Whitney posed as Hanni during our visit to Sears School last year — can you tell which is which?

Whitney usually leads me to the train station in downtown Chicago on her own, but when my gem of a husband, Mike Knezovich, generously offered to walk us this morning, I said “YES!” Reasons:

• Freezing temperatures — if Whitney and I got lost or turned around for just a few minutes, we’d end up with frostbite!
• Snowy slippery sidewalks
• Salt (Mike can spot it on the roads and help us avoid those areas so it doesn’t end up in Whit’s paws)
• The train we’re catching leaves at 7:52 a.m., which means we’ll be approaching the train station precisely when commuters are getting off trains and rushing to work

Today marks the start of our 2015 year of visits to schools — we’re heading to the Joseph Sears School in suburban Kenilworth. We were at Sears School last year about this time, and the kindergartners squealed with delight when Whitney led me in wearing snow boots on her paws. “That‘s our special guest Mrs. Fink,” their teacher announced. “And that’s Hanni, the dog from the book, too!”

We’d arrived late to Sears School last year (our commuter train had been delayed in Chicago due to weather) and our opening assembly had to be cut back to 15 minutes. After that, Whit and I gave separate fifteen-minute sessions for each and every kindergarten and first grade class.

Fifteen minutes was not enough time to explain that my last name, Finke, rhymes with “Pinky” and really, I prefer you call me Beth, that Hanni, the star of my book Hanni and Beth: Safe & Sound, had retired, that this was a new dog, I’d had to decide when it was time for Hanni to retire, I could have kept Hanni as a pet or brought her back to the Seeing eye but I decided to find friends to adopt her, that she’s doing fine and is living an enviable retirement in Urbana, that I had another dog after that, his name was Harper, he retired early and lives in Wheaton with friends, and now, this new dog is Whitney, a sassy urban girl who is a ball of energy.

And so, I did what I had to do. I referred to the dog at my feet generically. She was “my Seeing Eye dog.” Ick snay on it-whey ee-nay. The questions during the classroom visits last year reflected what the kindergartners and first-graders were learning to do in school:

• How do you put on your shoes?
• How can you print your name if you can’t see the paper?
• How do you read those green signs that tell you what street it is?
• How do you get dressed?
• Can you tell time?
• Does your dog really know right from left?

I was honest with the little girl who asked that last question. I really wasn’t sure. “We say the word ‘left’ when we want our dogs to turn left,” I told her. I went on, then, explaining how Seeing Eye trainers teach us to point to the left and face our shoulders left, too, at the same time we give the “left” command. “So I don’t know if my Seeing Eye dog understands the word ‘left’ or she sees my body language….” I could hear the kids starting to fidget. I was losing my audience, so I stood up to show them how it works.

In the real world, out on the street, a blind person memorizes or knows the route before leaving home. The pair gets themselves situated on the sidewalk and faces the direction they’ll start. The blind person commands “Forward!” and the dog guides them safely to the curb. When the dog stops, the person stops. That’s how a blind person using a guide dog knows they have arrived at an intersection.

If the person wants to turn right or left at that corner, the person commands the direction, simultaneously turning their upper body in that direction and pointing in that direction, too. The dog turns, and the blind companion follows the dog’s lead.

Back in the school classroom, I woke up the dog sleeping at my feet and lifted the harness off her back. And then, uh-oh, it dawned on me. These kids all thought my dog was Hanni.

Dog is my co-pilot. I offered a quick prayer. “Please, Whitney, go along with the ruse.” Pointing both shoulders and my pointer finger left, I commanded, “Hanni, left!” My Seeing Eye dog turned left with more exuberance than usual. She was onto the fake. I gave her another command. “Hanni, outside!” Whitney led me to the door.

This morning we should be there in plenty of time for me to explain to the students that Hanni, the star of Safe & Sound, has retired, and Whitney is my new dog. Our school visits this past year taught me that the kids are intrigued by a dog “retiring,” and it makes them feel special to meet the young dog – especially when she misbehaves and I have to put her through her obedience ritual. “It’s like a time out!” a boy at one school we visited exclaimed.

