My tracks are being tracked.

A few weeks ago I downloaded a new version of my iPhone’s operating system and didn’t pay a whole lot of attention to any changes it included. I’d already read that the update included the Watch app (whether I wanted it or not), but I didn’t know much else.

Then, last week, fiddling with my phone while riding the subway, I swiped my screen and accidentally opened a folder called Health. Up came a fancy graph that showed me how many steps I’d taken so far that day, that week, that month, and my daily average.

So this thing had been monitoring me without my even knowing it. Which was a little disconcerting. But once I got over that little thought, I was gratified to confirm what I knew intuitively: I walk a lot. I’m averaging about 12,000 steps a day.

I’ve learned that’s a pretty healthy total, which is good. Even better, I do this without thinking much about it. But it hasn’t always been the case.

Beth has always liked to walk—to destinations but also, to walk for its own sake, just to be outside, talk (or not), and get a little exercise. I was never crazy about it in the other places we lived because driving was easy and therefore quicker for errands and what not.

Not so in downtown Chicago. Having a car is expensive, you can’t count on parking, and when you can it can cost an arm and a leg. Plus, there’s public transportation, which routinely requires at least a quarter to half-mile stroll to and from stops.

There’s a lot of stimulation, enough to make the steps and the time fly by: People watching, architecture, the lakefront. And concentrations of worthwhile walkable destinations—restaurants, museums, theaters.

On the other hand, it has made me wonder why on earth I didn’t walk more in the other places we lived. In Champaign-Urbana, for example, downtown Champaign is two miles from downtown Urbana. Now, that’s a healthy walk, but not monumental; nevertheless I would never have considered it while I lived there. (Nor would I have considered taking the bus—even though CU has a terrific system.)

I think it was sheer habit as much as laziness. And the sense—accurate or not—that I didn’t have the time. I feel a little silly about all that, even a bit ashamed. Could’ve burned a lot less gas and a lot more calories.

Mostly, though, I am reminded: Listen to Beth.

My sister Bev’s grandson is a kindergartner in Caledonia, Michigan, and when we were visiting there this week, young Bryce was kind enough to share his Great Aunt Beth and Whitney with his fellow kindergartners and first-graders at Paris Ridge Elementary School.

Bryce’s class was full of questions.

Teachers read Safe & Sound to all the kids before we arrived, so they were all set with questions when we got there. Some examples?

• How do you go to bed?
• Does your dog drive?
• Can you take a taxi with your dog?
• How can you see if you’re blind?
• What if the taxi driver has allergies?
• Does your dog like getting a bath?

That last question gave me a chance to explain that Seeing Eye trainers encourage us to brush our dogs every day. “I lift her ear flaps to check her ears when I’m brushing her, too,” I said. “If they smell bad, that lets me know she might have an ear infection,” I said. When I brush her, I feel her coat, too, so I’ll know if she has any lumps or bumps that the veterinarian needs to check out.”

Back to that question about baths. Seeing Eye dogs are almost always on leash, so they don’t get into mud puddles and stuff like that. “And if we brush them every day, they never really need a bath.”

The question made me remember the one and only time one of my Seeing Eye dogs did need a bath, and for some reason I decided to tell the kids how that happened. “I was on a city bus with my first dog, Pandora, and someone a few rows ahead of us threw up,” I said. After pausing for a chorus of Eeeeeeooooooos from the audience, I continued. ”The puke seeped under the seat from the front of the bus to the back, and it got all over my dog. She really needed a bath that time!” I heard a chorus of “uh-huhs and “she sure dids” that time. The questions went on from there.

• Does Bryce ever get to pet your dog?
• When is it okay for your dog to disobey you?
• I just want to say, I have a dog who is blind.
• I think I saw you when I was in Chicago. Was that you?

And finally, my favorite of the day :

• So, you know, when your dog had to take a bath that time, what color was the throw up?

The political scene around these parts continues to depress. Particularly gruesome is the latest news about the head of the Chicago Public Schools being under Federal investigation. But that’s only a part of the ugliness—the conflicts of interest and big-money corruption is rife in a place that has profound ramifications for kids in the system, and for those who work for CPS.

But. But! I did run across one thing that buoyed my spirits last week. In my last post, I wrote about the masters of the universe who lose touch with the world inhabited by those who aren’t as fortunate as they are, and who never seem to have enough of everything.

Well.

Back in 2004, while still in college, a 19-year-old named Dan Price founded a Seattle-based credit card payments processing company called Gravity Payments that now employs 120 people. Price happened onto a study that Beth read about some time ago that looked at the relationship between emotional well-being and wealth. The short version of the results: As you might expect, being poor causes stress and unhappiness. As incomes rise, so does emotional well-being. But that well-being plateaus at around $75,000 annual income. In other words, people don’t get happier if they make $175,000. They can do more and buy more stuff, but their fundamental emotional state does not improve.

Price also looked into what living on less than 70k in Seattle was like–and it was harder than he’d imagined.

