That’s Katya (l) and Sasha helping me out in class.

Our nine-year-old friend Sasha and our six-and-a-half-year-old friend Katya invited their third-grade and first-grade friends at Dewey Elementary School to gather in the multi-purpose room yesterday morning to meet Whitney and me.

I talked with them about Seeing Eye dogs, Braille, and about how I manage to write books without being able to see. It’s important to me that kids understand that a disability does not necessarily prevent a person from working and doing interesting things. we just use different tools — and ways — to do them, and just like everyone else, we need help sometimes, too.

”I get all over the city with Whitney, I teach writing classes, I interview people for stories, “ I told the kids at Dewey. “One thing I can’t do, though? See if you’re raising your hands to ask a question.” I asked if Sasha and Katya would be willing to come in front and call on classmates who had their hands raised, and they jumped at the chance.

I have Sasha and Katya’s dad, Dmitry Karpeev, to thank for introducing us to his two bright and beautiful daughters and arranging our visit to their school. Dmitry was born in Russia, and his accent makes him easy to differentiate from the cast of other colorful characters I’ve met at Hackney’s, our local tavern. His command of the English language is impeccable – he’s corrected my grammar more than once — but he speaks to his daughters only in Russian, so they are bilingual. Sasha and Katya spend summers with their grandparents in Montenegro, which helps their command of their second language, too.

Dimitry with Sasha and Katya.

Dmitry began his mathematics education at Voronezh State University in Russia and wrote his doctoral thesis while a Lab Graduate at Argonne National Laboratory near Chicago. Dmitry holds joint appointments at the University of Chicago/Argonne Computation Institute and at Rush Medical Center, but he talks more about films and art and language when we’re together than he talks about work, so I used Google to find out exactly what he does. You should hear my speech synthesizer try to pronounce words like “stochastic” or “homogenization analysis of suspensions of interacting protein polymers”! But who needs Google? Our visit to Dewey Elementary School yesterday confirmed what Dmitry specializes in: being a great dad.

The Lindenhurst first-graders loved Whitney .

After Whitney and I visited Daniel Street School in Lindenhurst, NY last may, first-grade teacher Erica Bohrer published a post about us on her blog. What fun it was to see (okay, hear about) one of our school visits from a teacher’s point of view.

That’s Erica with me and Whitney at Daniel Street School in Lindenhurst last May.

Fast forward to October. Lindenhurst was one of the Long Island towns hardest hit by last month’s storm, and an email from Erica this month assured me that she and the sweet students we met there are okay. “I am so lucky that my family, my friends, and my students are safe,” she wrote. “Many lost their homes, but they still have their health. We are all pulling together.” Erica’s email also explained a fundraiser she is sponsoring: she offers lesson plans, teaching resources and other related materials for teachers on TeachersPayTeachers.com (an open marketplace where teachers buy and sell original teaching materials from each other) and she is donating proceeds from a Hurricane Unit she developed to help with Hurricane Sandy victims in Lindenhurst. Whether you’re a teacher or not, I encourage you to check out Erica’s unit on hurricanes — it’s interesting stuff!

And the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree: Erica’s mother, Maria, is a reading teacher in the Lindenhurst school district as well. My Seeing Eye dogs and I have enjoyed visits to Maria’s special readers over the years, and we’ve been to her beautiful home a few times, too. Maria is collecting new children’s books to replenish school libraries devastated by flooding, and you may send new (or almost new) books to her at:

Maria Bohrer
Harding Ave. Elementary School
2 Harding Ave.
Lindenhurst, NY 11757

For more information, you may email Erica’s mom Maria at mbohrer@lindenhurstschools.org

Whitney taking a break from her Nylabone on Thanksgiving day.

My husband’s giving me a holiday blog break with this guest post–here’s Mike Knezovich!

On Friday night Beth came through the apartment door sounding slightly panicked. “Mike, take a look at Whitney — I think she’s bleeding.”

A dog had lunged at Whit in our building’s elevator, and Whit was bleeding from a cut across her nose. As I cleaned it up, Beth recounted what happened. And then we both fell silent.

