Hey, if you missed hearing Red Sox organist Josh Kantor on NPR’s Wait Wait…Don’t Tell Me quiz show yesterday, don’t despair. You can hear him every day at 2 p.m. central time when he live streams “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” and takes requests from baseball fans listening in. This all happens at 7th-Inning Stretch 2020 on Facebook, and donations from the requests are raising money for Boston area food banks.

Loyal Safe & Sound blog followers might recognize Josh Kantor’s name: I wrote a post back in 2016 about our friend retired White Sox baseball organist Nancy Faust donating her home practice organ to an auction benefiting Chicago White Sox Charities.

Boston Red Sox organist Josh Kantor placed the winning bid on the Hammond Elegante Model 340100, and a slew of his Chicago musician friends picked up a rental van in Chicago to deliver it to Kantor in Boston.

The organ juuusssst barely fit in the van.

The musicians took a pit stop at the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown along the way, and a story in the Chicago Reader back then reported that the trip almost didn’t happen at all: They measured ahead of time, but when they got the rental van, the organ didn’t fit. “The crew managed to Tetris it inside,” the story said. Singer Kelly Hogan was on the moving crew and told the reporter that the musicians who drove the organ to Boston all have many, many miles in band vans between them, and that it was “pretty normal” to be resting her arm on an organ as they were traveling.

The story said Josh Kantor was overwhelmed by the scores of people who called and e-mailed and texted him asking what they could do to help get the organ to his home in Boston. “A friend sawed a metal railing off the entrance of Kantor’s house so the organ could be moved inside,” the story said. “Another donated a Nancy Faust bobblehead, which became a focal point of videos documenting the trek.”

Nancy emailed me a few times while the organ was in transit to send clips of stories and interviews with Josh Kantor about his new musical Instrument. “Here is a link to this morning’s interview on 670 the score with Josh Kantor who bought the organ,” one note read. “What a gracious guy. The ballpark has enabled me to meet the nicest people.”

Nancy sent me the Chicago Reader article I’ve been quoting in this blog post, too, along with another note. “Hi Beth, This is a rather long, very inclusive account from today’s Reader about my ‘organ transplant,’” she wrote. “Josh Kantor has been far too kind but hopefully gained the best memories, friendship bonds, and the Red Sox recognition from the whole adventure. Love, Nancy.”

Me and Mike with Nancy Faust at the Green Mill awhile back. Nancy showed Mike her World Series ring.

Josh Kantor was hired as Red Sox organist in 2003. After accepting the position, he flew to Chicago to see Nancy Faust, and the Nancy Faust-Josh Kantor mutual admiration society was formed. “He spent the day with me,” she said, and that story in the Chicago Reader quotes Kantor saying, “That was one of my favorite days ever!”

Kantor told the reporter that during that visit, among other things, Nancy urged him to keep updating his repertoire. “If you want to do this for a long time and not turn into a dinosaur like a lot of other organists have, keep learning new songs.” More from the Chicago Reader story:

His fascination with her process helps explain why he was so interested in purchasing this particular organ. “To me, the organ that was in her home for 35 years, that was her practice instrument, was as interesting—if not more interesting—because that was the lab instrument, basically. That was where she did all her homework,” he says, laughing. “That was where she concocted all her genius.”

Baseball organists are a dying breed – MLB reports fewer than a dozen ballparks still hire organists, and many of the musicians are only allowed to play a few times throughout the game and “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” in the seventh inning. The Chicago Reader story called Kantor one of the “most vocal proponents of organ music and its role in baseball,” and it sounds to me like he’s doing a great job. He couldn’t help but notice how open and accessible Nancy Faust was to fans at White Sox Park, and he said he tries to do the same, with a modern twist: during home games, he takes song requests via Twitter (@jtkantor) at Fenway. And now, his music is helping with food banks in Boston and providing baseball fans sheltering in place with a little something to smile about every afternoon.

