The questions were fast and furious. Photo courtesy of retired teacher Maria LaPlaca Bohrer, who, with her husband Glenn, graciously fed and put us up for the night.

Mike, Whitney and I flew into La Guardia last Tuesday evening. The next day, New York City schools were closed due to snow. The next day, schools on Long Island were closed, too, so our Thursday visit to Rall Elementary School was cancelled.

Eyebrows up! Whitney and I finally outlasted Mother Nature on Friday. We spent that entire day at Harding Avenue Elementary School in Lindenhurst, and if you ask me, the questions the kids asked there made the wait worthwhile. Some examples:

• What happens when you have to go upstairs?
• How many dogs have you had?
• What inspired you to write books?
• How do you eat ice cream?
• How can you write books if you can’t see??
• What if your Seeing Eye dog bit you?
• How come you’ve had so many dogs?
• But what if the ice cream is in a cone?
• Can your dog have babies? Why not?
• When you go to shop, how do you pick out clothes?
• How can you drive?
• How come you have to change dogs so much?
• Is your dog with you all the time when you’re at home, too?
• How do you feel if you’re blind?
• You said all you can see is the color black, right, so I gotta wonder if, when your dog pulls you, does she keep you safe?

It took that little boy a while to get that last question out. I sure didn’t mind — it just gave me a chance to lean down and scratch Whitney’s ears while I listened. Bonus: the concern in the boy’s voice motivated me to lift the harness on Whitney’s back and demonstrate how a Seeing Eye dog works.

And so, for our grand finale, I commanded “Whitney, outside!” The kids watched in awe as my magnificent Seeing Eye dog led mea safely around chairs, bookshelves and children sitting criss-cross applesauce on the floor to the door out of the room.

This past Monday special education teacher Caitlin Farrell emailed me thank you notes from her class that I can hear. If you are looking for — or need — something to smile about, click the players below to hear their beautiful voices.

I had an idea to round up some of the more thoughtful bits of post-election reading I’ve come across. When I told Beth about my idea, she replied, in her infinite wisdom, “Don’t! People are getting all that from all sides.”

Doh.

So, instead, I’m simply going to give thanks for longtime friends. The ones who’ve borne witness to my life and my foibles and still call me their friend. I was reminded this past weekend of the deep, comforting value of having people who knew me way back when.

That’s Pick and us just before we left for the wedding. Thanks to Hank, the man behind the camera.

At the wedding we attended in Washington, D.C. on Saturday, at some point my friend Rebecca—the mother of the groom—took me aside and said, “I just realized who you look like. Your father.” For a moment I froze, grateful for the simple privilege of having a close friend who knew my dad. I knew Rebecca’s parents, too. We became thick as thieves in high school, and partners in crime during summers home from college. Basically, two kids with a visceral desire to get out of our little town and see what the hell was out there. Our lives took us in different directions, but we never lost touch.

On Friday night before the wedding, we stayed with Pick and Hank, who got together as a couple just about the time Beth and I did. I’ve written about them before. I met Pick when I was a college intern in Washington, D.C. Later, after I graduated from the University of Illinois I took a job in D.C. Pick and I eventually became roommates and fast friends. Pick was visiting with Beth, me and Gus at the house we rented in Urbana over Labor Day in 1991 when I got the phone call—my father had died at home of a heart attack. Pick drove up to Pennsylvania to be with us for my dad’s funeral. Come to think of it, Becky was there, too, at the wake.

A year later, a week after my mother’s funeral, Pick drove from D.C. to Urbana, Illinois, to help me and Beth and Gus get settled in our ramshackle “starter home” ($38,900 back in the day). I have Pick to thank for introducing me to Hank and a slew of other friends, most especially Michael and Susi.

I realized this weekend that I go back with all these people 40 years, more or less. I don’t know where the time went.

But I’m thankful I’m still here, and that they—and all of my friends—are, too.

P.S. I’m happy to report that although we did have a few frightening “Miracle Worker” moments, Beth’s ears are almost all the way back.

If you haven’t signed up to follow BlindBeader’s Life Unscripted blog yet, I highly recommend you do. BlindBeader is a gifted young writer who lives in Edmonton, Alberta with her husband, three cats and guide dog Jenny. She wrote a guest post for our Safe & Sound blog last month with recommendations for visiting New York City, and when I contacted her this week to let her know how much I enjoyed her Life Unscripted post about “inter-marriage” she generously agreed to let me reblog it here for you.

So, Like, he takes care of you!” Or…?