Just pressed the button on my talking clock. “It’s 5:52 a.m.” Uh-oh. Time to get ready. Wish us luck!

Beth wrote a post last week about how author Laura Hillenbrand and NPR’s Terry Gross—like Beth—conduct interviews without being able to see their subjects. Of course, that’s owed to very different circumstances for each of them. Not being able to do something in a conventional way can be the mother of invention for other methods that have their own merits, and that has long been fascinating to me.

That happens when you live with someone who is blind for 30 years, and with someone with multiple disabilities (our son Gus) for 16 of those years.

I’ve observed all sorts of workarounds. They range from Beth using rubber bands to distinguish shampoo from conditioner, to a wobbly Gus getting off the couch to steady himself with a hand on an end table so that he could sidle over to the living room wall, where, from there, he could go all over the damn place holding on to said wall. And Beth, somehow, finding my eyeglasses in our apartment after they’d gone missing for weeks. (I may have never found them.)

Beth’s written about using talking computers, which sort of replicates the way sighted people use computers, and about her talking iPhone. These are remarkable things that have made an enormous difference in countless lives.

But I’m not talking about replicating an ability here. It’s something else.

I’m thinking about this again, for the umpteenth time, because of a recent This American Life radio segment about a man who was born blind who has learned to maneuver using echolocation, a kind of sonar. It involves his clicking and using the sound feedback to conceive of and navigate the spaces and objects around him. So well that he, his mother, and—it seemed to me the reporters—believe that this echolocation is like seeing with eyes. He’s nicknamed Batman.

Well, the radio story is compelling but it is problematic, in my opinion, on several levels—reportage, semantics, implicit judgments, and others. I need to listen to it again before I can formulate my thoughts. But it is a worthwhile piece, I hope you’ll listen to it, and undeniably this Batman guy has a one-of-a-kind story and he does get around in a remarkably fascinating way.

Anyway, back to Beth’s post. Beth focused on the way Laura Hillenbrand got the most out of long-distance interviews. Another part caught my attention. The article puts it this way:

It may be tempting to think of Hillenbrand as someone who has triumphed in spite of her illness. The truth is at once more complicated and more interesting. Many of the qualities that make Hillenbrand’s writing distinctive are a direct consequence of her physical limitations. Every writer works differently, but Hillenbrand works more differently than any writer I know of. She has been forced by the illness to develop convoluted workarounds for some of the most basic research tasks, yet her workarounds, in all their strange complexity, deliver many of her greatest advantages.

The writer goes on to say that Hillenbrand’s chronic fatigue syndrome prevents her from leaving the house to read old newspapers on microfiche.

“Instead,” the article goes on, “Hillenbrand buys vintage newspapers on eBay and reads them in her living room, as if browsing the morning paper.”

It was that kind of immersion in the news, advertisements, and the tone of the time that helped inform her superb writing for Seabiscuit. And it also led to her writing Unbroken, very directly: While reading an article about Seabiscuit in one of the old newspapers, she saw an item about Louie Zamperini. And that became her next project.

It likely would not have happened if she could get out to the library to view microfiche.

And that’s what I’m talking about.

When our friend Mary Ivory told me early last year that she and her husband were going to volunteer to raise a puppy for Leader Dogs for the Blind, I asked if she’d be willing to write a blog post about the experience. Mary is a clinical professional counselor, social worker, life coach, and co-author of Parenting by Strengths: A Parent’s Guide for Challenging Situations — she’s a busy woman, but she said yes to my offer right away, feeling sure she’d find the time to write. 

And then, the puppy arrived.

Mike and Mary live on the 12th floor of our apartment building. Imagine how many trips they took up and down the elevator for house training – and that was just the beginning! Mary explains it all in this lovely guest post.