What an honor it was to have Richard Reeder ask me to give an Author

That’s me and Heidi celebrating after the presentation.

Night Presentation last Monday at the Chicago Jewish Author Literary Series! Richard is the creator and coordinator of the series, and I’d been hearing about it for years. A well-respected (yet casual) gathering, the literary series meets monthly at Max and Benny’s Deli Restaurant in Northbrook and welcomes listeners to come and nosh during the presentation.

I was joined at the front table by Heidi Reeves, a writer in the class I lead at the Chicago Cultural Center. One of 12 children, Heidi was born and raised in Chicago’s south side. She read a poignant – and fun – essay she’d written about her brother, and when she looked up, laughed and proclaimed that “he was the dickens!” the crowd – about 70 people in all – laughed right along.

Heidi is also a graduate of the online Beth Finke Memoir Teacher MasterClass I put together to show others how to organize and lead memoir-writing classes on their own. Heidi started a brand-new memoir-writing class at the Blackstone Branch of the Chicago Public Library earlier this month. The class is already a huge success, and Monday night she and I shared stories with the audience of the merits of writing – and teaching – memoir.

Friends were there from the north suburbs, the western suburbs, and the

Signing books.

city. I was thrilled when so many stood up to ask questions afterward – that gave me the opportunity to introduce them to the crowd. Nancy Faust, the White Sox organist who taught me to love baseball – and life – again shortly after losing my sight was there. Dovie Horvitz asked a question about how I use a talking computer to edit, and that gave me the opportunity to tell the audience about Educational Tape Recording for the Blind, the non-profit organization her mother started when Dovie’s little sister, who had a serious visual impairment, wanted to attend the neighborhood high school back in the early 1960s and needed her textbooks recorded to graduate. Patty O’Machel had a question, too, and that let me tell the audience about how Patty’s high school daughter, who uses a wheelchair, inspired Patty to launch a new business last year. Educating Outside the Lines hopes to expand disability awareness curriculum in schools.

The show-stopper came at the end of the Q&A, when a man asked if the writers in our classes only write prose. “Do any of them write poetry?” I had to think for a second, and just as I turned Heidi’s way for inspiration, a familiar squeaky voice piped up in the audience. “Beth! Me! Bindy!” Bindy Bitterman, who happens to be a friend of Dovie (Chicago is a small big city!) was one of many writers from my classes who were kind enough to show up for Monday’s event. And yes, Bindy writes poetry. Limericks, to be specific.

“You have one to share?” I asked, and with that, Bindy bounded right up front. “I have one memorized!” she announced. She started right in, and when the last line ended with the word “Schlemiel,” the audience burst into laughter and applause.

And that is when Richard Reeder, the very wise organizer of the event, popped up and ended the presentation. On a high note.

Guess it all just goes to show: everybody has a story to tell, right?! Huge thanks to all of you who made the long trek to Northbrook last Monday, and to you lucky ducks who live near Max and Benny’s and stopped in, too. Also big thanks to my husband Mike Knezovich for carting copies of Writing Out Loud to sell after the show. Max and Benny’s treated both Mike and me to a Reube so huge we are still noshing on it today. What can I say? The entire evening was, well…delicious.

Years ago I had an idea for a Saturday Night Live skit: “The baseball organist at home.”

I imagined the mother, on her off day from the ballpark, sitting at the organ. The kids would leave for school and she’d play, “Na na na na, na na na nah, hey-hey, good-bye.” There’d be a walkup song for each member of the family as they arrived home from school or work. And as the family convened for dinner that evening, the organ would sing out “Hey, hey, the gang’s all here.”

And so on. Such is the brain of me.

All the gals in Nancy and Joe’s back yard.

The whole idea was inspired by Nancy Faust, about whom Beth has written more than once, most recently last weekwhen she learned that a StoryCorps piece she did with Nancy would air on public radio. (You can stream it online now.) The short of it is, Beth and Nancy struck up a friendship after Beth noticed the clever selections Nancy played during the White Sox games we attended — Nancy’s music helped Beth follow what was happening on the field.

