Our flight from O’Hare to Washington, DC was cancelled Friday afternoon, but after re-booking and enduring Two additional flight delays, we finally arrived in DC at midnight.

Nine hours in an airport provides a couple with a lot of time to come up with great ideas about housekeeping, budgets, writing, Academy award nominees, work, Facebook, Hackney’s, Flo, the upcoming baseball season, the 2016 Presidential election, books, dog names, groceries, Fresh Air interviews, jazz music, bartenders, aquariums, business ideas, and…blogs!

And so, here’s the thing: Mike enjoys writing guest blog posts, and we get oodles of positive comments on my Safe & Sound blog when we publish his posts, so while sitting at Gate B19 with Seeing Eye dog Whitney lying patiently at our feet, we got to thinking, hey, why not have Mike Knezovich write a post once a week, and the decision was made. Starting February 3, 2014, readers can look forward to our Mondays with Mike segment every week on the Safe & Sound blog.

Before the feast: That’s Michael and Susie Bowers, Pick, and moi. Hank’s in the kitchen….

As for the weekend trip to visit our dear friends Pick an Hank in Washington, DC, the wait at O’Hare Friday was well worth it. Visits with Pick and Hank are always a joy, and the highlight of this one was dinner at their condo with mutual friends Mike and Susie Bowers. Hank prepared a fresh salad with homemade dressing, followed by scrumptious filet mignon with roasted brussel sprouts and beautiful russet baked potatoes. And then? Cheesecake for dessert. Pick provided musical entertainment, and if you link here you can hear me joining him for a blues number on the piano. It was as cold in DC as it was in Chicago over the weekend, but it’s amazing how much being with friends, and especially, playing music together, can warm the heart.

Just got word that my friend Lindy Bergman died. Lindy was a well-known art collector who found a way to continue living and loving her life after losing her sight. She was very smart and extremely charming, but you know what I liked best about Lindy? Her surprisingly wicked sense of humor. The frigid weather, combined with a bad cold I picked up a few days ago, kept me away from the memorial service today, but in her honor I’m reblogging a post I published about Lindy here back in 2012. You sure are gonna be missed, Lindy.

My friend Lindy Bergman was an art collector. Then macular degeneration set in.

When the disease became so severe that Lindy could no longer see the surrealist works on her apartment walls, she donated the collection to the Art Institute of Chicago. From a New York Times review of the Art Institute’s new modern wing:

The unsinkable Lindy Bergman

…and a wonderful little tropical fantasy by Leonora Carrington. This last work is part of the museum’s extraordinary Bergman Collection of mostly Surrealist art, which forms a kind of cabinet of curiosities at the heart of the third-floor galleries.

The Bergman trove includes a phalanx of 30 boxes by Joseph Cornell, an American. That collection contains the only artists on this floor who developed outside Europe, primarily Arshile Gorky, Matta and Wifredo Lam. (The exception is the Parisian expatriate Man Ray, who is in the Bergman collection and elsewhere in these galleries.)

After donating her collection, Lindy took to writing. Out of Sight, Not Out of Mind chronicles Lindy’s journey with macular degeneration and offers suggestions on how to keep your head above water when vision loss is trying to pull you under. Lindy is the perfect role model. In her 90s now, she swims a quarter mile each day, works out with her trainer, serves as a board member for a number of organizations, and goes to concerts and lectures. She is particularly enthusiastic about the audio cassette that comes along with her book — it features recordings of classical music as well as Lindy’s children and grandchildren. I recognized the voices of a few of the experts on the cassette — they are the same caring University of Chicago doctors that did my eye surgeries back in the 1980s. “I didn’t want it to just be my old voice droning on and on. Who’d want to listen to that?” she says with a self-deprecating laugh.”I wanted the book to be uplifting, not depressing!”

My friend Bonita has known Lindy a long time and was wise enough to introduce us when Mike and I moved to Chicago. On our first lunch date, I showed Lindy how to fix her talking watch so it’d quit announcing the time out loud every hour on the hour. She was so appreciative for what I saw as a small gesture. We’ve been friends ever since.

The stories Lindy tells me about tracking down art with her late husband Ed sound like Hemingway novels. “Ed always was a collector of something or other,” Lindy says with a shrug, describing a sun porch full of aquariums when Ed was collecting tropical fish, or his enormous shell collection.

