U of I graduate Sandra Murillo.

If you follow this blog, you already know guest blogger Sandra Murillo. Sandra lost her sight when she was three years old. She has always attended regular public schools, and has known she wanted to be a writer ever since her sophomore year at Thornwood High School in South Holland, Ill.

Sandra’s first guest post was about using assistive technology to vote in her first presidential election, and the last time we published a guest post by Sandra was when she’d just graduated from University of Illinois journalism school and was looking for a job.

Good news! Sandra is working full-time at the Chicago Lighthouse for the Blind – she is a regular contributor to The Beacon (a weekly radio program on disability issues) and runs a weekly column there.

Sandy’s View features Sandra’s responses to commonly asked questions about the challenges facing people who are blind or have visual impairments. This week’s question was about how people who are blind manage to swim, and Sandra was kind enough to include an excerpt from my memoir Long Time, No See there to help answer that question.

The posts I write here about ways I manage to do things without being able to see always get a lot of comments, so if you’re interested in learning more, I highly recommend you look at them from Sandy’s View. Congratulations on the new job, Sandra!

Some people escape to lake houses, some to cabins in the mountains, others to villas overseas.

Me? When I want to get away by myself, I splurge on a fancy hotel.

That’s Hanni and me luxuriating in a lovely hotel room in Chicago a few years back.

What luxury — a plush robe waiting for me, my bed gets made every morning, clean towels magically appear in the bathroom, and when I walk through the lobby everyone — from the doorman to the people behind the front desk — asks if they can help me. Some even call me by my name. “Hello, Ms. Finke.” “Welcome back, Ms. Finke.” “Ms. Finke? May I help you to the elevator?”

Those of you old enough to appreciate James Thurber (or young enough to have bothered seeing Ben Stiller’s film adaptation of Thurber’s classic last year) will understand why I refer to my hotel stays as Walter Mitty experiences.

Staff at expensive hotels are used to taking care of demanding customers, so I don’t really stick out when I ask for extra help. “Can you cut a corner from the keycard? “ I ask. When I explain how that would help me feel which end to put in the key slot, no one flinches. “Our pleasure, Ms. Finke.” “May I help you with your bag, Ms. Finke?”Of course I say yes. The bellhop escorts most other guests to their rooms, so it feels downright normal to have him take my Seeing Eye dog and me to ours, too.

Once in the room, the first conquest is the phone. “How do I dial downstairs?” I ask the bellhop. “What’s the number for room service?” Next stop? The bathroom. I feel through my bag for rubber bands. “Which bottle is shampoo?” I ask. At one hotel, I washed my hair with lotion. You only have to do that once to learn a lesson. Now I stretch a rubber band around the bottle of lotion to differentiate it from the others.

I put a rubber band on our hotel doorknob, too. When my Seeing Eye dog leads me to it later, the rubber band will confirm we’re at the right place. Before the doorman leaves, I ask one last question. “Is the radio alarm on?” While he checks, I feel through my wallet for tip money and extend my arm in his general direction. “Thank you, Ms. Finke,” he says, and he’s out the door.

Hotel rooms are predictable, simple, easy to get around. The furniture is rugged, sometimes even bolted to the floor. Nothing fragile on the dressers or countertops. I can’t break anything.

Early on in my blindness, I would have never imagined this possible. Me. Spending a night alone in a hotel room. I feel like a grown-up.

And that’s Whitney ensconced before a gigantic rain forest shower that came inside a gigantic bathroom that was inside a gigantic suite we stayed in once.

All of my memoir classes are on hiatus until after Independence Day, and Tomorrow my Seeing Eye dog Whitney and I are taking a train to a new boutique hotel we haven’t stayed in before. I’ll spend our quiet time there finishing a manuscript I’ve been working on  —  the one about all I learn from the memoir-writers I work with and how I manage to lead the classes without being able to see. I’m looking forward to the escape , hoping (finally) to finish this manuscript of mine. Time to get packing!

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.