Joe Jenkins, Nancy’s husband, and I have joined their party. The four of us don’t get together often, but it’s always a blast when we do.  Just as it was this past weekend when, well, we got to live “The baseball organist at home” in real life.

Nancy and Joe spend the winter at their home outside Phoenix with their dog Jack and their two … donkeys. Yep. More later. Nancy and Joe generously hosted Beth, Whitney and me at their Arizona home Friday and Saturday nights. We attended the White Sox-Cubs spring training game on Friday. The Sox had invited Nancy to do a one-day comeback and play that day.

Well, although Nancy did provide the soundtrack for decades of White Sox baseball, I can tell you that no, she does not provide a soundtrack for their daily lives. But … Beth and I were privy to the genius at work as Nancy ran ideas by all of us for what to play for whom and when. We chipped in ideas where we could, and Nancy kept updating her notes. We learned that after decades of playing for Sox games, Bulls games, Blackhawks games, even Minnesota North Stars games, old habits die hard. She said she still hears a song, thinks—“that’d work great on game day”—and scribbles down the title. The bad news is she can never find her notes!

We also got a window on how hard she works for a game—and how hard the game-day staff work to put on a show. Nancy had a voluminous script of sorts—it was basically a list of cues about when the PA announcer would be doing his thing, when the DJ would play, and when she should play. The whole time, someone would be in Nancy’s ear helping her stay on schedule.

We arrived early with Nancy, Joe, their son Eric and his fiancé Ann. We had time to lazily explore Camelback Ranch stadium—which the White Sox share with the LA Dodgers—and take in the radiant sun, which was mitigated by a delightfully cool breeze. It’s a lovely facility and especially accessible; we could make a lap of the whole place without climbing a step.

The food and drink offerings were surprisingly good—basically representative of what you’d find at Sox Park or Dodger Stadium. I had a Dodger Dog, just because, well, I don’t always get the chance. It was fine. It’s a foot long hot dog. No Chicago-style garden. But, you know, with a beer in the sun at a baseball game, all hot dogs are delicacies.

As we walked the concourse, Beth and I both experienced bittersweet nostalgia. Nancy chooses the pre-game music just as cleverly as she does in-game riffs, and she has a distinct style. It was an all-Chicago game, so she played Chicago favorites, from “My Kind of Town”to “Lake Shore Drive.”There were also fight songs from the University of Illinois, Northwestern, Notre Dame, Wisconsin. She knows her crowd.

The overall effect is breezy, upbeat, and relaxing. We used to take Gus to the park when he still lived with us, and he loved the music as much as we did. I’ve missed it.

Because we arrived early, I was afraid it might be a long day. But it kind of flew by. Crowd-watching was great—I played at guessing who might have traveled from Chicago, and who were Chicago transplants. Some fans made the guessing easy—one Cub fan wore a t-shirt that said “I live in Las Vegas but my origins are in Chicago.” Well, no comment.

There were really no bad seats at Camelback Ranch.

There were a lot of mixed couples (Sox fan/Cub fan) and a whole bunch of family/friend reunion outings, with good-natured South Side-North Side ribbing. The vibe was so laid back that there was none of the ugliness or tension that can bubble up at regular season games between the two. Beth struck up a conversation with a Sox fan on our right. Just a delightful guy. Turned out he’s a bricklayer who’s been working a lot recently on hi-rises not far from where we live in Chicago.

After the game, we waited outside Nancy’s booth while she was interviewed by Chuck Garfein of NBC Sports Chicago for a podcast. (That podcast turned out great, give it a listen here.)

After the game, Eric and Joe had the organ packed and loaded in the van in no time.