Puppy raising: it changes the street life

By Mary Ivory

Everybody say aaaahhhhhhh! That’s Ananda at a very young age taking a nap.

My laid-back husband Mike came home one day in early November sounding defeated. “I just walked up the street and no one said ‘Hi’ to me!” We’d been living with Ananda, a female Black Labrador Retriever for ten months, and we’d just returned her to Leader Dogs for the Blind in Rochester Hills, Mich., two weeks earlier. Mike had forgotten what urban life without a puppy is like.

We live in a very friendly and close knit neighborhood, but it’s still the big city. Everyone is in a hurry and distracted with their own lives, but you have to slow down when you are walking a puppy, and when others see you with the puppy, they often slow down, smile and say hello, too.

Watching and knowing what a dog can do for a person’s quality of life is a bit of happy mystery. Watching and knowing what a trained service animal can do for a person who needs assistance is the mystery turned into a real miracle. I have always had animals in my life, and as life would happen, I found myself with time and energy to volunteer to raise a puppy for Leader Dogs. Lucky for me, Mike was agreeable to this adventure.

As the job title implies, puppy raisers are charged with creating an environment and focusing on skills to help a puppy become a candidate for a career as a leader — a guide dog for a blind or visually impaired person.

Puppy raising is about nurturing a calm and focused dog to prepare them for the actual skill training that takes place after they are returned. For the first months of life after they leave the litter they live in homes to learn such skills as becoming house broken, yes that means going outside hourly when awake when they are very small. Yes, that means even in the winter of the polar vortex you go for a walk. You also are taught how to teach calm walking on a leash, not easy when your pup is sweet and just full of friendly wiggles and licks, and the other ‘basics’ like sit, stay, come, no, heal, down……oh yes and ‘drop it’ or ‘leave it’ as she snuck a sock from the dirty clothes or found a stray chicken bone on the street.

Everybody say “thank you” to Mary, Mike and all the puppy raisers for all the schools. It’s a tremendous and generous effort.

And all of this happens during all hours of the day, which means you walk down the street a lot. It’s a busy but fun time — strangers snap out of a distracted or grumpy state to talk about the dog, and people seemingly down on their luck rise up to chat about and pet a friendly puppy.

That mystery of connection with animals and people is powerful and amazing to me. My busy city street transformed into a small town lane during the ten months Ananda was living with us. And yes, it was hard to take her back to her career home. Ananda, which means joy or bliss in Sanskrit, was an intense and wonderful presence in our lives.

Today I got an email from the Puppy Development Department at Leader Dogs with this picture telling us she is progressing in her career training. We miss her but are so happy we had this chance to be a part of this great big task, and who knows? We may do it again. Next time, though, we’ll sign up when the dog doesn’t need hourly walks in deep freeze weather.

Turns out I’m in good company when it comes to interviewing people without seeing what they look like. Laura Hillenbrand (award-winning author of Sea Biscuit and Unbroken) and Fresh Air’s Terry Gross were both quoted in a New York Times Sunday Magazine story recently saying they actually prefer interviewing people that way.

The article explains that Hillenbrand has been sick with chronic fatigue syndrome since 1987. She has been mostly confined indoors ever since, and she doesn’t get out to do face-to-face interviews with the people she writes about. The New York Times Sunday Magazine article says most reporters would regard this as a terrible handicap, . “One hallmark of literary nonfiction is its emphasis on personal observation.” More from the article:

Hillenbrand found that telephone interviews do offer certain advantages. No one appreciates this perspective more than the radio host Terry Gross, who performs nearly every interview on her program, “Fresh Air,” by remote.

Terry Gross told the reporter that she began doing this out of necessity: The cost of bringing a guest to her studio in Philadelphia was simply too high. Now she believes there is intimacy in distance. “I find it to be oddly distracting when the person is sitting across from me,” she told the reporter. “It’s much easier to ask somebody a challenging question, or a difficult question, if you’re not looking the person in the eye.”

