Here in Chicago, the past week started with elation over the Blackhawks winning their third Stanley Cup in six years. But the elation was later  tempered by the news out of South Carolina.

There are lot of people doing good work, including Bryan Stevenson and EJI.

I have lots to say about it, too much really, and I’ve found over the past few days that others have said these things better than I can. Charlie Pierce hit several nails on the head with this piece for Esquire. And this post called, “Yes, you’re a racist, and a traitor,” hit several more (thanks to the Beachwood Reporter for the link). Give them a read–they were cathartic for me.

But, what to do? Some of the things I’d like to do, out of anger, I’d best keep to myself. And I think, in the end, if I did them, however righteous it’d feel at the moment, I’d only feel regret afterward.

Instead, I’ve resolved to:

Increase my support for the Equal Justice Initiative.

This group, founded and led by a brilliant attorney named Bryan Stevenson takes on the cases of people who are wrongly convicted or charged with crimes, and of people who can’t otherwise afford effective representation. EJI has been effective at winning cases, but also at shedding light on how racism persists, and how our past plays an insidious role in our present.

EJI also does research, and recently released a report on the history of lynching in the United States, and it’s effectiveness as a tool of terror. While I’m at it, I think I’ll renew my support of the Southern Poverty Law Center, which has been doing important and difficult work since 1971.

Support one or more gun control organizations.

There’s been a piece of information about the Charleston horror that I haven’t been able to track down. Some accounts say that the coward’s father bought him the gun. Others say that the coward’s parents gave him the money, and that the coward bought the gun himself. Still other reports indicated that the coward had an arrest record. Which leads me to think that if he did purchase the gun, and we had background checks, he would’ve been stopped. We’ll never stop this stuff entirely, but we can certainly reduce the number of incidents with some common sense measures.

There are lots of worthy organizations out there, local, state and national. Here’s an easy way to find them: Go to the NRA Institute for Legislative Action’s Web site, and you’ll find a list of anti-gun organizations that they’ve assembled. It’s kind of chilling, because they include organizations like AARP and the MacArthur Foundation. Such is the NRA paranoia. But on the other hand, you realize there are a lot of people and organizations that have some sense on this issue. I’m going to pick one or two of them.

Oh, and this idea certainly has merit.

It’s not a lot. But it’s a start. And only a start. We have a lot of work to do.

The late great comedian George Carlin said it best: “When you’re born into this world, you’re given a ticket to the freak show. If You’re born in America, you get a front row seat.”

Between the likes of Donald Trump and Rachel Dolezal, This week’s freak show was weirder than usual. The best I can say about that speech Donald Trump gave to announce his run for the presidency is, well, nothing. And this whole thing about Rachel Dolezal identifying herself as black is confusing, too — especially when you can’t see her.

I’m not above bigotry by any means, but I will say this: It’s a lot easier for me to be unbiased toward people now than it was 30 years ago, when I could still see.

Fat, skinny, beautiful, homely, young, old, white, black—it’s all the same to me now. Without being able to see them, I’m left to judge people “not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.”

But that’s the confusing part about Rachel Dolezal’s story. The more I read, the harder it is to figure out. What exactly is the content of her character?

Beth and I went to a White Sox game last Wednesday courtesy of their opponent that night, the Houston Astros. More specifically, courtesy of the kindness of Kevin Goldstein, and old friend who happens to be a bigwig in the Astros front office. (Beth posted about Kevin’s story a couple years ago.)

Vincent’s friends and family were all around us. He pitched five scoreless innings in his debut.

The seats were terrific—behind home plate just on the first-base side, and given the source of the tickets, in a section dense with Astros fans. We quickly sensed that these weren’t just any fans—they were on every pitch, cheering strikes and outs every time the Houston pitcher retired a White Sox player. They were polite, joyful, terrific fans. One young guy—who looked like he could be out there playing—would shout “peanut” every time the Astros retired the White Sox and headed to their dugout. Someone asked why “peanut,” and he said, “When we were in high school, he used to call me watermelon head, so I called him peanut head.”