Blogger Blindbeader and guide dog Jenny waiting for a water taxi in NYC.

by Blindbeader

Beyond my blindness, which is fairly visibly obvious, one of the first things people notice about me is the ring on my left ring finger. Many of them will say something about me being married, and the topic comes around to the fact that my husband is sighted.

“Oh, that’s great!”

Are they happy that I am married, happily, to someone who loves me? That I share my life with someone who carries me through dark times as I try and do for him? That we own a house, laugh at the antics of my guide dog and our three cats, cook, clean, bicker, smile, laugh, share hobbies, misunderstand each other, argue over money or sex or in-laws, smile and nod at little quirks that we just accept about each other?

Or are they happy that he can see?

Thankfully, Ben has told me that we don’t often get people staring at us, unless he is walking me into tables and chairs (something he has struggled with since we started dating). There are no noticeably pitying looks, or no outward looks of admiration…

But it is not uncommon for me (and others with sighted partners) to hear comments about how great it is that their mate is there to “take care of them.” Sure, he cooks a mean lasagna and picks up groceries, but I do laundry and clean the bathroom; if that’s taking care of me, then my contributions to our household are obviously considered “lesser” than his. Often times (though this is not unique to my husband), staff at stores or restaurants will ask what “she” would like. Few things annoy me (and him) more, so often times I will assert myself, or he will direct whoever to speak to me directly. Ben says he often gets questions about how I can read, what I do for work, or if I have a dog – questions that are par for the course when people meet or hear about a blind person. What is incredibly disconcerting is that it is assumed that Ben is my friend, and my blind guy friends are my FRIENDS (my emphasis). It has never been said in Ben’s presence so far as I know, but I have gone for coffee or worked out with blind male friends, and it is assumed that they are the giver of the ring on my finger.

My friend Meagan is engaged to Gregg, who is also blind. I have known them for quite a while now, and find them cute. Not CUTE (“Oh, the little blindie couple!”) but cute (two people who care about each other and still make each other smile despite distance, time and any difficulties that come their way). She says people do think they are adorable in the blind-couple sense, but are alternately upset that Meagan and Gregg (Meagan in particular) don’t have someone to take care of them. It’s a double-edged sword, contingent on the idea that a blind person needs someone to watch over them; it is not a matter of finding someone to love, who happens to be blind (or sighted, in my case). My friend Alicia agrees, going one step further: “First time someone learns I was dating, especially if the curious person was a parent or family member, that was the first question out of their mouths. I used to get angry and ask them why that was their first question, now I just answer it and move on. Usually their second is, what caused his blindness,” she says.

Conversely, I do know other blind people who are resistent to the idea of dating someone sighted, and seem to carry a resentment for those of us who have. On one hand, it appears that blind people with sighted partners enjoy a certain elevated status; on the other, it is assumed that we think we’re too good to “stick with our own kind.”

Click here to read the rest of BlindBeader’s original “So, Like, he takes care of you!” Or…? post on Life Unscripted. Be sure to read the comments, too. Her well-written and thought-provoking post received dozens of responses from readers who can see and who are blind, some who are deaf, others who are deaf/blind and from some spouses, too. I haven’t come across any other bloggers who’ve tackled this subject matter, and I commend BlindBeader for taking it on.

Thanks to good old fashioned wires, I can hear Floey loud and clear.

Anyone out there still have a land line? We do. We still use an answering machine, too. I came home from memoir class and pressed the button on that good ol’ answering machine the other day and was tickled to hear my eight-year-old great niece’s voice ringing out from a tiny speaker. I’ve written about little Floey here on the Safe & Sound blog many times before — AnnMarie Florence Czerwinski is the only offspring in our entire family to be blessed with my mom’s beautiful name. I call her Floey for short.

Anyways, Floey sounded excited on the answering machine, and she wanted me to call her back right away. “I have awesome news!” Beep! Another message. Floey again. “Oh, and when you call back, use this number.” I had to rewind the message a few times to get the number right, and hearing Floey’s voice over and over again, I couldn’t help but notice how loud and clear it sounded. A clue to the awesome news, I thought. maybe they got their landline back.

Like so many other friends and relatives, Floey’s family got rid of their landline years ago to save money. Mike and I talked about getting rid of ours, too, but Floey’s great-grandma Flo had a hard time understanding people who called from cell phones, and, to be honest, so do I. The quality of a conversation is sooooooo much better on a landline than a cell phone, and for obvious reasons, sound is very important to me. Others seem resigned to cell phone’s, but I’ve gotta wonder: if cell phones were the only thing humans could use to make calls, and word got out that some tech guru had come up with something called a landline, would the inventor make millions?

