In the past month my Seeing Eye dog Whitney and I have traveled to Seattle, Long Island, Milwaukee and Champaign. We’re home for a while now, and finally all three of the memoir-writing classes I lead for Chicago senior citizens are in full swing. We started out with a bang after my travel experiences inspired me to assign “Waking Up in a Strange Room” as a writing topic.

Whitney’s used to planes, trains and automobiles.

None of the seniors came back with anything terribly lurid, but (more…)

Let’s start with this: A hammer is technology. How you use it is what counts. Hit a nail. Good. Hit a person. Not so good.

I say this because I’m about to venture into the realm of cranky person complaining about technology. (more…)

Remember my post a few weeks ago about heading to Champaign to give a talk to an animal sciences class at the University of Illinois? My friend Nancy Beskin generously agreed to come along with my Seeing Eye dog Whitney and me on the train, and her guest post today describes what our trip was like from her point of, ahem, view.

A living field trip into Beth’s history

by Nancy Beskin

I think Beth was surprised at how quickly I said yes when she asked if I wanted to come with her and Whitney to Champaign, but the trip was compelling to me for all sorts (more…)

That’s 14-year-old Hanni on the left, 5-year-old Harper on the right, and Whitney with her back to the camera. (Photo by Larry Melton.)

Sunday was dogapalooza in the suburbs. Beth and I and Whitney took the train to Wheaton, where our friends Steven and Nancy, with Hanni in tow all the way from Urbana, picked us up. From there, it was on to Chris and Larry’s, where Hanni, Harper and Whitney—Beth’s last three Seeing Eye dogs—met and rollicked until they and we were exhausted. (more…)

If a hybrid idled at an intersection…

There’s been some noise, ahem, lately about regulations to add soundmakers to hybrid cars. You know, so they’d be safer around pedestrians — especially those of us with visual impairments.

I don’t get it.

Maybe it’s because I live in a big city. I walk around a lot with my Seeing Eye dog Whitney. There’s so much traffic here that It’s not likely we’ve ever been at an intersection where one silent hybrid car was sitting alone waiting for a light. If that has happened, we didn’t know it, and it didn’t matter. We still got across the street safely.

People who are blind don’t use the sound of idling cars to determine when to cross a street. We listen for the traffic moving at our parallel to know when to cross. The tires on hybrid cars make noise when they move, so we hear them along with the rush of other cars at our parallel, and that noise tells us it’s probably safe to cross.

I don’t cross a street the minute the light turns green. I wait until traffic starts going my way – the cars stopped in front of us can’t be moving if all that traffic is rushing by in front of them. I give Whitney a command. “Whitney, Forward!” Whitney looks to make sure no one is making a fast turn and that it’s safe, and then she leads me across.

A Chicago benefactor – he doesn’t want to disclose his name– donated a hybrid car to the Seeing Eye School back when I was training with Harper. The donation helped the Seeing Eye figure out a dog’s reaction to the car’s silence, and exposed students like me to what a hybrid does — and does not — sound like.

This morning my brother-in-law Rick Amodt sent me a link to a story from AOL Tech about the European Parliament’s decision to back a proposal that would “require sound-making hardware in new electric vehicles by July 2019.” I must be missing something. Is this really necessary?