An older man (older as in the neighborhood of my age or thereabouts) and woman watched every pitch, somewhat nervously. They looked like Hispanic versions of the parents of the neighbor kids I grew up with—blue collar types who exuded solid reliability.

Kevin, who lives in Illinois and would normally attend, couldn’t be at the game because he was locked up in a room back in Houston with his colleagues during MLB’s annual draft. I emailed him to thank him for the tickets, and told him that we were sitting with a great group of Houston fans who were really into the game. He immediately wrote back, “Velasquez debut group?”

Aha! I used my magic phone and learned that 23-year-old Vincent Velasquez was making his first major league appearance. I suddenly felt even more lucky to be at that ball game. I got swept up in it all, and at one point, during a break in the action, I walked over to Victor’s father. “Is that your son pitching,” I asked. He said yes. “You must be very proud,” I said, shaking his hand. “He looks like he’s going to be terrific.” He immediately pointed to his right and said, “This is his mother.” She and I shook hands, I said congratulations to her, and took my seat.

Of course, business is business, so I was still pulling for my White Sox. But the feeling in that group transcended loyalty.

Many of the guys on the field that night make millions and millions of dollars. But for Victor and his family, I really don’t think that had anything to do with what they were feeling. And I was privileged to feel a little of it with them.

Hey, it’s time to sign up for the 2015 Northwestern Summer Writers’ Conference, a three-day institute at the end of July that’s dedicated to the creation and revision of novels, short stories, nonfiction, and poetry. From their web site:

The program is tailored to writers of all genres, backgrounds, and levels of experience, and welcomes anyone seeking a fuller understanding of the craft — and business — of writing.

This conference is held every summer on Northwestern University’s Chicago campus, and this year I’ll be giving a workshop at 9:30 a.m. on the morning it opens: Thursday, July 30, 2015.

My 90-minute workshop is called Getting Your Memoir Off the Ground. I plan on giving a couple in-class exercises and discussing techniques to get past whatever it is that’s stopping writers from getting their work done, whether it be worries about writing as a victim, facing issues that come with writing about friends and family, or arranging writing they’ve already completed into book form. The overall emphasis will be on craft and on overcoming the barriers that keep us from writing and assembling our stories.

Each workshop at the Northwestern Summer Writers’ Conference is limited to 18 participants, and organizers tell me workshops and panels are filling quickly. My friends and fellow published authors Miles Harvey and Audrey Petty are giving workshops at 9:30 a.m. on Thursday, July 30 as well.

That’s Miles Harvey. (Photo by Matt Moyer.)

I met Miles long ago when both of us wrote for the Daily Illini at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign. His first book The Island of Lost Maps: A True Story of Cartographic Crime was a national and international bestseller, and a session he’ll be giving at the Northwestern conference is called Start Here: Get Your Story Started with a Map:

Writers from Robert Louis Stevenson to Ursula K. Le Guin have begun their books not with an outline of the plot but with a hand-drawn map. In this workshop — open to essayists and fiction writers alike — you’ll learn how to establish setting and ignite action through the creative use of cartography.

Miles will also be leading a workshop called “The Instant Essay” where attendees will learn the basics of essay writing and get started on an essay of their own. And as if that isn’t enough, he’ll be moderating a panel about taking a Book from inception to completion, too.

As for Audrey Petty, I was introduced to her in Urbana, too. Audrey taught creative writing there, and she and I took to each other the minute we met.

Audrey was born and raised in Chicago and moved back here with her husband and their daughter a few years ago. An oral history Audrey put together of stories from residents of Chicago’s Henry Horner Homes, Robert Taylor Homes, Stateway Gardens and Cabrini-Green (all publicly-funded buildings here in Chicago that no longer exist) called High Rise Stories: Voices from Chicago Public Housing was published by Voice of Witness, the nonprofit division of McSweeney’s Books. She’s had essays published in Saveur and in a 2006 anthology of Best Food Writing, and her workshop for the Northwestern conference is called Writing about Food. Audrey will give in-class exercises and use texts by Laurie Colwin, John T Edge and Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor as examples so participants can “venture out and begin their own stories and/or essays about food.”

