A cab driver who picked my Seeing Eye dog and me up once had such a heavy accent that I couldn’t tell what he was saying. “Dog face on floor,” he demanded. “Saliva.” He repeated that word a few times to help me understand. “Saliva. Saliva. Saliva.” Was it his mantra?

That’s Floey and Ray with Great Aunt Beth at the Indianapolis zoo. We didn’t catch the elephant’s name.

My face must have betrayed my confusion, because the driver went on to explain that he was Muslim, and in his religion dog saliva is impure. “Dog mouth is near me, seven times I must wash.”

The driver understood that United States law required him to pick up people with disabilities who use service dogs, he just wanted me to keep my dog’s face on the ground, far from him. Whitney wasn’t crazy about the idea, but I appreciated him explaining this to me, and I’ve long believed that reasonable accommodation goes both ways. I commanded “Down!” Whitney laid at my feet, and I placed my hand on her head to keep her there.

Once home, I looked this dog saliva thing up, and sure enough, the ruling comes from the hadith:

The Prophet, peace be upon him, said: “If a dog licks the vessel of any one of you, let him throw away whatever was in it and wash it seven times.”

That cab ride came to mind again last week after Indiana’s divisive Religious Freedom Restoration Act made news. If the Governor signed it the way it was originally worded, I wondered if Muslim cab drivers in Indiana would have the right to refuse people with disabilities who used service dogs.

As it happened, my niece Janet invited me to join her and her two youngest kids on a Spring Break road trip to Indianapolis last week, so we were there the very day the Indiana governor signed the state’s Religious Freedom Restoration Act into law. Nine-year-old Floey loves to practice her sighted-guide skills with Great Aunt Beth, and 6-year-old Ray never tires of folding and unfolding Great Aunt Beth’s white cane, so Whitney got a Spring Break, too: she stayed at home and played with my husband Mike while I was gone . I didn’t hear about the new amended law until I got back home — sounds like if Whitney comes along the next time I head to Indiana, the law is still on our side.

Hello from Alexandria, Va., on the last day of our mini-vacation. It’s been, as always, a blast. And as always, it’s ending too soon but it was long enough to stir a big, bubbling pot of nostalgia.

In the fall of 1977, my junior year at the University of Illinois, I enrolled in a political science course on the history of party politics. I ate it up, and the professor was engaging and demanding in a way intended to build into our 20-year-old gelatinous brains a sense of responsibility as U.S. citizens. One day he announced the availability of internships in Washington, D.C. One semester working on Capitol Hill or at a government agency or other Washingtonian kind of place would earn a semester’s worth of credits.

Dianne and Hank

I filled out the application, sheepishly asked for recommendation letters from past professors, and the next thing I knew, I was living at 1430 Rhode Island Avenue, NW, in Washington, D.C. In minutes I could be walking by the Washington Post Building, the one where Woodward and Bernstein worked, and in another block or so I had a nice view of The White House. Then there were all the Smithsonian Museums, the monuments, all just a stroll away. As Gomer Pyle would say, “Shazam!”

Then again, making a wrong turn (or right turn, depending on your point of view) landed me on a patch of strip clubs and seedy bars. Fourteenth was notorious. Heading north was treacherous; the neighborhoods that had burned in the wake of Martin Luther King’s assassination hadn’t recovered. (That all has changed, but that’s another post.)

I was as green as green got. But I landed in the right place, Consumers’ Checkbook magazine. My supervisor Dianne took me and a fellow intern, who hailed from South Carolina, under her wing. Next thing you know Dianne introduced us to Pick, and Venita and he (fellow southerners) talked trash over games of backgammon.

Before the feast.

I went back to complete my senior year and met a girl named Beth in my basic reporting class. I told her about my internship, and she eventually did the same program in D.C.

A couple years later, I’d graduated and taken a real job at the magazine and moved to Northern Virgina. At some point Pick needed a roommate and so did I, so we got a place together. Pick introduced me to his North Carolinian friends, a married couple named Michael and Susi, who ended up living upstairs. Pick and I and Mike and Susi all became fast friends, making camping trips along Skyline drive, and one to the Outer Banks of North Carolina—my introduction to saltwater.

I eventually moved back to Illinois and about the time I reconnected with Beth in Urbana, Pick met Hank, and we more or less share anniversaries. Saturday night, Pick and Hank hosted a dinner party for me, Beth, Mike, Susi, and Dianne.

Hank cooked a marvelous meal, Pick made sure everyone had a glass, and a thousand memories were triggered. But it wasn’t maudlin “good old days” stuff. Way back when was fun, but we were all working harder at finding our way in life than we have to now—well, I should say I know I was—and we did plenty of stuff worthy of gut laughs, particularly in hindsight.

There’s a lot good about growing older, at least for us lucky ones. We get more comfortable in our own skins and shed insecurities. Troublesome things that seemed to be really important a long time ago have dissolved, replaced by gratitude and appreciation for a few hours of the company of the people we love. Here’s to all of you.

And to Professor Seligman. I’ll never forget him.