And so Price did something kind of remarkable: He raised the minimum salary of his employees to $70,000. (Not sure why not all the way to $75,000, but who’s going to complain?) To cover the cost, he’s reducing his own salary from $1 million to … $70,000, and putting a greater share of  annual profits toward salaries.

Here’s a quote from Price in the NY Times article about him and his company:

“The market rate for me as a C.E.O. compared to a regular person is ridiculous, it’s absurd,” said Mr. Price, who said his main extravagances were snowboarding and picking up the bar bill. He drives a 12-year-old Audi, which he received in a barter for service from the local dealer.

I’m sure some people think he’s crazy—but I hope you’ll read the whole article. Price doesn’t seem particularly political, he just seems to me to be a capitalist who practices it against the backdrop of a larger set of values. Thanks, Dan Price, for reminding us that’s possible. And for brightening my week.

Yesterday Whitney and I took a train to River Forest, a suburb of Chicago, to do two assemblies at Willard Elementary School. One was for all the kindergarteners, first graders and second graders in the school, and the second was for all the third and fourth graders there. Some examples of questions the kids asked during the Q & A part of the presentations:

• Does Whitney like other dogs?
• How do you know when it’s days and when it’s nights?
• Can you draw?
• Can you swim?
• How can you cook?
• How do you write books?
• How do you drive?
• When you dream, do you dream in colors?
• How do you know if it’s a taxi cab or a car?
• How do you get through a door?
• How do you know what you look like?
• So are your dreams just in black and white, or in other colors, too?
• When it’s time to get off a plane, and your dog is there underneath, how can you get off the plane if you don’t have your dog with you?

Dog is my co-pilot.

That last question gave me a chance to explain the Americans with Disabilities Act. The Department of Justice’s ADA regulations define a service animal as any dog that is individually trained to do work or perform tasks for the benefit of an individual with a disability. “Guide dogs don’t have to fly under a plane as cargo,” I said, explaining that Whitney is a service dog, so she comes right on the plane with me. “She sits with her butt under the seat in front of me, and her head between my feet.” Want a measure of how mesmerized the kids were by the magnificent Whitney visiting their school? I didn’t hear one single snicker when I said the word “butt.”

Well, Chuy Garcia lost the Chicago mayoral runoff election, despite the endorsement of the prestigious Mondays with Mike blog.

It wasn’t a bad showing considering Garcia got into the race very late, had no name recognition, and was widely considered the second or third best choice of possible opponents to the incumbent Rahm Emanuel.

Nelson Algren

That Chuy got 46 percent of the vote speaks to the depth and breadth of dissatisfaction with Emanuel as much as anything. Rahm is behaving as if he’s been chastised into turning over a new leaf. I’m not holding my breath for Scrooge on Christmas morning, though.

Meanwhile our new governor, Bruce Rauner, is doing his best Scott Walker impression. Whether he can enact some of the stuff he’s talking about is yet to be seen. I’d implore Rauner to read this piece comparing Walker’s policies to those of his Democratic counterpart in Minnesota, Governor Mark Dayton. It’s about as close to a scientific experiment as you can get in politics, and it does not speak well of Walker’s choices.

The governors of Wisconsin and Minnesota are both wealthy, Dayton probably the wealthier of the two. Which only goes to show, you can’t generalize too much based on wealth.

And it is too easy to generalize about “the rich” and “the poor,” glorifying or vilifying as we see fit. Of course, defining rich is problematic. Compared to lots of people I walk by on Chicago streets every day, I’m filthy rich. But to coin a phrase, some of my best friends are rich, and these friends are…rich. They are also thoughtful, caring and generous people. They pay attention to the world around them, outside their comfortable existences, and understand that they had some advantages as well as hardships, they understand themselves to have some responsibility for the well being of others, and of the country as a whole.

That doesn’t mean I always agree with them on government policy, or that we always vote for the same people. It does mean we have respectful conversations where I always learn something for my trouble, and hope they do, too.

But there is a particular subset of people who do worry me. They come in multiple political stripes. They’ve done well and interpret their doing well as meaning they know everything. And they get insular. They can afford to buy their way into priority everything, they don’t rub elbows with people unlike themselves. They forget they had support. That they got breaks. They develop a distorted view that assumes that those with less most certainly deserve to have less.

In the restaurant of life, these are the people who behave as if, because they’re paying for a meal, they own the servers.

In real life, these people are buying public office. They’re appointing their friends to positions in education, transportation—you name it—even though those pals have no experience in those fields. They’re doing it confidently because, well, they think they know everything. And they seem never to have enough.

It is this group—the self-appointed “masters of the universe,” to borrow from Tom Wolfe—that scares me. I’d like to think they’re acting in good faith, and that we just disagree. Instead, I’m afraid that this quote from the great Nelson Algren applies:

When we get more houses than we can live in, more cars than we can ride in, more food than we can eat ourselves, the only way of getting richer is by cutting off those who don’t have enough.