People stare at my Seeing Eye dog and me sometimes. Who can blame them? We’re an unusual pair! But as long as they’re watching, I want to look good.

So when I heard that the Segal Design Institute at Northwestern University was looking for projects to help people with disabilities, I suggested they have their undergraduates try to come up with some easy way we blind folks could identify the color of our clothing. Right now I put a safety pin in the tag of anything I own that is black, and a paper clip on anything white. I wear other colors, too, and I memorize what color those other things are by the feel of the clothing.

My proposal got a thumbs-up, and one of the students agreed to write a guest post to explain what the design experience has been like from his point of view.

Design thinking

by Nadhipat “Ebay” Vaniyapun

My name is Ebay and I am one of the engineering students at Northwestern University working to create a color identification system for Beth. Design Thinking and Communication is a required class for engineering students, and I believe that it is required for a very good reason. There is no other class that gives you real design experience while putting the fruit of your hard work back into helping the community.

I actually chose to study at Northwestern partly to take this class. I went to Concord Academy in Massachusetts and did a number of engineering projects in high school, including a custom physical therapy walker for a toddler who has cerebral palsy. Our walker had the same functionality as a commercial walker, but it can be disassembled, it’s adjustable for his growth, and it includes a board for him to play with his toys. It was really something to see a little kid being able to walk and play without falling over, and to realize that he didn’t have that kind of freedom until we made that therapy walker for him. You could say I was hooked from the get-go.

I admit I didn’t know much about blindness before starting this project. The last time I had any real contact with someone who was blind was probably when I was around 8 years old living in Bangkok, Thailand. I visited what could be called a nursing home for the blind as part of a school service trip. Everyone there was blind from birth and could read Braille. They got most of their income from crafts, giving lectures and receiving donations. I didn’t see their wardrobe, but I remember that the speaker wore plain, dark colored clothes while the kids wore something with mismatched colors.

With that vague recollection in mind, I couldn’t quite connect the dots with this project prompt until I met Beth for the first time. I just didn’t expect her to have a large wardrobe of clothing that wouldn’t go well together. I didn’t expect patterns or a lot of colors. I was also completely unaware that there were so many people who went blind later in life, and that not all of them read Braille. I just never thought blind people might put this much thought into the clothing they wear.

Students observed Beth sorting through her closet, looking for ways to make it easier.

This project is very different from my high school projects where I worked with tools I was used to and could easily imagine how I’d solve the problem. I guess I do miss using lots and lots of power tools a little. Fabric is not a very common engineering material, and all of us on our team even learned how to sew in order to speed up the mock up process. You also really have to use your head to make the color identification system as intuitive as possible, knowing that the user’s perception and priorities are different from you. Even if you pretended to be blind, you wouldn’t be able to pick up small details from touch or know what features of the clothing a blind person would use to pick it out from the rest.

Working with Beth has been a pleasure. There were even times when we felt uncomfortable ourselves asking difficult questions but she had no problem answering us. Thanks to that, we got a lot of unexpected data and are now incorporating everything we learned into our designs. Two things that still get me every time we visit her is how dark her room is and how many articles of clothing she can identify quickly through touch. I’m sure we wouldn’t be able to do the same without lighting.

We’ve gotten close as a group through this project. We usually meet twice a week, have a team dinner on one of the days and occasionally hang out even when it’s not about class. Every time we visit Beth, we also eat together at the restaurants in the area. I know my team a lot better now not only as colleagues, but also as friends. I have enjoyed everything I’ve done so far, and I have no doubt that we will deliver an excellent prototype.

Other Design Thinking and Communication classes at Northwestern are working on different projects to help people with disabilities, and all 50 teams will present their completed projects on Saturday afternoon, March 16. Awards for design and communication will be announced that day, too.

At Oglesby last week.

Last Friday Whitney and I visited an elementary school in a South Side Chicago neighborhood that’s been the center of a national focus on violence and guns the past couple of weeks. That very day, President Obama was at a Chicago high school nearby giving a speech about his new antipoverty policy initiatives. Our mission at Oglesby Elementary was far less controversial: Whitney and I were there to talk about writing, Seeing Eye dogs, and what it’s like to be blind. Judy Spock (a writer in my Thursday afternoon memoir-writing class) has a neighbor who works for a Montessori program at Oglesby, and the two of them accompanied Whitney and me on the visit.

