Bryce on Sunday while my husband Mike Knezovich the lonely White Sox fan joins Brian and a group of other Cub-fan-family members to see the White Sox play the Cubs at White Sox Park.

Brian and the Michiganders will head for the train home after Sunday’s baseball game, and Monday Brian takes off from Grand Rapids back to Japan. Whew! Whirlwind schedule, I know. Kind of mimics Brian’s life, I guess – he is a whirlwind!

Lately I have been trying to remind myself that whenever I have something touchy, sensitive, or otherwise difficult to say to — or about — somebody, it’s probably a good idea to do it in person. Ideally, in the same place at the same time, not on the phone, or via Skype. It’s something I like to call Actual Reality (AR®).

This young man is about to experience Actual Reality.

A news story here in Illinois last week drove home that very basic principal. I’m a proud graduate of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, but that pride has taken another in a long list of recent hits. The U of I is beset by troubles right now – in the athletic department, and in its academic administration.  It’s facing a lawsuit about the hiring/firing of a faculty member. It’s all pretty complicated and deserving of its own treatment. I bring it up here only to explain the news story I mentioned earlier. Last week, emails between then-Chancellor Phyllis Wise and other administrators became public (despite their best efforts to prevent that).

The cache of correspondence is not flattering, and I don’t know where to begin on the content. But it provided a brilliant example of the virtues of AR®.

If you’re a bigwig, of course, worried about scandal, it has the virtue of really keeping it between you and another person.

But apart from the CYA aspect, with all the texting and email and online surveys and Facebook memes, and posts and Tweets, the only truly interactive communication we still have is in-person conversation.

You are forced to look at the person you’re about to communicate with, unlike when you’re sitting at a keyboard alone, building a righteous, ironclad argument about why you’re absolutely right and the other person is dead wrong. You’re less likely to be glib or snarky, and you have the opportunity to correct, steer, and recalibrate in real time.

Seeing that person will probably make you measure your words more carefully. To read facial expression and body language. And the other person will have the same opportunity with you.

And if you’re talking about controversial issues and making tough decisions, it’s more likely that at some point, one of you will look at the other and realize, “Hmm, maybe what we’re contemplating isn’t such a great idea.”

Moreover, it means that whatever you are discussing is important enough for you to have taken the time and trouble to be in the same room at the same time. And important things usually do merit such effort.

I’m not preaching on this one. I’ve done my share of stupid online responses, via e-mail or unwise and unfair Facebook comments.  This is more a NOTE TO SELF: If someone says something online that concerns you and that might possibly warrant any back-and-forth, don’t type a response, type a note to yourself to take the matter up the next time you’re together.

And if it’s not worth getting together to do that, it probably doesn’t warrant the time.

My one minute of fame from that “Where are They Now?” video about me on the Oprah Winfrey Network last month brought up a lot of questions from friends who didn’t know me back when I modeled nude for art students.

Visit the OWN site for the full clip.

One Safe & Sound blog follower emailed me personally with a lot of questions, and assuming some of you other readers might have been too shy to ask, I figured I’d answer the questions here for any of you who are interested.

1. Did it bother you being nude in front of all those guys? Well for one thing, there were some female art students in class, too. And the art professors who were at my audition (yes, you have to audition to be a nude model, they want to make sure you won’t freak out on your first day and waste the three-hour classtime) reassured me ahead of time that art students think of models the same way medical students think of the naked bodies they work with. “It’s all very professional,” they said, pointing out that a lot of the students would be freshmen and not yet very sure of themselves as artists. “Add to that the fact that they’ve probably never been in a room with a naked stranger before, and you’ll realize they’ll be a lot more nervous than you’ll be.” I remember wondering why we didn’t all get naked then, you know, just to make absolutely sure the nervous playing field was level? So yes, I was a bit nervous at first, but after a while I focused more on staying still than worrying what I looked like up there.
2. How long did you have to stay very still and not move? Fifty minutes, and then I’d get a ten minute break.
3. How long do you have to sit there? Each class was three hours long, and remember, sometimes I was standing up in the same pose the entire time with just two ten-minute breaks. Teachers made it clear that if I couldn’t hold a pose for the entire 50 minutes, all I had to do was call out to the teacher that I needed a break. They’d come with masking tape to mark the position my feet were in so that I’d have a better chance of striking up the identical pose when I returned. My favorite poses were the ones where I was laying down.
4. Do you think you would have been a nude model if you still had your eye sight? No way.
5. Or did the fact you were blind enter into your decision to model at all? Yes. The ADA had been passed, but I was still out of work and pretty bummed out about it. I’d applied for jobs but by then employers had already figured out ways to avoid hiring me without mentioning anything about blindness, they knew how to avoid being sued. On Sunday evenings my husband Mike would read the want ads out loud to me. When he came to the one about needing nude models, he read it out loud as a sort of joke. I memorized the phone number without telling him and called for an audition.
6. Did you enjoy doing it or did it bother you? It was okay. A thing I didn’t like about it was that I got achy sometimes, standing in one position. The good part was feeling like I was still part of the visual arts. Another thing: staying still so long gave me lots of time to think about my writing, how to reformulate a lead, how to get across a certain idea. In fact, I used that quiet time to put together my very first published essay. I composed it in my head and then typed it into my talking computer the minute I got home. Nude Modeling: Goin’ In Blind was picked up by “Alternet” and published in alternative newspapers all over the country.
7. Do you still model? I quit modeling in 2003, after my memoir Long Time, No See was published and we moved from Urbana, Illinois to Chicago. In a convoluted way, the success of that essay I’d written about nude modeling led to the publication of my memoir, my appearance on Oprah, my job leading memoir-writing classes here in Chicago, my recorded essays on NPR, and this blog. So hey, I’m glad I gave it a try.

