When I assigned “The Best Job I Ever Had” as a topic for the writers in my memoir classes, Hugh went home and started making a list. “I wrote down every place I’d ever worked,” he said. “This one kept coming up on top.”

His essay opens in the summer of 1943. Hugh was 11 years old, American soldiers were fighting in World War II, and everyone here at home was rationing. “Metal was necessary to use in making all kinds of military equipment,” he wrote, describing scrap metal drives, manufacturers of pots and pans switching to making mess kits for soldiers, Boy Scouts collecting tin cans that would eventually be turned into airplanes.

An assembled cardboard Lionel train car (and action figure).

Less important businesses like toy manufacturers had to stop using metal altogether, and Hugh said it hit the Lionel Train company hard. ”They knew they wouldn’t be able to sell any new electric trains to run around the Christmas Trees.” What to do? Execs at Lionel put their heads together and hired a novelty designer who came up with the answer: paper trains. From Hugh’s essay:

My mother worked for a market research firm that was hired to test whether the paper trains were easy enough to assemble and to produce enough samples to show to the retail stores. Mom, in turn, enlisted my 14-year-old brother and some of his friends to assemble a bunch of paper trains. Needless to say, although I was only 11, I tagged along and got hired, too.

Hugh describes the flat 11×15 lightweight cardboard sheets he and his buddies worked with: each sheet had train parts printed in authentic colors, and Lionel’s insignia was on every page. “The kit included an engine, a tender, a boxcar, a gondola car and a caboose,” Hugh said, stopping to take a breath before continuing to read his essay out loud in class. “It also had a crossing gate, a crossing signal and enough paper ties and rails to make a good sized circle.” The wheels were laminated cardboard, too, but the axles were little rods made of wood. “It took us many tries to be able to assemble the cars and the track, but eventually we became pretty good.”

It was difficult to find any information online about these 1943 paper trains, and I might have started worrying about Hugh if I hadn’t found a Lionel Wartime Freight Train page on Wikipedia. The Wikipedia page confirmed Hugh’s story and reported that paper trains did well financially in 1943. After buying a paper train for their children, though, most parents became so frustrated by the assembly process that they gave up on putting it together and threw it out.

Hugh and his buddies got paid for testing the paper trains ahead of time, but he couldn’t remember how much they earned for their work. “It must have been by the hour,” he wrote, realizing now that if it was by the piece, they wrecked so many that they never would have made anything.

”It was really fun being with our friends and playing at putting these things together,” Hugh wrote. “And I got paid!” The all-paper product train sold for a dollar during the 1943 Christmas season, but it went off the market after that due to poor customer response. Seventy years (and many, many jobs) later, however, Hugh maintains that getting paid to put those paper trains together “is still The Best Job I Ever Had.”

I have a deep-seated desire, a need even, to try to keep up with current events. And lately, I’ve been thinking that’s gonna kill me. Between bankrupt domestic and local politics, and conflicts here and around the world that continually point out the human genius in finding ways to terrorize, brutalize, and diminish other humans, it can overload anyone trying to make sense of it all.

The scene at Chicago Summer Dance last Friday night.

I find myself needing more than an escape—I need evidence that people are—or at least can be—good. Luckily, here in Printers Row in the summer time pretty much any weekend, Beth and I can find joyful evidence of goodness at Chicago Summer Dance.

It’s just a three-block walk from our building to the Spirit of music Garden on the western edge of Grant Park. For the last 18 years, the City of Chicago’s Summer Dance program has presented an hour-long dance lesson, followed by a live performance by some terrific swing bands, salsa bands, and DJs. It happens all summer long, Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays.

This summer’s weather has been as gentle and mild as the past winter was wretched. That’s how it was this past Friday evening—warm, not hot; breezy, not humid. At dusk, with Chicago’s skyscrapers shining in soft sunshine framing the scene, at least a hundred folks lined up for a swing dance lesson.