Last week I asked my downtown Chicago group of memoir-writers to come up with 500-word essays titled What Makes Me Happy. “Don’t come back with lists, or with vague things like ‘family and friends’,” I said. I asked them to write about an event from the past couple weeks that left them feeling fresh, energized, rejuvenated. “What was it about that specific experience that made you so happy?” The writers did not disappoint.

Sandy wrote about the teeny-tiny narrow view she has of Lake Michigan from her 7th floor Chicago apartment. “If I stand in the right hand corner of my living room and look to my left with my forehead resting on the window, I can see my small piece of the sky, sand and water.” The sky was a rosy pink the morning she wrote her piece, and the huge blocks of ice at the edge of the lake were starting to melt. “We can see the sand again,” she wrote. “And, instead of non-moving frozen water on the lake, the small waves are showing their white caps as they roll in at the shoreline.”

Nancy shares lunch and laughter with two longtime friends every Sunday, and her essay described them playing a card game after a recent lunch. “I seem to lose more often than I win, but IF Jo and Elaine were here, they’d tell you I was exaggerating.” She said every week each of them thinks they are the loser. “By the following Sunday, nobody remembers who won the week before anyway.”

Thumbing through a photo album she started in 1960 reminded Sheila that the photography hobby she enjoys to this day started with a memorable gift. “Aunt Anona gave me my best 8th grade graduation present,” she wrote. “It was a Kodak Hawkeye camera.”

Tycelia had just returned from a trip to Mexico City where she visited the Temple of the Moon at Teotihuacan. “When my husband passed this summer, I felt that all of my happiness had died with him,” she wrote. “But I felt happy to have succeeded in my attempt to climb that magnificent temple — for the first time in months, my heart had a break from sorrow.”

Yesterday was the last meeting for this eight-week session with that group of memoir-writers, and it was energizing to end on such a happy note. The seniors in all four memoir-writing classes I lead here in Chicago are all on spring break now, and so am I.

On the left that’s Pick (a.k.a. Keith Pickerel) and on the right Hank (a.k.a. Henry Londner). We’re lucky to count them as friends.

No doubt I’ll be publishing a post soon on a happy event: Whitney, Mike and I are taking off tonight for a four-day visit in Washington, D.C. We’ll be staying with our dear friends Pick and Hank, and being with those two, enjoying Hank’s fine cooking, singing along to Pick’s sensational piano playing, sharing stories and jokes and laughs, well, that always makes us happy.

It’s almost here. Spring that is. The signs say so, even if the thermometer seems a little late to the game. As in 34 damp, bone-chilling degrees.

We jumped to daylight saving time a couple weeks ago — which as it always does — left me feeling out of sync for about a week. I don’t know if it’s biorhythms or resentment that I’ve been robbed of an hour of my life, but I’m always out of sorts after we switch. I know we get the hour back in the fall, but I’d just as soon leave it be and forget the whole misbegotten idea.

Major League Baseball’s spring training is winding down, and that means the real games are getting close. Can’t come soon enough. I’m fairly certain the White Sox are going to win the World Series on the 10^th anniversary of their last run. And I expect them to win again in 2025, 2035, and so on. I’m not greedy. Every 10 years is plenty.

Last week we had friends to dinner and we were able to open our windows, or rather we had to, as between the cooking and all the humans it was getting a little warm inside. It was great to remember what that’s like.

And, to cinch it, yesterday I cleaned the humidifier and stowed it away. That means that for absolute certain, winter is over.

I was going to write about the upcoming Chicago election, a big one around these parts. But I can’t quite muster it, as I’m between mental states, unable to concentrate fully, waiting for spring, for baseball, for real.

Bring ‘em on.

Elementary school teachers commend me for struggling to sound out words when I read from the Braille version of Hanni and Beth: Safe & Sound during school presentations. “That’s what we’re trying to get our kids to do!” They tell me, assuring me I needn’t apologize for my poor Braille-reading skills. “It’s good for the kids to see a grown-up working so hard to try to read — it convinces them to try hard to read, too.”

Monday evening my Seeing Eye dog and I visited Tutoring Chicago, a non-profit organization that offers free one-to-one tutoring services to economically disadvantaged children in grades one through six. Thanks to the generosity of donors, sponsors and my publisher, Blue Marlin Publications, every child in the group of first and second-graders there was presented with their own print copy of Hanni and Beth: Safe & Sound to read along with me.

I made it through the reading–with help from all these kids.

During other school presentations, I only get through the first couple lines of Braille before closing the book and giving up., but these kids on Monday wouldn’t let me quit!

Anytime I struggled with a word or couldn’t sound it out on my own, one of the kids would read on from their own book or give me a clue so we could sound it out together. It was magical.

Only problem? It took us so long to read together that we didn’t have much time for question and answer time. The kids didn’t seem to mind that, though –as long as there was enough time for me to autograph their books in print and in Braille they were happy. And what a coincidence – so was I, knowing that each and every one of those curious and high-spirited kids in that group would be leaving that night with their very own brand new book to read at home.