The reason we waited outside the booth is that Joe had to pack up Nancy’s organ—the park doesn’t have one, so he had delivered hers the day before. I chipped in somewhat feebly to help Joe and Eric collect Nancy’s organ and electronic keyboard, amplifier, speaker and various cables. It was a sort of ballet—Joe has done this a million times over Nancy’s career, and he ran a business that rented organs to clubs like the Jazz Showcase—the iconic venue down the street from Beth’s and my place. I think Eric has done it, oh, maybe a half a million times. It was amazing how quickly they had 400+ lbs of equipment packed safely in a rented van.

After celebratory pizza, we headed back to Joe and Nancy’s place, which is as much a small ranch as it is a house. The landscape is manicured, smoothly rolled stone peppered by a variety of cacti. No lawn mowing but hardly maintenance free.

Out back, a nifty barn that includes a nicely furnished tack room—where Nancy practices the organ. On the other side? A stall that opens to a penned in outdoor space for Nancy’s two donkeys. The miniature one is Gigi, the older full-size gal is Mandy. Every day, Nancy tends to them and shovels, well, you know what, twice a day.

She also trains them, and I got to see some tricks. One—which I didn’t capture on video—had Nancy asking Mandy whether she thought I was smarter than her. She shook her head no. Hmm.

There’s lots more, from a hot dog at Costco to Thursday night at the biker bar—I mean it was a jam-packed couple days, but I’ll just say if someone told me back in the day that  I’d be hanging out with Nancy Faust, her family, and her donkeys at spring training in Arizona, well, I don’t think I’d have believed it. Or certainly not all of it. But, there I was, sitting outside on a cool night beside a fire pit, doing just that.

And pinching myself.

Was it a virus? I don’t care, I feel better already!

Last night I woke up in the in the wee hours feeling like a little volcano was erupting in my stomach, forcing nearby areas to evacuate. It might have been something I ate, or a gastrointestinal virus, but at this point it doesn’t matter. I know it wasn’t the flu, because I’m sitting up straight and working on this blog. This morning, that didn’t seem possible.

Right now I’m having that feeling where, really, I’m still wiped out, but by comparison, I’m positively bouncy. Even if still in my robe. Feeling good is relative. Of course, while in the trenches of misery, I was resolving to go to the gym more often, eat better, you know the drill.

But that gall-bladder attack feeling so awful that I wanted to leave my body behind until it got its act together reminded me that, a) we humans can’t do that and so I had to suck it up and grin and bear it, and b) I’ve been pretty lucky for a long while to be mostly healthy.

I seem to have reached a new stage of life. I mean, I still feel like I’m 25, looking for the next adventure. But before I can embark, I feel the need to call out “oil can,” like The Tin Man, to get things humming.

Beth’s always dealt with a chronic disease—type 1 diabetes and all its ravages. And for the better part of my life, in a real way, I have, too. I watched her lose her eyesight, and I spent more hours that I can count maintaining hospital vigils for her and for Gus.

Any time I’d rant about how illogical and inefficient the health care system was, most friends looked at me with glazed eyes. Some would pretty much run away. I’ve come to realize that they just couldn’t relate. We were all 20-somethings, and had been healthy and had minimal experience with the system.

I’ve come to understand that because of my unique experiences compared to our cohorts, there were some lonely periods. I struggled with how far I should go with the stiff upper lip thing—I didn’t want people to think either of us couldn’t do something because our lives were taxing enough. Our lives could be really hard sometimes and I wanted to be able to say that without people thinking we were whining. Sometimes I think I isolated myself.

Fast forward, and whaddya know? No one gets out of here alive, and the people around us are catching up to us in maladies suffered, doctor visits, and hospital visits. A few weeks ago, Beth turned to me and asked, “Do you think that for the rest of our lives we’ll know at least one person going through radiation or chemo?” I would’ve liked to have said, “Nah.” I didn’t say anything.

I don’t like it much.

For one, I don’t want to lose friends or see them suffer. For another, I’ll be honest, I feel like I went through this whole health problems thing once, and now I have to do it again? Who do I see about this?