The dance floor was expanded awhile back—but it was still crowded. The instructors knew what they were doing, though, and somehow the hour flew by. The Fat Babies played on Friday—they are a superb traditional jazz/swing septet that’s earned some justified acclaim of late. We’d seen them at their regular gig on a rainy night at a Pilsen club called Honky Tonk Barbecue—Beth’s trombone-playing brother Doug sat in for a bit the night we saw them.

On Friday, as always, lots of people came out just to hear the music–they bring lawn chairs and little picnics and ring the dance floor. And everyone was in good spirits and behaved like, well, civilized people.

The band was terrific.

But the dance floor is always the best. Short dumpy men whose footwork belies their physiques dance with statuesque women. Young couples who take their dance seriously and dress the part. Young black men dancing with women who look like my middle-aged mother. Blue hairs and kids, black people, white people, Asian people and Hispanic people, drag queens, guys that wear yacht-captain hats. Women in flowing dresses and impossible heels.

All partnering with one another, the only condition being you have to want to dance. It’s a liquid tableau of color and people.

And every time I leave, I’m reminded: It’s not all bad.

So many dog lovers who see me out and about with Whitney stop, sigh, and say, “I wish I could bring my dog with me to the store.” This month, if you live anywhere near Chicago, you finally can!

My longtime friend Jenny Foucre Fischer works at The Bookstore in Glen Ellyn, Ill, The store is celebrating the dog days of summer this month — not only are they encouraging customers to bring their “furry, feathery and scaly friends” along when they come to shop for books, but they’ll give you a reward if you do. Don’t believe me? Here’s a quote from their August newsletter: “Stop by with your pet and meet us in person, — or show us a photo of your favorite animal companion (real, stuffed or imaginary) — and you’ll receive 10% off an animal-related book in August. What can I say? The Bookstore is a rare breed, ahem, and this story about them in the Chicago Tribune explains why:

The store is one of about 50 independent retail booksellers in the Chicago area. Not too long ago, all of them and the other roughly 4,000 independents across the U.S. were supposed to vaporize. By some estimates, more than 2,000 did.

But about 1,500 survived. And as the Tribune story says, “through a mix of obsessive attention to detail, lean inventory, an embrace of technology and resourceful salesmanship, they hang in there.”

The Bookstore has been extremely supportive of my books over the years, and of course Hanni and Beth: Safe & Sound is one of the books you can purchase with your discount when you bring your companion animal with you to shop there this month.</

“That’s Jenny with Hanni and me a few years ago at The Bookstore in Glen Ellyn.”

And wait. There’s more! Email The Bookstore at justbook475@yahoo.com to share a photo of yourself or someone in your family reading to your pets, and if you give them permission to use the photo on their website & social media pages, they’ll give you an additional 10% off an animal-related book, bringing your total discount to 20%. What. A. Deal.

Our current ride

For her birthday, on December 23 1983, I gave Beth a brand new Peugeot bicycle. It was a dandy ride—a lovely light blue, classic upright riding position, folding saddle baskets, three speeds. Perfect for the young and lovely university professional who wanted to commute to campus and run errands on her bicycle.

She loved that bike. But Beth only got one good season out of it, then the diabetic retinopathy put an end to her riding days. We eventually gave it to an exchange student at the university. Beth wasn’t sentimental about many things after losing her sight, but somehow the presence of that bicycle gave us both stomach aches, so we got rid of it.

Back then, can’t remember exactly what year, our good friend Greg Schafer called one day and said he’d spotted a Schwinn Twinn tandem in one of those weekly ad papers. He and I took a look, and I took possession.

We’ve had a tandem ever since. Just this past Saturday, we schlepped our big long bike out of the basement of our building and rode to another hood for a terrific breakfast. Later we headed out on and did some grocery shopping.

It was a swell day. But. Our tandem bicycles—the Twinn lasted a long time but we’re on our third now—have been, in a very real way, a telling representation of how Beth’s blindness changes things, and how it doesn’t.