Judy sat at my side while I talked to the kids, and as she rhythmically flipped through Hanni and Beth: Safe & Sound to show off the beautiful illustrations, she noticed a boy in the class had his hand up. “Can you color?” he asked. I could, I said, but I’m not very good at staying in the lines. “Can you paint?” I had to consider this one a bit. “I could get the paint on the brush,” i said. “But whatever I painted would be kind of, well…abstract.” Next question: “What’s a stract? Hmmmmm. “I guess I meant it’d be a mess.”

The finger-painted wreath.

The class grew quiet. I didn’t have to see to know their little minds were thinking, thinking, thinking. All of a sudden another hand shot up. “You could finger paint, couldn’t you?” a little boy asked. “We made a wreath!” And just like that, all of them started talking at once. “It’s right there! Behind you! We painted it with our fingers” I turned around to look. Don’t ask me why.

“No, over there! Not there! Behind you! On the wall!” Judy to my rescue. She turned around, looked up at the wall behind us, and described a huge piece of paper with a beautiful green circle of painted handprints: a holiday wreath. The boy was right. I could do that. “Maybe you and that dog could come next Christmas to try,” one of them said, which led to the next question. “How does the dog know where to go?”

I’m the one who tells Whitney what direction to go to get our errands done. I told the kids how we travel one block, she stops at the curb, I tell her,  “Good girl, Whitney!” Then I give her a direction. “Whitney, left!” She turns left, I tell her how smart she is, and we go to the next curb. “Atta girl, Whitney! Good girl!” I say, then give a direction. “Whitney, right!” Whitney turns right, and we’re off again. I explained how I listen very carefully for traffic when we have to cross a street. When I think it’s safe, I command “Forward!” Whitney looks both ways, and once she’s made sure it’s safe to go, she leads me across. More questions followed:

• How do you wash up?
• If you can’t see, how do you know where the doorknob is?
• If you can’t see, can you play any games?
• Did that dog write the book by itself or did you help the dog type it into the computer?
• What if you got to a hole in the sidewalk and the dog took you around and right then a big bus came by an beeped really loud and you fell in to the hole?
• How do you know where to press your fingers on the piano if you can’t see the sheet of paper?
• Why is your hair so blonde?

That last question gave me an opportunity to tell them how I tap the lane marker to keep my place when I swim laps, and how the chlorine in the pool makes my hair turn lighter . “Do I look like Beyonce?” They chorused a joyful, “Yes!”

Just as it was getting time to leave, one girl asked, “How can that dog keep you safe?” She must not have been listening when I’d explained our routine at the stoplight, or what Whitney does to prevent us from falling into holes. I repeated my story about Whitney checking both ways before we cross a street, and then Judy and her neighbor led Whitney and me out to the car. We spent the entire drive home yammering about the delightful and curious kids at Oglesby and how thoughtful their questions were.

It was only when I got home and turned on the radio that I realized that last question might have been about a different sort of safety. The radio story said that in his remarks that afternoon, President Obama had paid tribute to 15-year-old Hadiya Pendleton, who had attended a high school near Oglesby. “Too many of our children are being taken away from us,” the president said. “last year there were 443 murders with a firearm on the streets of this city, and 65 of those victims were 18 and under. So that’s the equivalent of a Newtown every four months.” The school where the kids want me to come back and fingerpaint is located at 7646 S Green St., right where the Englewood, Auburn and Gresham neighborhoods meet, and on the Friday we visited, the Chicago Red Eye reported:

In Englewood, a 29-year-old man was shot to death Friday in the 6900 block of South Morgan Street, officials said.
Englewood has recorded three homicides so far this year. This South Side community area logged 21 homicides last year, RedEye found.

Oglesby Montessori is a free, open enrollment, elementary school that is a part of public (non charter) Chicago Public Schools. You can help them grow by letting Barbara Byrd-Bennett, CEO of Chicago Public Schools (773-553-1500) and Mayor Rahm Emanuel (312-744-3300) know that the Auburn-Gresham/Englewood neighborhood deserves an ever-growing and expanding Public Montessori school.

That’s Marion. (Photo courtesy of Alyna Karczmar)

Marion Karczmar is a mischievous writer who sparkles when she reads her essays for our Monday afternoon memoir class, and I’m excerpting a piece she wrote to celebrate Valentine’s Day today. The essay is about her enduring love for her husband, and it opens with Marion asking herself the age-old question: what does the word “love” really mean?