Of the many, many things Beth and I have felt thankful for over the past few days, one stands out: This is the first year of the past three that Beth wasn’t flying to New Jersey the weekend after Thanksgiving to spend three weeks training with a new Seeing Eye dog. Like many other couples, Beth and I appreciate our breaks from each other, but I don’t like it when she’s gone that long. And I particularly don’t like the yearlong process, after being matched with a new dog, where we figure out how and if it’s going to work.

Regular “Safe & Sound” readers know the story…in 2010, Beth’s guide dog Hanni began a well-earned retirement. Though it was sad to say goodbye to the intrepid Hanni, it all felt natural. We both looked at this next episode with positive anticipation. Sure enough, Beth returned with Harper, a gentle, loveable and handsome Yellow Lab. All was well until Beth and Harper had a terrifyingly close call with a car—and Harper was never the same.

So last November it felt more like “Groundhog Day” than Thanksgiving. For the second straight year, Beth juggled her work schedule, packed her things for a three-week stay at The Seeing Eye, and girded herself for the physical and emotional challenges of training with a new guide. I crossed my fingers that this one would take.

And it has. It’s been a year since Whit and Beth met, and Whit continues to learn and improve. She still has her moments—she’ll just sort of space out and lollygag, veering here and there to sniff around—I liken it to teenage behavior.

But those episodes are fewer and further between. More often she walks—trots, really—with a purpose, stops precisely where she should at the crosswalks, and waits for Beth’s command to go. Her head is high, and on a swivel—she’s always scoping out her environment. She’s affectionate but independent—she prefers to sleep in her luxurious bed under the piano in the living room rather than on the floor in our bedroom.

And so, after the elevator episode, Beth and I each quietly feared the worst: Whit might get scared in the elevator, and then, who knows.

We headed out for a long city walk yesterday and she didn’t miss a beat—in the elevator or on the street. Whit seems undaunted, and boy, am I thankful. Hanni’s enjoying a splendid retirement. Harper’s got a best friend named Beau. I’ve got a new favorite in Whitney.

And Beth’s right here where she belongs.

LBJ being sworn in on Air Force One, November 22, 1963.

Today, November 22, is the day President John F. Kennedy was murdered back in 1963. You have to be at least 55 years old to sign up for the memoir classes I lead in Chicago, so I knew all my students would remember that day. I couldn’t be sure that all of them would want to write about such a melancholy time in our history, though, so I came up with a writing prompt that could be considered in many different ways. The topic: Love Field.

Love Field is the airport where the famous photograph was taken of LBJ in an airplane being sworn in as president. Jackie Kennedy is standing next to him, still in the pink Chanel suit she wore that day. The memoir writers could write about how that day in 1963 affected them, where they were when they learned that JFK had been assassinated, whether or not LBJ being sworn in on Love Field changed their lives. I suggested that anyone who didn’t want to think about those sad troubling times might consider writing about what it feels like to be surrounded by love, a “field of love” sort of thing.

Two students wrote love poems, and another wrote a poignant piece about her enduring love for her husband, who is in his 90s now. Wanda took the topic into, well, left field. She wrote about the fields she’s loved over her 91 years: Wrigley Field, Marshall Field’s, Midway Air Field. She described ushers escorting her right onto the baseball field to meet the players after an East-West Negro League All-Star game at Comiskey Park. She met Larry Doby on that same baseball field years later, after he broke the color barrier in the American League.
Other students chose to write about where they were, and what they were doing, 49 years ago.

Bruce was a young seminary school graduate back then, and earlier that month the preacher at his church had asked if he’d be willing to give a guest sermon on the Sunday before Thanksgiving. He opened his essay saying, “It should havbe been so simple.” The Sunday he gave his sermon turned out to be two days after JFK died. Bruce’s downstairs neighbors, both secular humanists, asked to accompany him to church that day. “I kept thinking what can I say that will be meaningful for them. I asked them after service and they said, ‘you did the best you could.’”

Andrea was 14 years old in 1963. She went to school that Friday morning feeling dreamy about the school dance she’d be attending that night. News of the President’s death came over a loudspeaker into her classroom. “My 14-year-old desires collided with sorrow,” she wrote, admitting that while the world watched their TV screens in horror, all she wanted was to go to that dance. “While I waited to hear the dance’s fate, Jacquelyn Kennedy flew back to Washington, D.C., accompanying her dead husband’s coffin,” she wrote. “As I primped my hair and chose an outfit, Mrs. Kennedy planned a state funeral.”