On the one hand, it’s cool we can go for rides together. And Beth still gets that feeling of the wind in her hair. On the other, it’s a circumstance that’s dictated. It’s not like we rode a tandem and fell in love with riding together one day. Back on the first hand, it’s another example of how adaptation can help fill gaps left by Beth’s disability. On the thumbs down side, like most of the adaptations—a talking computer, audio books—it’s not the same.

For Beth, she has to follow my lead and put an enormous amount of trust in me. She can’t just go for a ride if she feels like it. I have to feel like it, too. And even recruiting other friends isn’t a great solution—because in truth, it takes some practice to ride these things safely, and you have to learn to work together.

It hasn’t always been easy. And it’s sort of representative of a lot of the give and take we’ve had to work through. I have short stocky legs and prefer a faster pace in a lower gear. Beth likes pedaling slower at higher gears. I like to coast when Beth likes to get on the crank. I have to be vigilant about traffic and such, she’s just pedaling away.

And so on. It’s like that in other scenarios off the bike. It just is. And I wish it weren’t so. But it is. It’s not what we’d choose if we had the power. But we don’t. It’s the best we can do. And it’s pretty good.

It’s been a pretty stimulating month so far:

From front to back that’s Anita, Floey, Moi, my sister Cheryl, and Ray at the Cougars game. My niece Janet took the picture.

• August 1: A lot of talented writers attended my Getting Your Memoir Off the Ground workshop at Northwestern Summer Writers’ Conference, and now I can look forward to reading their memoirs once they’re published!
• August 2: Sat in on Kevin Davis’ two-hour workshop at the writer’s conference. My neighbor Margaret was at the conference, too, and on our walk home together we talked about all the new ideas we have now to make the characters we write about come alive.
• August 3: Took a commuter train to the suburbs with Whitney to join family members for a Kane County Cougars baseball game. Renowned baseball organist Nancy Faust has been playing for Sunday afternoon home games for the Cougars ever since retiring from her White Sox gig in 2008, and my friend Amy Mason is the Director of Ticket Operations for the Cougars. So of course Amy set us up with a row of tickets right in front of Nancy — we could actually turn around, name a song, and have Nancy play it instantly on her Hammond B3. I requested Stevie Wonder’s “I wish” and marveled at how she nailed the bass part on the organ’s foot pedals. She played a UB40 tune for my niece Janet, a song from Beauty and the Beast for Floey, and even managed to honor five-year-old Raymond’s request:“Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star.”
• August 4: Put together a post for my part-time job moderating the Easter Seals blog in the morning, hopped on a CTA bus with Whitney to lead my Monday memoir-writing class in Lincoln Park in the afternoon, then put on a fancy dress and headed to the Chicago Shakespeare Theatre. The opening reception for the Leadership Exchange in Arts and Disability (LEAD) conference was in the lobby there, Mike came along with me, and few things make me happier than being on the arm of a handsome man and having wait staff come around with teeny-tiny unidentifiable concoctions for me to try. Heaven.
  

  That’s me and the legendary baseball organist Nancy Faust. (Cub fans, that’s what a World Series ring looks like.)

• August 5: Our panel at the LEAD conference about the challenges and successes in accessing arts programs if you can’t see was a hit, but that was no surprise — I had Sally Cooper (Volunteer Coordinator at Blind Service Association here in Chicago) and George Abbott (Director of the eLearning Center at the American Foundation of the Blind in New York) at my side! At lunch afterwards I had the good fortune to be seated next to some very fun people from the Pittsburgh Arts Council, and now, who knows, maybe Whitney and I will be heading out there sometime to give presentations and check out the Pittsburgh art scene.
• August 6 & 7 Led my Wednesday and Thursday memoir-writing classes and made some progress on the book I’m writing about all I learn from the writers in those classes . Their topic for next week is “The Best Job I Ever Had,” and after reviewing everything that went on this week, I’d have to say that, hands down, the best job I’ve ever had is the one I have right now. Who could ask for anything more?