During the war I worked at a canteen. The soldiers were not much older than I, looking bewildered and afraid. We danced and I let them kiss me. They made me promise to marry them when or if they returned from the war. I agreed. At that rate I would be a female polygamist after D Day. But my well meaning compassion was not the same as love.

Before she was married, Marion worked as an actress in Toronto and New York City. She delighted in applause and good reviews, and in her essay she admits to being “in love with no other than myself.” That all changed after her girlfriend Danielle insisted on a double date with a couple of foreigners who had escaped from the Holocaust. “I had great sympathy for refugees,” she wrote. “But I didn’t see how dating them would advance my career as an actress.”

Marion’s friend persevered, and the next thing you know she and Danielle were at the Copa Cabana with their dates. “Both had something in their hair, I think it’s called Vitalis. In the case of George, sprigs of hair kept escaping from their oily binding and were sticking out.” Marion liked George, especially after she discovered how good he was at tango. “Danielle didn’t complain because she preferred quiet Morton; she spent the evening correcting his English.” George accompanied Marion to her boarding house and made her promise to see him the next day. “So we met again, and then again.”

George followed Marion to Delaware when she accepted a summer stock job there that summer. “He proposed marriage on a crowded beach under a hot sun,” she wrote. “I agreed to think about it.” She eventually said yes, of course. I mean, get serious. Who could resist a stiffly-dressed European who wears Vitalis and dances the tango? From her essay :

I found being with him stimulating, exciting. He was older and more worldly and I was infatuated. As I grew to know him better I began to notice that beneath his bravado and cocky behavior he was really a very decent guy. I found myself liking him very much and then realized I loved him as he did me.

“I won’t say we lived happily ever after, we had our ups and downs like other married couples, we quarreled about this and that,” she admits in her essay. “After all, we came from very different cultures, and we were both temperamental and impatient.” On the other hand, she writes, they “had a lot of good times together with each other, and later, with their children.”

Marion is in her 80s now. Alexander George Karczmar, 95, is a neuroscientist whose academic career culminated with 30 years tenure at Loyola University of Chicago Medical Center. Marion worked in various aspects of theatre throughout her life, and she continued dancing for exercise and fitness — part of Marion’s early acting training in New York had included dance classes with Martha Graham. She eventually traded in her ballet slippers for a yoga mat and started teaching classes in both yoga and meditation.

Marion ends her essay describing the ways growing older has made their differences — and any quick judgments of each other — fade away.

We have become truly good companions. We are open and easy with one another; we don’t make love any more, but the kind of love we have now is really more satisfactory. As Tom Stoppard says, “there is one person who can bring out our humanness,” and I find out that that person is my husband. I believe I have at last discovered the definition of love. I can feel it and I know it’s the real thing. My days are brighter.

It’s guest post time again. Here’s my husband Mike Knezovich.

Dogs ain’t the problem.

It’s Westminster Dog Show time — bringing infinite Facebook posts of mugshots of canine contestants, and, for those of us who love that kind of thing, internal laughs just thinking about the movie spoof set at this annual event, “Best in Show.” (Best line from the movie: “We met at Starbucks — not at the same Starbucks. We saw each other at two different Starbucks across the street from each other.”

Apparently, though, Westminster also brings a behavior that is absolutely not funny. Before and after the show, airliners in and out of town are filled with an inordinate number of “service dogs,” at least according to this blog post at The Bark.

The author of that blog post has traveled to many Westminsters and notices that lots of folks bringing their dogs to the show falsely claim their pooches are service dogs. I get why these people want to do that—I don’t get, never will, why they don’t understand why they absolutely shouldn’t.

There are two issues going on here: one, outright lying about the status of one’s dog and one’s disability (or lack thereof). The other issue is stickier: what kinds of dogs qualify as service dogs—more to the point—what kinds of disabilities/maladies constitute a legitimate need for a service dog to travel on a plane with its companion.

Warning: I am a hawk on both fronts.

On the first, there is no wiggle room. You’re lying. You’re disrespecting people who really need the dog for basic issues like mobility, and all the work The Seeing Eye and others have done to advocate for guide dogs to be admitted to public places. And all the work the respected schools do breeding and training a dog to behave flawlessly so as not to be a nuisance in public.

