Mary Finnegan is a cancer survivor who attended my memoir-writing class for senior citizens in downtown Chicago a few years back. When she read the guest post my husband Mike Knezovich wrote here after his sister died, Mary offered to light a luminaria for Kris in the Oak Lawn Relay for Life of the American Cancer Society. Mike and I were both very moved by this memorial to Kris, and I appreciate Mary’s willingness to write a guest post describing the experience.

Life renewed, and hope for the future

by Mary Finnegan

Kris’ luminaria, like all the luminarias, was randomly placed along the track at Oak Lawn Pavilion Park for the Oak Park Relay for Life of the American Cancer Society. There really aren’t a lot of trees along the track, but there was a beautiful evergreen tree just yards behind her candle. I thought that was a nice placement for her luminaria.

This is the seventh year that my husband and I have participated in the Oak Lawn Relay for Life. There are three reasons to relay:

• To celebrate survivors,
• To remember those, like Kris, whose lives have been cut short due to cancer,
• To raise funds for research.

RFL, as the event has become known, was organized as a kind of living metaphor for the journey undertaken by a cancer patient. It begins as the sun sets, a metaphor for a cancer diagnosis. It continues throughout the darkness of night, the metaphor for surgery, chemotherapy, radiation and other treatments endured by the cancer patient. It ends at sunrise, the symbol of life renewed and hope for the future as a survivor. Theoretically, at least one member of each registered relay team is supposed to be on the track at all times during the event to symbolize that cancer never sleeps.

This may all sound very somber, but in reality, the RFL is fun. It’s more like a street fair than a wake. Relay teams set up campsites, and many of these teams host mini-fundraisers to supplement their registration donations. Beanbag games, softball, volleyball, and Frisbee contests are held, and you can dance to the music of a DJ throughout the event. The solemn part of the evening happens about 9 p.m., when names of cancer survivors as well as names of those lost to cancer are either read aloud or displayed on a screen while soft music plays in the background. After all the names are displayed, nearly 200 relayers walked silently around the track to a bagpiper’s rendition of “Amazing Grace.” It was so touching to see all the candles flickering in the luminarias around the track, and it was hard not to cry. I have personally lost so many friends to cancer, and I remember all of them every year as I complete this journey around the track.

After the silent walk, nighttime dancing and other activities continue. Teens love it. People my age find it hard to stay awake. Because of the torrid weather, which was mercifully overcast that night, I almost had to drag myself to the event. But when I got there, I was glad I came. As a survivor, I was treated to dinner in the air-conditioned Pavilion gym. My husband, as my caregiver, also was recognized during the survivors’/caregivers lap around the track.

I was glad to see that many of the friends I made throughout the past seven years returned as I did to celebrate, remember, and fight back through raising funds for research. I was also glad that I could help to remember Kris and witness her candle burning in the warm summer night.

I published a post here back in March after Chicago Public Radio let me know they wouldn’t be airing pre-recorded essays like the ones I used to do for them. But here’s some good news: reports of my radio-essay death were greatly exaggerated. An essay I wrote aired on WBEZ this morning!

At the WBEZ studios, recording my essay. (Photo by Bill Healy, courtesy WBEZ)

I like working with public radio, so after I got that disappointing note I headed over to the WBEZ studios to meet with the Managing Editor of Public Affairs to see if I had any other options. She told me that in their new format they’d be covering topics in-depth from time to time, and that this summer Aurora Aguilar would be producing pieces on literacy, and Cate Cahan would be focusing on race issues. I told her I’d worked with Aurora and Cate before. She suggested I try pitching ideas to them. I pitched. They responded. I wrote. We recorded.

The piece I did for Aurora hasn’t aired yet. The one that aired today is about how blindness can change the way you look, ahem, at race, and Its part of Cate’s Race: Out Loud series. Here’s how WBEZ describes Race: out Loud on its web site:

We’re asking: What would it sound like if people said what they really think and feel about race, about ethnicity? What if they really talked about how it shapes them, their lives, and attitudes? What would we hear, if we listened?

That part about what we might hear if we listened is what motivated me to pitch my essay. And speaking of blindness, I can read Braille, but I’m painfully slow at it. WBEZ radio producer Joe DeCeault has been recording my essays for years, and the two of us developed a system where he puts me in front of a microphone, asks what the first paragraph in my essay is about, then what the second paragraph is about, and I retell the story paragraph by paragraph in my own words. Essays produced by Joe make me sound like I’m just sitting down talking to you, and we’re both pretty proud of how this works.

Race: Out Loud is a special project, though, so they have a freelancer doing the sound work. Bill Healy consulted with Joe about how to pull this off, but knowing that Cate Cahan and I had gone back and forth via email editing and rewriting the essay, Bill thought we needed to record it exactly how it had been written.

