Hanni and I making our exit from a classroom at Fairview Elementary School back in 2010.

Back in 2010 I wrote a blog post about a visit to Fairview Elementary School in a Chicago suburb called Mt. Prospect. A first-grader there asked one of my all-time favorite questions:

“How do you know if you picked a four-leaf clover?”

That little girl must be in fifth grade now, and I’m hoping she might show up at our presentation at Mt. Prospect Public Library this Sunday afternoon to ask even more fun questions like that one.

Our presentation starts at 2 p.m. this Sunday, September 28 in Room 154 at the Mt. Prospect Public Library, 10 S Emerson St., Mt. Prospect, Ill. From the library web site:

Beth Finke is an author, teacher, journalist, NPR commentator, and recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts grant. She also happens to be blind. Her children’s book about Seeing Eye dogs, Hanni and Beth: Safe & Sound is featured on the Martha Speaks Read Aloud Book Club on PBS and won an ASPCA Henry Berg Award for children’s literature. Come meet Beth and her dog and find out more about the job of a Seeing Eye dog. Beth’s heartfelt and funny stories will leave you smiling and knowing a lot more about adaptability and resourcefulness.

The presentation is free, and the library recommends it for children in kindergarten through grade 5 and families. Registration is not required, but if you know you’re coming they’d appreciate you registering just to get a read, ahem, on how many to expect. Ellen Sandmeyer of Sandmeyer’s Bookstore in Chicago is driving Whitney and me to the event, and she’ll be selling copies of Hanni and Beth: Safe & Sound and Long Time, No See for me to sign for anyone interested afterwards.

I’m really looking forward to all of this, I just wish I’d checked the NFL schedule before we booked, ahem, this gig. Earlier this week I found out we’ll be giving our presentation right when the Chicago Bears are playing the Green Bay Packers. Rats. With so many Chicagoans glued to their T.V. sets, I wondered if anyone would show up at the library.

Eyebrows up! I just talked with a youth services librarian, and they have 30 people registered already! See what can happen when you have to feel a four-leaf clover over and over again to make sure you have the count right?

I get exhausted by NFL coverage in any normal season–it’s everywhere, and though I watch the Bears when they’re on, I generally don’t have an affection for football. So, I am especially exhausted by all the recent hype about Ray Rice, Roger Goodell, etc., etc., etc., as the King of Siam would say.

Also troubled. And not necessarily for obvious reasons. But because, as is pretty much business as usual in modern culture, I wonder if real stuff is obscured by hand-waving, hyped up blather.

To start, we have the video of Ray Rice (an NFL star running back, for those who have been lucky enough to miss all this) punching, I mean landing a direct hit, on his then fiancé (now wife). It’s disgusting, and there’s not much to say about it. Though there’s no shortage of loudmouths spouting outrage. There’s also been a lot to say about who knew what when, and whether this has Watergate implications for the commissioner, and what does this say about the game and….

Well, a couple things trouble me. First, it’s sad that domestic violence–which is an everyday, horrible, terrifying and fatal fact of life for countless people (mostly, but not all, women)–only gets this kind of attention when the NFL is involved. It’s perverse really.

Second, here’s the way I look at it: It wouldn’t matter so much what the freakin’ NFL’s policy on domestic violence was if our public judicial and social systems were in order with regard to domestic violence. Because if someone is threatened, they should be able to go to the police, press charges, and receive the protection they need in the meantime. And if the accused is convicted, presumably (s)he goes to jail or enters some sort of program–the extent to which it interferes with work then coming into the employer’s purview.

I’ve never looked to the NFL for leadership on anything, particularly anything regarding morality or civil behavior. And I don’t think for one second that what the NFL does in the wake of all this will have a substantive effect on how domestic violence is treated in day to day life, out of the spotlight. Unless maybe we take it as a signal to act quietly and resolutely out of the spotlight, as citizens, to change things. Sometimes I think reality TV has seeped into our world views so much that we don’t distinguish between reality and TV.