Check out the conference schedule to learn about dozens of other workshops being presented this year — I hope to sit in on many of them myself.

A guide dog who saved his blind companion from getting hit by a bus has been getting a lot of attention in the media. And well he should! A story in yesterday’s USA Today reports that the driver of a school bus in Brewster, N.Y. told police he didn’t see Audrey Stone and her guide dog Figo crossing the road as they made their way home. After the accident, Audrey was rushed by ambulance to a hospital while the Brewster Fire Department rushed her heroic guide dog to a vet. Both were hurt, but sources say both are recovering well:

Stone, 62, suffered a fractured right elbow, three broken ribs, a fractured ankle and a cut to her head in the accident, said Brewster Police Chief John Del Gardo. Figo’s leg was cut down to the bone, said Paul Schwartz, who manages the Extra Mart gas station at the intersection and ran to the scene.

The lead to the story in USA Today claimed that Golden Retriever Figo’s “protective instincts kicked in” to save his human companion, and while that may be true, it’s only a part of it.

Guide dog schools spend months teaching dogs to pull their blind companions back should oncoming vehicles come too close, and when we humans arrive at the schools to train with our new dogs, we practice over and over and over how to react to the dogs should something like that happen.

Harper is very happy in his well-earned retirement, living with our friends Chris and Larry, and hanging out with a Collie named Beau.

I have received all four of my dogs from the Seeing Eye school. With each one I’ve stayed there in Morristown, N.J. three weeks to learn how to work with that new dog before flying back home to Chicago. After the first week of training, Seeing Eye staff start heading out in vehicles to intentionally cut in front of us, simulating the very real behavior of drivers like that bus driver in New York. All four of my dogs routinely refused to step into the street if they saw a vehicle barreling toward us, and if a car cut in front of us in the intersection, these dogs knew to pull me back from harm’s way. Otherwise they would never have been placed with a blind person as a Seeing Eye dog. All four of my dogs have saved us from multiple near misses, but the near-miss I had with my third dog Harper was too close for comfort. I’ve told this story to you blog followers before, but that article in USA Today spooked me a little, and I felt a need to repeat it.

Harper and I were at a busy Chicago intersection in 2012, and hearing cars going straight at our parallel, I commanded, “Harper, forward!” We’d taken a few steps into the intersection when a woman in a van turned the corner right in front of us.

Harper pulled us back with such force that I fell backward, cracking the back of my head on the concrete. The woman driving the van said later that she hadn’t seen us. Harper saved our lives.

My husband Mike inspected the harness later and discovered it was bent. I Suspect Harper was clipped by the car. After a near-miss like this, guide dogs will do one of three things:

1. Brush it off as to say, Hey, we almost got hit!” and just keep working
2. Need a little retraining before they get their confidence back
3. Never feel confident again and have to retire

Harper started showing fear around traffic after the near-miss. Three Seeing Eye trainers came one after another to help retrain him, but nothing worked. Harper trembled around traffic, his head down, his tail between his legs. City life had become too much for him.

The Seeing Eye staff members who’d come to visit us met in Morristown afterward to discuss Harper’s future. Could they bring him back to the Seeing Eye for retraining? Place him with some other blind person, one who lived in a calmer environment?

The head of training phoned me after their meeting. Harper would not be retrained, he said. I could go ahead and find friends to adopt him. I was crushed. So much time, energy and money had gone into training Harper. I’d hoped he could be placed with someone else so that all that effort wouldn’t have to go to waste.

Hearing the disappointment in my voice, the trainer on the other end of the phone assured me that the Seeing Eye’s hard work — and Harper’s training — had not been wasted at all. “Harper took a bullet for you,” he said. “And for that, he’s earned an early retirement.”