But I like to think that one upside of the struggles in our twenties is that it may have taught me, just a little, about how to be a comfort. It requires walking a line. The people that helped me keep afloat made themselves available. They knew when to be there, and when not to intrude. Being there has an intrinsic value. You don’t need to provide answers. Be there.

Just as important, they knew that sometimes, they could see things we couldn’t, and the injected themselves at just the right time and the right way. Sometimes, it’s best to intrude.

When I was in college literature classes, I used to scratch my head when professors or TAs would say something heavy like, “This book wrestles with the human condition.” What are they talking about, I thought, what’s the big deal about this human condition?

Now I know. The human body is both miraculous and wretched. We love people only to lose them or leave them behind. We want to live on, vaguely, but what if that life bears little resemblance to life as we have known it? Financial companies implore us to plan, plan, plan and make sure we have enough money to ,,, I don’t know. We are asked to trade off the present with future, when despite our best efforts, the future is one big crapshoot.

I don’t know about any of it.

What I do know is we just bought tickets to see the Sox play the Cubs in a spring training game—and Nancy Faust will be playing the organ!

The White Sox are still in the running for Manny Machado.

Last Saturday we made new friends over a scrumptious pot of red beans and rice made with the Camellia beans our friend Seth gave us while were visiting New Orleans last week.

We’re doing our best, and it ain’t all bad.

Last night when the L.A. Dodgers’ Manny Machado swung and missed so awkwardly at a wicked Chris Sale pitch that he fell down, the Major League Baseball season came to a close. The Red Sox won, which at this point is getting kind of old (my Cardinals fan friend calls Red Sox fans “professional Irishmen”). Nonetheless, I generally root for the American League, and seeing Sale—who labored with mostly bad teams for years with my White Sox—close out the championship was pretty cool.

Unless the White Sox are in the playoffs (an infrequent occurrence), around this time of the year I pick an alternate horse. Sometimes it’s a team/fan base that I least dislike. This year it was fun: I took the Brewers and Astros. The Brewers had a really entertaining team, a smart young manager, and the best radio announcer—Bob Uecker—in the business. He’s funny, yes, but he calls a damn good game, too. And thanks to a little App on our phones (MLB AtBat) Beth and I could listen to him call all the Brewers games.

As far as the Astros, well I can’t help it—we’ve written before about our friend Kevin who works in their front office. I just love seeing him in selfies with players like Alex Bregman after a clinching game. I also wanted the Astros to be the first team to repeat in forever.

Alas.

If you grew up in Chicago on either side of town, you have to learn to savor the World Series regardless of whether your team is in it or not. (In some ways, it’s a lot more pleasant; it’s certainly less stressful.) There’s always some regular guy that plays out of his mind. And games that are incredible for one reason or another. This year, that guy was a journeyman player named Steve Pearce and that game was the insane two-games-in-one 18-inning marathon.

Our pal Nancy Faust will be back behind the organ for a spring training game in 2019.

I also like this time of year because of the anniversaries of the 2005 World Series—the four games my White Sox took from the Astros when Houston was still in the National League. That 18-inning Red Sox-Dodgers game brought to mind a gut-wrenching, 14-inning game the White Sox won. There was much shouting at the TV, and ultimately, screams of joy in the wee hours. (I did not make it to the end of the 18-inning affair this year.)

Speaking of the White Sox, Beth and I saw our friends Nancy Faust, her husband Joe, their son Eric and his girlfriend last week. We caught up, got some great stories about Old Comiskey, past players, Haray Caray—and we had a lot of laughs. They are all delightful people and I thank my lucky stars that, thanks to Beth and her writing, they are our friends.

Still, I always get a little melancholy when that last out of the World Series is made. It’s probably silly to care so much about a game, but hey, it’s my silly. And there’s this: Nancy told us that she’ll be playing the organ for the Cubs-Sox spring training matchup at the Sox spring ballpark.

You know, I went to spring training once when the Sox were in Florida. But I haven’t been to Arizona yet….