In case you missed it, my friend Nancy Faust was featured in an article in last Sunday’s New York Times. Wow. What a fantastic lead sentence to this blog post. What is astounding about that sentence is not that the retired White Sox organist was featured in The Times, but that I can honestly and sincerely call a famous and talented woman like her my friend.

Nancy graciously took time out on her last day at White Sox Park to talk with me (and Hanni, of course).

Nancy comes to my book events when she can. These days I go to hear her play at venues outside of White Sox Park and spend time between tunes talking politics with her husband Joe. She and I keep in touch via email, and she follows our Safe & Sound blog, too – hi, Nancy!

Nancy Faust retired from the White Sox in 2010, and after 41 years, 13 managers and a World Series title, it’s a well-deserved retirement. Still, I gotta say, visits to the ballpark the past five years just haven’t been as fun as they used to be. It’s not that the team is doing poorly – a baseball fan gets used to that – I just miss the way Nancy played the organ during games.

My relationship with Nancy Faust started on that summer day in 1985 when my eye surgeon told Mike and me that none of the surgeries they tried had worked. The two of us were uncharacteristically silent as we started home, until we got to Comiskey Park and Mike noticed the White Sox were playing. “Wanna go?”

Going to a ballgame after learning I’d be blind for the rest of my life might sound like a strange thing to do, but it beat heading home and sitting on our pitiful second-hand couch and wondering where to turn next. “Between bites and gulps and giving me play by play, Mike bantered with other fans, cursing the underachievers on the team,” I wrote in my memoir, Long Time, No See. “I laughed at the tunes selected by Nancy Faust, the Sox organist-she’s famous for picking songs that play on player’s names.”
I stopped by Nancy Faust’s booth at White Sox Park in 2003 after Long Time, No See was published to sign a copy for her. She was tickled to see her name right there in print in my memoir, and I was tickled to have the opportunity to thank her personally for helping me track what was happening on the field. A friendship was born. Now, a dozen years later, Sunday’s New York Times article credited Nancy Faust for reinventing the role of a ballpark organist by incorporating rock and pop songs into her repertoire:

Faust played songs for the fans, for the moment. She did not think players found her music helpful; they had enough to worry about, she thought.

“I didn’t do it for the player; I was there for the enjoyment of the fans,” Faust said.

And boy oh boy, did I enjoy it. When Nancy Faust was at the organ and played Johnny Cash’s “I Walk the Line,” I knew it was ball four. When she played Michael Jackson’s “Somebody’s Watching me,” I knew there’d been a pickoff throw. If she played The Kinks “You Really Got me,” I knew the pick-off play was a success.

Nancy helped me identify who was batting by teasing the player’s name with a tune. Mike’s all-time favorite was the one for Gary Disarcina. No, it wasn’t “Gary, Indiana” from the Music Man. That is wayyyy too obvious. It was “Have you Seen Her?” by the Chi-Lites. As for me, I always loved it when Travis Hafner was in town. At the last Cleveland Indians game I went to, she played “Bunny Hop” for his first at bat, and then J. Geils “Centerfold” “his next time up.

Now this Sunday New York Times story tells me we have Hafner’s Cleveland Indians to blame for the obnoxious loud rock music we hear over the speakers during ballgames – Cleveland was the first MLB team to let their players choose their own walk-up songs. Nancy Faust was still playing for the White Sox when that started happening, and from that point on they had her play walk-up music on the organ only for opposing players. A stadium D.J. controlled the songs for White Sox players from then on. The Sunday New York Times article was about the “surprisingly long, intricate history of walk-up music,” and I absolutely loved this part where Nancy Faust likens the DJ recorded versions as Musical Selfies:

This new approach, she said, eliminated spontaneity, and maybe enthusiasm. “If you have momentum going, and you’ve got three guys on base and the next guy comes up to bat, and you’ve got the fans going crazy — and it all stops to listen to what I might liken to a musical selfie?” Faust said. “It just stops the momentum. And then you’ve got to hope you can get it going again.”

