Reports I’m receiving from fellow Seeing Eye graduates tell me the Seeing Eye school, located in Morristown, New Jersey, was spared some of the more devastating damage caused by Hurricane Sandy. Training at the Seeing Eye usually includes a trip to the Morristown train station to learn to get safely on and off trains with your dog, and with so many trains not running, that may be eliminated for a while. Same goes for trips to New York City for urban work.

Every day last month the Seeing Eye posted a picture on Facebook of a graduate with a short anecdote about how Seeing Eye dogs change our lives, and my friend Jerry Smith and I were two of the 31 grads featured there.

That’s Jerry with his current partner Aztec.

You might recognize Jerry’s name – he lives in Ontario, and I talked about him in a post I wrote last October after his Seeing Eye dog Seymour died. Seymour and my retired dog Hanni were classmates at the Seeing Eye in 2001, and Jerry and Seymour were a particularly colorful pair. Jerry returned to the Seeing Eye earlier this year and is working with his sixth guide, a Golden Retriever named Aztec, now. He was paired with his first Seeing Eye dog, a male German shepherd named Val, in 1971, and wrote about that dog for his Facebook story:

This story happened soon after I was partnered with Val. We were hurrying to a meeting in a hotel in Toronto and I was pushing my partner to go faster and faster as I was very late. We went down some stairs and down a long hall when suddenly Val stopped. I urged him on but he stopped in front of me, blocking me from going forward. I was in such a rush I made a big rookie mistake: I ignored him, stepped around him, and went forward myself. I took a couple steps before falling down an open elevator shaft. I only fell a short distance and fortunately (for me) I landed on top of two workers at the bottom. No one was injured, and I had let go of Val’s leash when I fell so he was still up there. The workers told me he was standing at the edge, looking down at me as if to say, “You have learned the first lesson – always trust your guide.

My decision 20+ years ago to train at the Seeing Eye ended up introducing me not only to four fun, fabulous furry four-legged friends, but also to dozens of spirited blind people like Jerry who come from all over North America to train with Seeing Eye dogs. We all return home to travel safely and independently with our dogs, thanks to the hard work of hundreds of generous staff members and volunteers. Most of these people live in New Jersey, and my thoughts are with them, and the dogs in the Seeing Eye kennels, and the puppies living with volunteer puppy raisers throughout New Jersey, as they all weather the storm.

The Wisconsin Book Festival runs from November 8-11 this year and features Patricia McCormick (a finalist for the National Book Award), Pulitzer Prize winners Richard Russon and David Maraniss, Peabody Award Winner Ben Sidran, Guggenhei Felowship Award Winner Jo Ann Beard, Alex Award Winner Lynda Barry, and ASPCA Henry Berg Award Winner…ME!

The theme for this year’s fest is “Lost & Found,” and what a kick it was to discover who’d paired up to sponsor our session. From the  WBF Web Site:

HOW I LOST MY SIGHT AND FOUND MY WAY
BETH FINKE, “HANNI AND BETH: SAFE & SOUND” AND “LEND ME A PAW”
Fri, Nov. 9 | 3:30PM – 4:15PM
Hawthorne Branch Library
2707 E. Washington Ave., Madison, WI
(608) 246-4548
Sponsored by the Great Dane Pub and the American Girl Fund for Children

The Great Dane Pub makes sense (in more ways than one!), but American Girl? All I can figure is that their sponsorship stems from the set of service dogs-in-training American Girl started selling last summer to go with their uber-popular dolls. From the American Girl web site:

This sweet puppy is a service dog-in-training! He has soft fur, a solid body, and a collar. When it’s training time, your girl can slip on his service vest—it has a handle My American Girl® dolls can hold. Reward this special helper with faux treats for all of his good work!

Great Dane Pub is offering a free first pitcher of beer to any Festival author who comes in with a group during the Wisconsin Book Festival, but I don’t think I’ll ask all those kids to follow Pied Piper Whitney and me from the library to the pub for happy hour. If you’re anywhere near Madison, though, I hope you’ll join us. First pitcher is on me!

Mike took this photo of us when we were in sunny Denver. I betcha Whitney is staring right at him, right?

When my Seeing Eye dog wants my husband Mike’s attention, she sits down, looks his way, and bats her big beautiful brown eyes. To get my attention, she butts her head against my computer chair. If I’m standing up, she nudges my hand. Whitney drops the ball at Mike’s feet when they play catch. When she’s playing catch with me,Whitney places the ball right in my palm. That way she doesn’t have to sit there waiting while I grope around trying to find the dang thing.

Does Whitney know I can’t see her? A post on the Psychology Today blog refers to a French researcher who did some experiments to try and find this out. Well, not just about Whitney. About guide dogs in general. Do they look toward their blind user’s face less often than dogs with sighted companions do when they need help finding a hidden piece of food? Or when they want to play? The researcher’s answer was clear: “Guide dogs do not understand that their owners cannot see them.”

A bunch of cognitive and animal scientists with opinions of their own left comments to the Psychology Todayblog post, and one of them explained that dogs have what psychologists call a “Theory of Mind.” That’s why they look to the human they’re with when trying to solve a problem: they’re trying to get clues or information from us that might help them with the task. Most of the experts who commented agreed that a guide dog does not know that his human is blind, though. “This would imply that the dog understood vision as a sense, and blindness as a loss of that sense,” one of them wrote. “I don’t think we have evidence in hand to support this.” Many of them agreed that a guide dog can figure out that hey, this human I’m with isn’t responding the same way I am to all this stuff I’m seeing around us! As a result, a guide dog learns ways to compensate and help by giving us the information we need to get around safely.