“Not just a few shells. We had a lot of them. So he really was always a collector, and I just went along with it.” They’d already been married about 10 years when she and Ed decided to take a course on the Great Books at University of Chicago. A teacher there recommended a book by the Museum of Modern Art called Masters in Modern Art. “We had a lot of books to read for class, but every night we would start reading about art. That’s how it all began. We really educated ourselves.” By the late 1950s, the Bergmans were established as Surrealist collectors. They met Wifredo Lam on a visit to Cuba in the mid-50s, and the painter met them again in Paris in 1959 to show them around. Aside from that Salvador Dali poster with the melting clocks we hung in our college dorm rooms, I don’t know a whole lot about surrealism. Lindy met a couple artists in Paris whose names I actually do recognize, though: Man Ray and Max Ernst. She and Ed met Dali on another trip to Europe.

Time flies when I’m with Lindy. She loves hearing stories about my travels with my Seeing Eye dogs, and delights when Hanni — and now, Harper — sneak away from me under the table to lie on her feet. “It keeps me warm!” she laughs. The Chicago Lighthouse for the Blind is honoring Lindy Bergman at a gala at The Four Seasons tonight, and Bonita is generously sponsoring me to attend. A description of Lindy from the invitation reads like this:

Lindy has been living with macular degeneration for nearly fifteen years and has become an exemplary benefactor of The Chicago Lighthouse. In 2009, she was among those who played a critical role in helping The Lighthouse realize its goal of a new building addition. Most recently, she has helped establish the Bergman Institute for Psychological Support, where our professional rehabilitation staff counsel people who are blind or are losing their sight. Finally, she has partnered with our professional rehabilitation staff on a second “Lighthouse” edition of her book on macular degeneration, Out of Sight, Not Out of Mind.

With all of Lindy’s accomplishments, the one area where she lacks confidence is … public speaking. At our last dinner together, and in subsequent phone calls, I’ve been coaching her for the short talk she’s been asked to give at tonight’s gala. I know she’s gonna wow them. She sure has wowed me!

Which is which?

The Kenilworth kindergartners squealed with delight when Whitney led me into their school wearing snow boots. “That‘s our special guest Mrs. Fink,” their teacher announced. “And that’s Hanni, the dog from the book, too!”

We’d arrived late (our commuter train had been delayed in Chicago due to weather) and our opening assembly had to be cut back to 15 minutes. After that, Whit and I gave separate fifteen-minute sessions for all the kindergarten and first grade classes at Joseph Sears Elementary School.

Fifteen minutes was not enough time to explain that Hanni, the star of Hanni and Beth: Safe & Sound had retired, that this was a new dog, I’d had to decide when it was time for Hanni to retire, I could have kept Hanni as a pet or brought her back to the Seeing eye but I decided to find friends to adopt her, that she’s doing fine and is living an enviable retirement in Urbana, that I had another dog after that, his name was Harper, he retired, and now, this new dog is Whitney, and she’s a ball of energy.

And so, I did what I had to do. I referred to the dog at my feet generically. She was “my Seeing Eye dog.” Ick snay on it-whey ee-nay. The questions during the classroom visits reflected what the kindergartners and first-graders are learning to do in school:

• How do you put on your shoes?
• How can you print your name if you can’t see the paper?
• How do you read those green signs that tell you what street it is?
• How do you get dressed?
• Can you tell time?
• Does your dog really know right from left?

I had to be honest with the little girl who asked that last question. I really wasn’t sure. “We say the word ‘left’ when we want our dogs to turn left,” I told her. I went on, then, explaining how Seeing Eye trainers teach us to point to the left and face our shoulders left, too, at the same time we give the “left” command. “So I don’t know if my Seeing Eye dog understands the word ‘left’ or she sees my body language… .” I could hear the kids starting to fidget. I was losing my audience. Gee whiz, Beth. Stop talking! Just show them how it works

In the real world, out on the street, a blind person memorizes or knows the route before leaving home. The pair gets themselves situated on the sidewalk and faces the direction they’ll start. The blind person commands “Forward!” and the dog guides them safely to the curb. When the dog stops, the person stops. That’s how a blind person using a guide dog knows they have arrived at an intersection.