I know what she means. I sure have had trouble getting my Major League Baseball momentum going again since Nancy Faust left in 2010. The article reports on how she retired to fanfare — the White Sox unveiled a plaque for her at a ceremony before one of her final games, and Nancy Faust bobbleheads were handed out the same day. The New York Times said, “Faust, who grew up in Chicago and still lives there, had become a White Sox icon.”

I’m glad the New York Times had the wisdom to interview her for Sunday’s story, and I can only imagine the tune she is playing in her head as she reads this blog post of mine. Rolling Stones “Miss you,” perhaps?

It was about a quarter mile into the short hike to the Wisconsin River that I threw off the weight. The weight of sirens, impatient car horns, tourists, shootings, and the helpless feeling of being unable to help homeless people.

Looking skyward from the trail.

I stopped in my tracks, recognizing that the only sound to be heard was the wind in the trees. I did not check my phone or even think about the mountain of email that I’d find when I returned. I just looked up into the canopy of trees and felt the thin length of sunshine that made its way through.

That’s when I remembered that the power of nature is the only thing worthy of the term awesome. And it is. Awesome.

Back in the nineties, I worked for a dot.com that took me on a wonderful and demanding roller coaster ride. I reached a point where I was waking up at 2 a.m. thinking about what I hadn’t gotten done or what I had to do. And I was told by my employer to take a vacation.

Beth, I and Pandora the Seeing Eye Dog rented an oceanfront place in the basement of an old Nags Head style cottage in Kill Devil Hills, North Carolina. We frolicked in the ocean, we ate fresh fish, we befriended our upstairs landlord. And lulled by the sound of the ocean through our bedroom window, I slept. Like a baby.

And so it was this past week in Wisconsin. I was told by my bosses to take a vacation. This time it was a one-room log cabin just about a mile from the Wisconsin Dells. For those of you who don’t know, the Wisconsin Dells is a ticky tack tourist destination where you can eat all the fudge and buy all the moccasins you want and go on amphibious duck rides and slide down enormous water slides and jet ski and well, you know. The Dells are also a real thing—beautiful rock formations carved by the Wisconsin River.

Despite Scott Walker’s best efforts, Wisconsin remains a wonderful place. Full of wonderful people who demonstrate the opposite of the ostentatious. On a walk through town, I passed a pizza joint that had a sign on the door: “Tree fell on our roof at home. We’ll try to be back by 7:00 p.m.”

Wisconsin is also full of natural beauty and fresh water left by glaciers. And a whole lot of trees. I took the hike to the river over and over again just to smell the trees and fresh air. I took a dip in the river while boaters passed by. I went into town to get groceries and drove down the main drag to find that the motel that I’d stayed in with my family decades ago was still there. I missed them. I took a Wisconsin Ducks ride.

My time near the river was too short, but I’d planned my re-entry well. I took a tour of Taliesin, Frank Lloyd Wright’s masterpiece residence, and it was an unexpected delight. I went there feeling like it was something I should do because it would be good for me, and I left feeling like… it was good for me.

I then drove to Madison for a night in the “city.” City is in quotes because Madison isn’t really a city like, say, Chicago. It’s more a state of mind. It’s a great college town like Champaign-Urbana or Ann Arbor or Iowa City–times 10. I went to a place on the Capitol Square called the Old Fashioned and had a proper Wisconsin Fish Fry. The perch was superb. I walked down State Street to the University of Wisconsin Student Union and watched sailboats on the lake.

The next morning I walked the Square and took in what has to be the greatest farmer’s market in the world. Well, I’m saying it is, anyway. Street musicians, cheese, local produce, and food trucks. I had the breakfast empanada, and it was sublime.

It was hard to leave. It was hard to come back.

I picked up Beth on my way home. She was visiting with our great-niece Floey and some other friends in the suburbs. Back at our place, I read the mail, dropped my bag, and we headed out to return the rental car. We walked home downtown and stopped for a drink to debrief one another about the past few days.

I was a little melancholy, as the taste of vacation had just whetted my appetite for a longer one. The remedy: We went to the White Sox game Saturday night, John Danks pitched like he was a young man who’d never suffered a shoulder injury, and the Sox beat the Yankees.

On Sunday, we got a text from some dear friends whom we met a few years ago by some crazy happenstance worthy of its own story, for another time. They invited us to a picnic in the little park just outside our place. We ate cheese and olives and a fresh green bean and tomato salad and drank wine, and were cooled by something stronger than a breeze but not strong enough to blow our goods away.

We sat opposite another group that had gathered for their own picnic, and one of them—a friend who lives in our building—brought us some home-made potato salad to share.

It was good to get away. And it is good to be home.