And so, after setting me up at the mike and testing my sound levels, Bill whipped out a printed copy of my essay and began reading it out loud line by line. I parroted what Bill said, and once I’d repeated all my lines, he spliced the sentences together, added sound effects and music, and…voila! When my essay aired on Morning Edition in Chicago today, It sounded like I’d read the whole essay all at once.

If you missed hearing the piece this morning, you can read the transcript and hear it online. Young Bill Healy sure rose to the task. He took photos for the online version and wrote some promotional copy as well. And now he can add “recorded a blind woman reading an essay” to his resume, too.

I spent the past four days at a summer Jazz Camp here in Chicago. That was not a typo. I was at Jazz Camp.

This is the fourth year that the Jazz Institute of Chicago, Columbia College Chicago and the Chicago Jazz Ensemble combined to present the camp for adults, but it’s the first year they expanded it to a kind of humanities festival rather than simply a series of classes for amateur musicians. A story in the Chicago Tribune explains:

“We’ve extended it way beyond what it ever was … so that arts educators and anybody interested in jazz can see the connection between the music and other art forms,” says Lauren Deutsch, executive director of the non-profit Jazz Institute of Chicago.

The article quoted Deutsch saying that the idea of the Straight Ahead and Other Directions Jazz Summer Camp this year was “to show how jazz really touches everything.” Lectures on topics ranging from “Jazz and Social Justice” to “Jazz and the Stage/Silver Screen” helped them achieve their goal, and the star of the show was New Orleans saxophone master and Mardi Gras Indian Chief Donald Harrison, Jr., who opened each day with a lecture. I know Donald Harrison from watching him play himself on the HBO TV series “Tremé,” and in a talk about Hurricane Katrina he said it was the “worst and best thing” that could have happened to New Orleans. “It forced people to realize how important the culture here is. People from out of town are making a point to come, they are paying more attention to us, they realize now how important it is to continue with it. And the people from New Orleans who are really interested in keeping the culture alive realized that they could have lost it forever.”

My morning master’s classes were for the rhythm section, and I took an afternoon master’s class on beginning improvisation. Donald Harrison sat in on one of the improvisation classes and reiterated some of the musical terms that by that time were already spinning in my head: octotonic, mixolydian, tonic, dorian, altered. I was the only blind student at camp, and by far the least accomplished musician in the master classes.

But hey, jazz musicians are known for their ability to improvise. When I begged off taking the piano part for one tune, reminding the teacher that I couldn’t see to read the chart, a fellow student jumped in to join me on the piano bench and call out the chords. In-between sessions students offered to read the notes on the whiteboard out loud into my digital recorder, and others would lend an elbow to walk Whitney and me to the elevator to find the next session. I learned as much about jazz from the conversations we had during those walks as I did in class.

One of the photos Bill Healey took during our Thursday morning shoot. (Photo courtesy WBEZ.)

I hadn’t planned it this way, but Jazz Camp landed on my calendar days after my Easter Seals job had given me a new laptop with new software to learn. I’d started teaching a second weekly memoir-writing class the week before camp, too, and returned from a last-minute trip to see my oldest sister and her husband in South Carolina the day before jazz camp started. Add to all that, Chicago Public Radio had asked me to write an record a piece for them the day before I left for South Carolina.

My WBEZ piece is about how blindness can change the way you look at race, and it’s set to air in Chicago this Monday, July 30, during the Morning Edition segment of NPR. It’ll be available online after it airs, and when the producer contacted me this week to ask if they could come out to shoot some photos to use with the online segment, I told them the only time I’d be available was on my walk to jazz camp in the morning. We squeezed the photo session in.

All this activity didn’t leave me much opportunity to practice the piano in-between sessions, but in many ways, the timing was perfect. Figuring out chord structures and listening for changes and working out dorian scales helped balance everything else going on. It’s kind of like George Gershwin once said: “Life is a lot like Jazz… it’s best when you improvise.”

This week I wrote a post for the Easter Seals blog reporting my progress using a talking pedometer for their “Walk the Extra Mile” challenge. In that post I quoted from a post on the New York Times Well blog that said one mile of walking covers about 2,000 steps, and Americans, on average, take 5,117 steps a day. After reading those statistics, I knew Whitney and I were well on our way to prove my theory: blind people who use guide dogs — especially those of us who live in big cities — really do walk more than the average person does.