Yesterday Whitney and I enjoyed a magical morning in a classroom in one of the most impoverished neighborhoods of Chicago’s South Side: the

The class at Oglesby.

Auburn-Gresham neighborhood. Fourth, fifth and sixth graders in a Montessori program at Oglesby Elementary are writing essays for a book they’ll publish in November, and their teacher asked me to come talk about memoir-writing.

The kids and I had to talk about other stuff first, though. Like what it’s like to be blind, whether I can blink or not, does my dog sleep with me in my bed, how I play piano if I can’t see the keys, how come I open my eyes at all if I can’t see. Then a thoughtful fifth-grader asked, “Do your eyes hurt?” Such a sweet, caring question. “I can’t see anything,” I said. “But no, my eyes don’t hurt at all.”

That answer prompted a question I’d never been asked before. “Can you cry?” For a quick moment I considered explaining what tear ducts are, telling the kids how they work, but then I thought about Jamal, a sixth-grade boy in class who’d described the memorial t-shirt he was wearing — it had photos of a cousin who’d died on it. Another boy in class told me he gets angry sometimes because his father is in prison. I kept my answer simple. “Yes, I can cry” I said. “And sometimes, I do.”

Jamal describes his memorial t-shirt for me.

I pictured the kids nodding their heads, understanding. The class was still for a moment, but then a boy in back broke the silence. “Would you win in a staring contest?” We all had fun with that — his question led to a heavy discussion of staring-contest rules. Do you have to look right into someone’s eyes, what if you’re close but not looking right in their eyes, is it just all about who blinks first?

After the Q&A came the writing exercise. We all took a minute to write a few sentences that define our lives, then we read our sentences out loud. I learned that Jamal is new to the Montessori class, but his little sister Shamiya has been at Oglesby Montessori for years. Jamal wrote: “I seen too much drama in my life. I wish I had a dog for a best friend and happiness.” A fifth-grade girl wrote this: “I’m oldest. One brother, 1 sister. Mom raised. Grandma died. Auntie baby died when came out. Happy that I am happy.”

We went through an editing process to cut our stories down to six words, then to three words. The fifth-grade girl decided on “I’m oldest. Happy.” A boy in class ended up with “I am awesome.” Jamal’s three words were downright poetic:” Drama and happiness.”

The classroom teacher had asked me to come up with a writing prompt for the kids to work on after Whitney and I went home, so I told them to finally cut their piece down to one word. “That one word is your writing prompt for today,” I said, and as Whitney and I left to go home, they all squirreled away to start writing on their topics. The kids promised they’ll read their stories out loud if Whitney and I return to Oglesby Montesorri, so among other topics, I can look forward to hearing essays about:

Getting down to one word.

• twin
• oldest
• angry
• grandma
• youngest
• awesome

A teacher-aide told me later that Jamal settled on “drama” as his one word, but then found that topic difficult to write about with all his classmates there in the room with him. “I asked if he thought he could work on writing his memoir at home, and he said he thought he could,” the teacher aide said, adding that she’d suggested maybe he could write about something happy while he was still there at school. “He and I thought he could write about what it has been like to experience Montessori class as a new kid.”

A 501(c)3 not-for-profit organization called Oglesby Montessori Foundation supports and advocates for the Montessori program Whitney and I visited yesterday. The Foundation is looking for help funding chess and yoga classes and camping trips to Wisconsin, the Nature’s Classroom Institute, and Camp MacLean. Please consider donating.

It’s 2:45 PT, which means it’s 4:45 CT, which means I’m running out of Monday to get this posted.

I’ve been out of town since a week ago for the annual conference the Passive House Institute US (PHIUS)—that would be where I work—was held. We’re a small organization, so putting on the five-day event for a few hundred people is nerve-wracking, hair-raising, and exhausting. Fortunately, the last day of the conference always comprises a bus tour of local passive house projects, which is downright inspiring each year. Architects and geeky building science people go nuts over these things, and they chat furiously on the bus between stops, swapping tips and stories about how to build these things right.