School officials did not cancel the dance. Andrea titled her essay “Perspective” and ended it like this: . “Today, forty nine years later, I can’t remember one single moment of that dance. However, I still feel the loss of a dream.”

After retiring from a long career as a journalist, Giovanna signed up for my memoir class to get more comfortable writing her own story, rather than reporting on the lives of others. She wrote for Life Magazine in 1963 and after the events on November 22 she was asked to head to Washington, D.C. to report on President Kennedy’s funeral.

Life’s Richard Stolley had negotiated for print rights to the Zapruder film, and before she left her New York City office she sat with her fellow reporters in the New York office reviewing the film. Out of decency and respect for the President’s family they decided not to publish every frame. “It was horrific,” she said.

Giovanna worked with Life Photographer Bob Gomel, photographing at two location. “We had credentials to a rooftop where we watched Jackie Kennedy walk with a long stride and a firm step behind her husband’s body to St Matthew’s Cathedral,” she wrote. “Our second spot was at St Matthew’s Cathedral where little John Kennedy saluted the body of his father as he lay on the caisson.” Giovanna’s piece read more like a piece of journalism than a memoir, and after she finished reading it aloud I suggested she might add more emotion, tell readers how these events made her feel. She took a moment to give my suggestion some consideration, and then answered in two simple words:

“I can’t.”

Loyal blog readers know that my third Seeing Eye dog Harper was traumatized after being clipped by a car in Chicago traffic last year. When it became clear that this heroic Yellow Labrador couldn’t work any more, our friends Chris and Larry agreed to give him a home with them in Wheaton, a quiet Chicago suburb. I’m sharing this update from Chris as a guest post in honor of Thanksgiving — Mike and I are so thankful to have Harper in such loving hands.

Looking forward to year two

by Chris Towles

Heroic Harper hangin’ in his new harness.

Has it been a year since Harper retired and came to live with us? I can’t imagine our house without him. When he came to us last year, he did fine in the house and loved playing in the backyard, but walking anywhere on a leash was tough. He would often refuse to budge, cowering at times, planting his paws so firmly that we could not get him to move, all the time with a look on his face that seemed so troubled and anxious it would just break your heart.

We started by taking small steps, going no further than one house away, then two houses. I would walk backwards most of the time, doing a lot of coaxing and no leash. We had tried treats, toys, other dogs, but nothing really worked until we hit on the “we walk backwards to get Harper to walk forward” technique.

Finally after a couple of months, we were able to get all the way around the block. That seemed like such a huge accomplishment. Building on this success, and after lots of trial and error with various collar and leash combinations, we found that a “Premier EasyWalk” harness and a retractable leash were key in convincing Harper that our walks were less about work, and more about fresh air and exercise.

Now when we walk, we get loads of compliments on how well behaved Harper is. People are always amazed to hear the heroic story of this lovable yellow lab who has become such a part of our life. We gladly acknowledge that our training is a small part of who he is, and that the credit really goes to the folks at The Seeing Eye who trained and cared for him so lovingly. These days we can walk over three miles on the bike paths and in the forest preserves without problems, and with all of us facing the same direction — yeah! .

Harper has a special knack for doing things that warm our harts. Every night he meets me at the back door, dancing and wagging his tail. Every morning he’s an alarm clock, laying his big ol’ Labrador head on the bed right next to Larry and breathing loudly – I love it! He’s great around kids and has managed to turn my dog fearing nieces and nephews into dog lovers. He’ll play catch, keep away and tug-o-war with them for hours, while being incredibly gentle with the little ones. Neighborhood kids also have great fun playing with our Harper.

Harper and neighbor Beau, caught in one of the rare instances in which they’re standing still.

Harper has made some dog friends too. He and Beau, the collie next door, wear themselves out running and chasing each other around the back yard. Harper also looks forward to playing with Wallace, another yellow lab who lives down the street.

Occasionally I take Harper to my office, where he has several FOH (Friend’s of Harper – Beth is president of the club). He helps to relieve workplace stress just by hanging out and letting people pet him.

We’re looking into getting certified as a therapy animal team and maybe spending some time with veterans at a VA facility. Larry and I were both in the Army, so the idea of sharing Harper’s special calming skills with veterans seems like a good fit. I can’t wait to find out what year two has in store for us.