Whatever the answer, I sure am grateful to this energetic two-year-old copper-colored companion of mine. In less than a year with me, she’s already determined that I don’t function the same way others do, and she alters her behavior towards me in response. I don’t need any more evidence than that. Whether she knows I’m blind or not, I do know this about her:she is one smart dog.

I turned the radio on just in time last Friday to hear Fresh Air’s movie reviewer David Edelstein say The Sessions ( a new semi-fictional movie about the life of a writer paralyzed below the neck from childhood polio) was better than some of the other “disability-of-the-week Oscar-bait” pictures he’d seen.

Cynical? Maybe. His statement does have merit, though. Take Al Pacino. He never won an Oscar for any of The Godfather movies, but when he portrayed a blind man doing the tango in Scent of a Woman? Woo-hah! Best actor.

Dustin Hoffman won an Oscar for RainmanRain Man, Daniel Day-Lewis for My Left Foot, JohnJon Voight for Coming Home. Marlee Matlin won best actress for Children of a Lesser God, and plenty of actors and actresses have been nominated, too: Russell Crowe was nominated for best Actor in A Beautiful Mind, Salma Hayek was nominated for best actress in Frieda, Mary McDonnell was nominated for best actress in Passion Fish and Judi Dench for best supporting actress in Iris. Disability-focused movies are nothing new. Turner Classic Movies (TCM) has enough of them in their collection to spend the entire month of October exploring the ways we have been portrayed in film. From the TCM web site:

The Projected Image: A History of Disability in Film features more than 20 films ranging from the 1920s to the 1980s. Each night’s collection will explore particular aspects, themes, or types of disability, such as blindness, deafness and psychiatric or intellectual disabilities. In addition, one evening of programming will focus on newly disabled veterans returning home from war.

Lawrence Carter-Long has been joining TCM host Ben Mankiewicz at 7 pm central time every Tuesday in October to discuss the films they’re showing, which include:

• An Affair to Remember (1957) Deborah Kerr’s romantic rendezvous with Cary Grant is nearly derailed by a paralyzing accident.
• A Patch of Blue (1965), Elizabeth Hartman as a blind white girl who falls in love with a black man played by Sidney Poitier.
• Butterflies Are Free (1972, Edward Albert as a blind man attempting to break free from his over-protective mother.
• Johnny Belinda (1948) Jane Wyman as a “deaf-mute” forced to defy expectations
• The Miracle Worker (1962) Anne Bancroft as Annie Sullivan and Patty Duke as Helen Keller
• One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975), Jack Nicholson as a patient in a mental institution and Louise Fletcher as the infamous Nurse Ratched
• The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) post-War drama starring Fredric March, Myrna Loy and real-life disabled veteran Harold Russell
• Charley (1968), Cliff Robertson as a man with an intellectual disability who questions the limits of science after being turned into a genius.

These movies reflect their times — the TCM retrospective only goes up to the 1980s, before the Americans with Disabilities Act was passed. I’m hoping that as those of us with disabilities become more of the fabric of everyday society, movie-goers will be subjected to fewer disability-of-the-week Oscar-bait-pictures and see more movies where we’re just part of the scene. So far, though, I can only come up with a couple examples of quality films featuring characters with disabilities in roles that are more in the background: Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994), where main character Charles reveals a crisis of confidence to his brother David, who is deaf; and Contact (1997) where Kent Clark, A SETI scientist, is blind and helps Jodie Foster with her research. Know any other memorable movies with characters who have disabilities? Please leave a comment here to let me know. I am, ahem, all ears.

My friend Audrey Petty has spent years gathering stories from residents of Chicago’s Henry Horner Homes, Robert Taylor Homes, Stateway Gardens and Cabrini-Green — all publicly-funded buildings that no longer exist. Audrey collected oral histories from residents and gathered them in a new book called High Rise Stories: Voices from Chicago Public Housing, and I’m heading to the Chicago Humanities Festival this Sunday to hear her interviewed about the project. From the Chicago Humanities Festival web site:

Narcotics, violence, and the perpetuation of poverty—for many of us, these are the lingering images of the Chicago housing projects Cabrini-Green and Robert Taylor Homes. But what was life in the homes actually like? University of Illinois professor Audrey Petty interviewed former residents for their firsthand accounts of Chicago public housing. Her oral history, which also includes such housing complexes as Stateway Gardens and the Henry Horner Homes, offers a revealing collective story of community, displacement, removal, and relocation. Forthcoming in McSweeney’s Voice of Witness book series, High Rise Stories is both a crucial addition to Chicago’s social history and a portal to a meaningful conversation about poverty, housing reform, and urban renewal in the United States.

Audrey and I met more than a decade ago when we all still lived in Urbana, Ill. Audrey was born and raised in Chicago — she returned home to work on the High Rise Stories project, and now

That’s Audrey, in a shot taken by her daughter Ella.

Audrey, her husband Maurice Rabb, and their daughter Ella live in a third-floor walkup so close to the Obama family’s Hyde Park house that little Ella has seen the President coming and going on recent visits. A few weeks ago Ella asked Maurice, “Daddy, is Romney real? Ella’s dad assured her that yes, he is. “Well, if Romney is real,” she said, “how come we never see him?”

It’s been a joy having the “Prabbys” back in town, and I’m looking forward to being with Audrey and her family this Sunday. You can come too —
Audrey Petty’s presentation is this Sunday, October 21 from 2 to 3 pm at The University of Chicago Law School’s Glen A. Lloyd Auditorium, 1111 East 60th Street in Chicago, and you can purchase tickets online now.