This year included an office building and a dormitory in Palo Alto, a retrofitted arts and crafts house in Santa Cruz, and then—after a gorgeous trip up Route 1—a retrofit house in progress in San Francisco’s Noe Valley neighborhood.

The view from the hotel.

I got back to the hotel, had two celebratory martinis, went upstairs to refresh with the intent of coming back down to watch the Bears play the 49ers here in enemy territory. I turned on the game, propped a pillow behind me on the bed, and the last thing I remember was the Bears were stinking and behind 10-0.

I opened my eyes the next morning, feeling better rested than I have in weeks, and learned that, against all odds, the Bears had prevailed. I’ll try to not watch from here on out.

I’m staying out near the airport, and in most cases that wouldn’t necessarily be ideal, but the hotel is across the water from the runways and, this being San Francisco, even this is pretty beautiful.

Though I’ve been in the Silicon Valley area several times in the past 30 years or so, I haven’t spent much time in the city. So tonight, I’m doing a nostalgia trip.

Back in 1982, I was living and working in Washington, D.C. The magazine I worked for (Washington Consumers’ Checkbook) had opened another magazine in the Bay Area, and asked me if I wanted to move out there to help it get off the ground.

I went on a scouting trip with my dear friend and then roommate, Pick, who knew the city and—as he had been on our trips to New York—was a fantastic fellow traveler who helped me see more than I ever would’ve on my own.

We had a grand time, and I was left stunned by the beauty of the city and the, for lack of a better term, differentness of everything. Vegetation. Rowhouses that seemed to hang from hillsides. The people. The hills.

Our trip was grand. But I didn’t take the job. Making that trip somehoe reminded me that—against any prediction I could’ve made about Myself before I moved away from the Midwest—that I wanted to go back. Which I did a few months later.

But San Francisco remains unforgettable. Our trip in 1982 included a trip to the Top of the Mark, a restaurant/bar on the top floor of the Mark Hopkins Hotel. And that view—the twinkling lights on the hillsides surrounding us in 360 degrees—is burned into my brain.

So, tonight, with the conference over, I’m taking the BART downtown, and I’m going to see if the real thing is as good as what I remember. I’m guessing it will be.

Jim Kessler left Wall Street for The Seeing Eye.

The post is called Career Moves and describes how the terrorist attack on September 11, 2001 convinced Jim to leave Wall Street and apprentice at the Seeing Eye in Morristown, NJ instead. My Daily Bark post quotes an article in The North Jersey Record that reports salaries start in the $40,000 range for those in the Seeing Eye’s three-year apprentice training program, and that the salary for full instructors ranges from $50,000 to $85,000. From my Daily Bark guest post:

Odds are that Jim Kessler took a significant paycut to work for the Seeing Eye, but he doesn’t talk about that. He talks instead about his respect for the instructors he works with, his pride in the remarkable work the dogs do, and how much he loves his family.

I learned all this during a drive with Jim when I was at the Seeing Eye training with Whitney. The last few days of training at the Seeing Eye are called “freelancing”: instructors expose us to some of the unique situations we’ll be facing once we’re home. When I learned that Jim and his wife Carrie have three daughters in school (in addition to a two-year-old son at home), I asked if I could spend my freelancing time visiting the elementary school his daughters go to. From the post:

Jim stayed at the school with us during the visit, and you didn’t have to be able to see to know he was beaming when we arrived. He was unabashedly delighted to be at school with his daughters, and they were proud to have their dad – and a Seeing Eye graduate with her working dog – at school with them that day, too.

After what happened on September 11, 2001, Jim Kessler is the first to tell you that he considers himself a very lucky guy. I’m a lucky woman, too: a man with integrity like his had a part in training Whitney. And me.

Whitney, upon graduation from The Seeing Eye.