If the person wants to turn right or left at that corner, the person commands the direction, simultaneously turning their upper body in that direction and pointing in that direction, too. The dog turns, and the blind companion follows the dog’s lead.

Back in the school classroom, I wake up the dog sleeping at my feet and lift the harness off her back. And then, uh-oh, it dawns on me. These kids all think this dog is Hanni.

Dog is my co-pilot. I offer a quick prayer. “Please, Whitney, go along with the ruse.” I point both shoulders and my right finger left and command, “Hanni, left!”

My dog heads left with more exuberance than usual. She’s on to the fake. I give her another command. “Hanni, outside!” She leads me to the door.

Dear Sears School kids who are reading this: I’m sorry I lied.

Dear Safe & Sound blog readers: any of you have a phone number for a dog psychiatrist that specializes in identity issues?

Last Friday Whitney and I took a train to Deerfield, a suburb of Chicago, to talk with second graders at Kipling Elementary School. It was “Disability Awareness Week” at Kipling, and the kids asked a lot of questions during the Q & A part of the presentation. Some examples:

• Does Whitney like other dogs?
• How do you know when it’s time to go to bed?
• How do you bake bread?
• How do you write books?
• How do you drive?
• If dogs are color blind, can they see any colors at all?
• Does Whitney ever slip on the ice?
• Where did you go to college?
• What’s Whitney’s favorite color?
• My favorite question of the day, hands down, was this one: “If you need to go to school to get a Seeing Eye dog, but you don’t have a Seeing Eye dog yet, how do you get to the school?” Tomorrow morning Whitney and I are taking a train to another suburban school: Sears Elementary, in Kenilworth. This time we’ll be talking with kindergartners. Note to self: go to bed early tonight.

I have a part-time job moderating the Easter Seals blog, and today we published a post there that I wrote about guide dogs and winter weather. I thought you Safe & Sound blog readers might find it interesting, too, so here it is.

The cold and snowy weather last week had a lot of people asking me if my Seeing Eye dog Whitney likes being out in winter weather. Truth is, she doesn’t have much choice. Poor guide dogs, they never get a day off work!

The snow started falling in Chicago last week, and it was still coming down days later. The American Federation of the Blind devotes a section on its web site to traveling in winter weather:

Winter weather is often more time consuming, more physically and mentally tiring, and possibly more fraught with danger than traveling in good weather. The cold often brings personal discomfort, making it difficult to concentrate and learn during travel or mobility lessons. Your toes, fingers and ears are particularly at risk. To protect your extremities, it is necessary to plan one’s clothing and equipment well beforehand.

When I was a kid, I thought it was magical the way snowfall muffled the sound around you. I still do. But on my walks with Whitney the past week, it just wasn’t the magic I was looking for.

Enough snow fell to mask the audible cues I use to navigate the city. Commuters who could see trudged through the Loop (downtown Chicago’s business district) with their heads down to avoid the snow pelting their faces. This would have been fine if they all had dogs like mine to guide them, but they didn’t. Whitney was on her own, weaving me around the blinded commuters in our path.

And that wasn’t all: snow accumulated between the raised, circular bumps I’ve come to rely on to tell me we’re at the edge of a curb ramp, so I wasn’t always exactly sure where we were. The further we got away from the Loop, the fewer pedestrians crossed our path. I’d stop. Listen. No footsteps in the snow, no sounds of shovels, nobody there. Panic. Where were we?

All I can do when this happens is take a deep breath and remember what trainers drummed into our heads when my blind peers and I were first learning to work with our guides: trust your dog. “Whitney, forward!” I hold on tight to her harness, follow her lead, and before long we’re at our destination, safe and sound.

As the snow begins to melt now, salt on the streets is the problem—it gets into Whitney’s paws, and stings. Thank goodness for booties. Whitney’s gotten used to wearing them now, and I’m getting used to compliments, too. Strangers on city streets gush when we pass by. “Awww! Look!” they exclaim. “That dog has shoes!” It makes me smile, and I picture those strangers smiling in the snow too. My dog is more than a guide, she’s a therapy dog, too. “Good dog, Whitney!”