Hillenbrand never met Louie Zamperini face-to-face but she interviewed him for hundreds of hours over the phone while writing Unbroken, her story about his life. She said that doing the interviews without looking at Zamperini allowed her to visualize Zamperini in the time period of the book. “He became a 17-year-old runner for me, or a 26-year-old bombardier,” she said. “I wasn’t looking at an old man.”

I know what she means. Hearing the life stories of the memoir-writers in my classes every week without looking at them as they read? It has taught me something. Maybe, just maybe, we put too much stock in appearances.

The holiday season is already a blur, but one of the many things Beth and I did over the holiday season stands out clearly: We attended a Christmas Eve service at the 2^nd Presbyterian Church on S. Michigan Avenue. Beth attended Lutheran Christmas services growing up, and because it was a ritual her mother Flo always observed, it was a comfort to uphold that ritual this year in our own way.

I came by my skepticism honestly, from my mom Esther.

I didn’t grow up going to church or having any religious identity. My Italian grandfather ex-communicated the Catholic Church, and by family lore he did so somewhat violently. As legend has it Paolo Latini booted a priest off the stoop after the priest had visited the impoverished Latini residence asking for donations. And that was that. Paolo’s daugher Esther, my mother, though not necessarily an atheist, was thoroughly agnostic. She was suspicious of religious institutions, and as a public school teacher, didn’t have much use for church-run schools. She was a firm believer in separation of church and state as well.

My father grew up in the Serbian Orthodox Church but during my childhood, the nearest such church was a fair distance away in South Chicago. He’d go occasionally, and he’d sometimes ask if my sister and I wanted to go, and we of course said no. Other times, when he wanted to go to church but couldn’t make the trip to the Serbian church, he’d go to a local Presbyterian church (I didn’t go to that one, either).

So as a kid, I was pretty ignorant about religion, and still don’t know as much as I probably should. I remember neighbor kids who went to Catholic school talking one day about how the Jews killed Jesus and I didn’t have the faintest idea what the hubbub was about. To that, I count myself as lucky in a way that I never was instilled with any ideas about one religion compared to another. I kinda think they’re all a little wacky, and I find criticisms and endorsements of any one of them to be valid for all of them.

Still, I have been moved by the relatively few church services I have attended. We’ve been fortunate to be invited to several predominantly African American church services—in Urbana, Ill., Manteo, N.C., and here on the South Side. If a live gospel choir doesn’t lift you up, you’re in trouble. It’s a powerful natural anti-depressant, and an inspiration.

The service this past Christmas Eve was less dramatic but fulfilling just the same. There is a power to coming together at the same time in the same place to light candles, sing, pass the peace, and talk openly about striving to be good. We spend so much time making conscious trade-offs, favoring practicality and self-interest and expediency, doing awful things and excusing them as business decisions, nothing personal you know. Talking openly about striving for what’s really good reminds me that, inside, I know what good is. Finding the courage to do good is another matter, but it starts with recognizing how things should really be, even if that means also recognizing how far away we are from that point.

Still I retain much of my mother’s skepticism about religion. For one, I’ve always been on board with the encouragement to be good to our fellow humans, but never can jibe it with some of the fire and brimstone. And I’ll be honest, some of that hocus pocus stuff—virgin births, arks and such—well, I get the power of story, but being expected to believe literally in that all stops me in my tracks.

Another problem is I’ve seen a ton of: compartmentalizing righteous thinking to an hour or two of every week, and perversely using it as cover for being a scoundrel the rest of the time.

And so I, like everyone else, am left to try to reconcile all these big ideas. I feel a powerful spiritual good in coming together for these services when I do, or the many times people have done remarkably kind and generous things for us at very dark times, or even when I’ve witnessed awesome natural phenomena like pods of dolphins making their way down the seashore.

It’s real. It’s a wonder. And perhaps the trouble starts when we try to define it or call it our own through words and deeds.

I don’t know.