The last time Floey stayed overnight with me, she seemed pretty excited when I gave her permission to use our landline to call home, but after she picked up the reciever, she was dumbfounded. “Do I just push the buttons?”

Floey and her family just moved into a new house, and I figured their move might have triggered the decision to go back to a landline. Turns out there was more to it than that. After I returned Floey’s phone call, my niece Janet (Floey’s mom) called me back to say thanks. “It gave her a chance to practice on the house phone,” she said. . “with everyone using cell phones, it’s like little kids are not learning this anymore.”

Janet said her concern over her kids ability to use a regular phone started after she’d told Floey’s five-year-old brother Raymond one morning that she was going to the basement to do laundry. “About 5 minutes later, he was running through the house, screaming out windows, crying, ‘MOM! WHERE ARE YOU?’” She ran upstairs to comfort Ray, and the experience led her to go through some “what would you do?” scenarios with him. “I tried to show him how to use the cell,” she said. Raymond couldn’t figure out how to use it. “It was charged, but it had been sitting there a while so he had to wait for it to come alive, then plug in the password, then dial 911, and hit enter.”

Even when Janet helped him through the steps, Raymond couldn’t tell if the call went through, and whether it was actually dialing. They decided to invest in a landline again. That’s one reason I’d never thought of for keeping a landline, and now I wonder: do other grandparents and parents go out of their way to teach kids how to use landline phones?

Here’s the clip with Floey’s personal bests.

I am one of the few people who will know Floey’s landline number, and when I told Floey how special that makes me feel, how excited I was about her awesome news, how cool it was that she has a landline like mine now, how nice it is to hear her voice so clearly on my phone, she sighed an exasperated sigh. If I didn’t know better, I’d swear I heard her eyes rolling. Floey’s awesome news had absolutely nothing to do with the landline. “We had a swim meet, and I got three personal bests,” she exclaimed. “My picture is in the newspaper!” She proceeded to describe herself doing the backstroke in the photo, then she read the caption, and then she read the story. And, thanks to the new landline, I could hear just how proud she is. Loud and clear.

This week Judy Roth, one of the writers in my Thursday afternoon memoir-writing class, arranged for Whitney and me to visit the school where her grandson Davin goes to kindergarten. My friend Carol drove us to Francis W. Parker School and agreed to write a guest post about our morning together there.

My morning at Francis W. Parker School

by Carol Dorf

The hands flew up in unison.

When I heard Beth was going to speak to kids at Francis W. Parker School, my hand immediately shot up to ask if I could accompany her. Sure, I wanted to experience Beth interacting with kids, but, truth be told, I really wanted to see what kids who attend one of the most prestigious private schools in Chicago are like. From the school Web site:

Colonel Francis W. Parker, influenced by the educational theories of John Dewey, envisioned a school that held the child at its very center. His fundamental belief was that learning could be fun and proved his point, not by theories on child psychology, but with actual classroom demonstrations. Colonel Parker believed that education included the complete development of an individual — mental, physical, and moral. Through the educational journey, students would develop in to lifelong learners and active, democratic citizens.

Colonel Parker believed that these great citizens must use their knowledge to improve the community– to make things better, more fair and pure. Parker students would graduate, not only with vast knowledge, but also with heart and soul.

Francis W. Parker School was, shall I say, quite lush: carpeted hallways, perfectly appointed decorations on the walls, modern desks, fabric lounge chairs. This was the crème de la crème.

The kindergarteners shuffled into the auditorium, and once they found their seats I could see heads bobbing and stretching to get a look at Beth and Whitney. Some kids were literally on the edges of their seats in anticipation of what would come. They waited patiently as Beth did her shpiel, and then, like mini Arnold Horshack’s, two dozen hands went up.

This was the moment I was waiting for. What questions would these “senior kindergarteners” ask: “How do you know the maid has done a good job if you can’t see?” “Who walks the dog for you?” Yes, I admit I was expecting a bunch of precocious kids asking questions that reflected their seemingly privileged lives. I pre-judged, and boy, was I wrong. What I heard instead was exactly what you’d expect from any 5-year-old:

• How do you write if you can’t see?
• Can you tell what I look like?
• If you can find your wallet, How do you know what’s in there?
• How do you make food?
• When you’re doing art, and you have to pick a color, how do you know what it is, you know, if your dog is color blind?

A big thank you to Beth for allowing me to accompany her that morning. Me and the kids at Frances W. Parker School learned a lot that day.