I got news for you dog lovers who think it’s cute to lie about your dog: It ain’t. And Beth and I have encountered it countless times. A young woman who sat next to Beth on a flight actually told the story, giggling throughout, about how her father regularly dons a pair of dark glasses and puts a fake harness he fashioned onto their German Shepherd so the dog can go on board with them. Haha.

Other news flash for you who think your dog is as well-behaved as a well-trained service dog. It ain’t. And every time your dog acts up, it’s an insult to everyone who really needs their dog, and to the airlines, hotels, restaurants and stores who are trying to do what’s right.

How do I know this? Well, years of experience. But I’ll bring up the most recent. While Beth and Whitney and I waited to check our bags to fly to New Orleans, a woman was making herself very conspicuous as she barked at the airline employee behind the counter. Conspicuous because she was very tall and very broad and wearing a leopard skin jacket and skirt. She had one of those luggage arrangements that looks like a wheelie luggage skyscraper. Down at the bottom was the actual wheelie suitcase; strapped above were several floors of who knows what.

She was up there for probably 10 minutes as we weaved our way through the maze. We checked in, headed to the gate and passed her just as she was about, finally, to wheel away from the counter. At that point a whir of grey and white spun around near the top of her little tower—two dogs were in a fabric cage of sorts with a screen in front, and shrieking barks—or something like barks—pierced the air.

The airline person said, “Oh, I didn’t realize–there will be a charge for those dogs.” At which point, the woman said, “Oh, those are my assistance dogs.”

I’m pretty sure the only person in that exchange who needed assistance was the poor airline rep. Beth wanted to ask the conspicuous woman what her dogs did for her, but I herded us on—not because I didn’t want conflict, but because when I travel, I’m crazy nervous until my butt is in the airplane seat.

Which brings me to the second issue. I’ve met people in wheelchairs who have dogs who provide critical assistance. And dogs that help people with hearing impairments.

But I’ve also met people who swear they need their dog for anxiety they experience when flying. My glib answer is, “Try alcohol. Or Dramamine.” I’m only half kidding; I had a short period where out of the blue, I had high anxiety on planes. Those two substances worked wonders.

But I’m also familiar enough with mental health issues to take them seriously. If a dog can help, good. But if the dog is not extremely well-trained, that dog doesn’t belong in public spaces. These people are basically bringing on their pets. I know you all love your pets, but many pets are not reliably well-behaved enough to bring them on planes.

I’m not sure where the line is. The government and the many, many legitimate organizations that train and match service dogs with human companions wrestle with it. Then again, the abuses seem obvious when encountered. As Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart wrote of hard-core pornography, “I know it when I see it.”

I’ve seen too much of it.

I was a very happy six-year-old any time Flo (that’s my mom) dropped me off at the library so she could run errands, and I was an absolutely elated six-year-old the night she dropped me off at the library, headed to the grocery store, drove straight home, pulled the car into the garage, put the groceries away and sat down with her feet up for a while before noticing how quiet it was.

Flo found me outside the library’s locked doors, smiling, sitting next to my pile of books, flipping through pages, anticipating which new book I’d start first. I was in seventh heaven.

That’s me in the middle, flanked by my sisters Bev and Marilee – they must not have gone to the library with me that night!

I met my dear friend Colleen ten years later. We were both waitressing at Marshall Field’s, saving our money for college. She says she knew I was cool right away when she saw me hide my paperback copy of Great Expectations in a pile of folded cloth napkins so I could sneak in a page or two between customers. Goes without saying. Colleen was a bookworm, too.

I lost my sight ten years later, in 1985. No iPhones, no digital recorders, no mp3 players, no laptop computers. Unabridged books on tape were hard to come by back then, and Braille was difficult to learn. How would I survive without being able to read? The National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped (NLS) came to my rescue. NLS mailed books and magazines on audio cassettes directly to our house at no cost, and now their books are available online for download.

The Daily Post reports that ebook sales recently trumped those of hardcover books. “The ease of digital books can’t be beat,” the post says. “How else can you hold hundreds of books in your hand so easily?” The post went on to admit that the sensation of reading a book by machine is undeniably different than cracking open a brand new book in print, and I have to agree. I’m grateful for technology for allowing me to keep up with my fellow bookworms, but if you want to know the truth, I do still miss cozying up in the corner of the couch to read words. In print. On paper. In a good, old-fashioned…book.