In a previous post I’d written for the Easter Seals blog about this challenge thing at work, I explained that when you live in a city you can’t simply open a sliding glass patio door to let your guide dog out. When Whitney needs to “empty,” I take her down the street, around the corner and to her favorite tree. That’s 1,000 steps per trip, and that trip takes place at least four times a day. The first two weeks of our experiment included one week of 100-degree temperatures in Chicago. We stayed inside with our air conditioner on more than usual, but hey, a girls gotta go. Even in that hot weather Whitney and I averaged 9,871 steps a day. My steps per day increased when temperatures cooled down the next week.

Just when I’d started planning which new equipment Whitney and I would try out when we won the Go The Extra Mile challenge grand prize (a free six-month fitness club membership), I pressed the button to hear the number of steps I’d taken so far that day, and … nothing. My talking pedometer stopped talking. I shook the thing and pressed the button. Nothing. I turned it upside-down and rightside-up again. Nothing. I stuck it in a bag of rice for a day. Nothing.

And so, what happened with the challenge? Well, human resources offered to buy me a new talking pedometer, but I told them not to bother. I have a new theory now: blind people who use guide dogs — especially those of us who live in big cities — walk so many steps that a talking pedometer can’t keep up with us.

Hi all–I’m traveling, visiting with sisters, so  I asked my husband Mike to chip in a guest post — I’ll be back soon, in the meantime, I give you Mike. 

Me and Brad and Roy

by Mike Knezovich

Our favorite neighborhood watering hole and restaurant – Hackney’s Printers Row – draws us frequently (probably too frequently) because it also draws an eclectic, articulate, smart, accomplished and just-plain-nice group of folks from the neighborhood. Attorneys, artists, architects, research scientists, computer programmers, linguists, stock market mavens … you can learn a lot sipping a beer at Hack’s.

Two of my favorite people: Brad and, well, I think you recognize the other one.

One of the Hackney’s denizens Beth and I have learned a great deal from is Stephen Bradley Gillaugh, who goes simply by “Brad.” Brad moved to Printers Row – from Los Angeles – to retire after a long, illustrious career in the art world. He worked for decades in NYC – at the Museum of Modern Art and at the famed Leo Castelli Gallery. Later, in LA, he managed a big corporate art collection (when corporations used to have such things). Brad doesn’t brag, but over time (and libations) Beth and I have gotten lots of inside chatter about the likes of Rauschenberg and Warhol and even Truman Capote. (I’m not telling, so don’t even ask.)

We also learned that Brad has a fantastic art collection, displayed in his apartment, and that he has so much art that some of it has been left in boxes and shipping tubes because there is no room to display it. One evening Brad said he didn’t even remember what he had stored. Beth took exception to this and suggested he go through his stuff, get it framed, and then loan it to friends to hang.

As we know, Beth can be, err, persistent. And so Brad, one day, decided to go through his forgotten works. He found prints and drawings by Roy Lichtenstein, Roger Brown, and other notables. But instead of framing them, he’s gone on a generous donation campaign, giving them outright to friends in the neighborhood.

Thanks to Brad’s generosity, this hangs in our living room.

Including us. He had us over one evening to select from his overage. I took a fancy to the one he’d guessed I’d like — a print of a poster Lichtenstein did for the 1967 Aspen Winter Jazz Festival. It now hangs in our living room.

And I love it. So much so that it inspired me to visit the Art Institute of Chicago to take in the Lichtenstein Retrospective that runs through September 3. It turned out to be a terrific show—but it was all the better because I walked the gallery with Brad.

Along the way, I learned that Lichtenstein was a kind, even-tempered man, not the stereotypical high-maintenance hell-raising artist. He did drawings – studies – that became the basis of his paintings. He didn’t sell the drawings (many of which are in the retrospective), but “around the holidays,” Brad says, “he’d come into the gallery (Castelli) and give them to staff as gifts.” One of them – a study of entablatures – he gave to Brad, signed with a personal note.

I learned that Lichtenstein was easy to work with — as opposed to another prominent artist, who, Brad says “traveled with an entourage and would go through two bottles of Jack Daniels every time we set up a show.”

I learned that Brad had actually handled one of the sculptures in the Lichtenstein exhibit ( it’s a big, metal art-deco-ish piece called “Modern Sculpture with Glass Wave” if you take in the show). Brad pointed at it and groaned, saying only that it was “god-awful heavy” to move around.

The show is spectacular, especially if you – like I did – think only of the famous Pop-Art pieces for which Lichtenstein is known. He did a remarkably wide range of

She’s talking about a different Brad.

work, most all of which I found engaging and fascinating.  If you’re in Chicago, I hope you’ll go.

And for those of you who know Lichtenstein and may be thinking Brad…Brad…no our Brad is not THAT Brad. But I’m glad he’s our Brad, and I marvel at the people Beth and I are lucky enough to call our friends.