Without being able to drive, I’ve always thought that blind people who use guide dogs — especially those of us who live in big cities — must walk more than the average person does. Now I have a chance to prove it.

Some of you blog readers know I have a part-time job at Easter Seals Headquarters here in Chicago — last week they started a six-week “Walk For U, Go The Extra Mile” challenge as part of their wellness program. Every employee received a free pedometer to keep track of progress for six weeks, and those of us who meet the daily goal of 7,000 steps per day — a distance of 3.5 miles — throughout the entire six weeks will be entered into a drawing to win a six-month fitness club membership.

The human resources department here realized I wouldn’t be able to read the number of steps I’d taken each day on my own, so they ordered a special talking pedometer for me — it says my results out loud. And so, I’m on my way to prove my theory.

The list of requirements for people applying to train with a Seeing Eye dog says candidates need to be able to walk one or two miles a day:

Applicant must be between the ages of 16 and 75, motivated and emotionally stable, capable of walking one to two miles a day, and able to receive and implement instruction.

In a post I published on the Easter Seals blog about all this, 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. I take Whitney down the street, around the corner and to her favorite tree at least four times a day. That’s 1,000 steps per trip. My talking pedometer counted out 12,157 steps the day I walked to Walgreens to pick up prescriptions, and that included a safety shortcut I take each way to cross State Street. Whitney and I walk down the subway stairs on one side, pad along under State Street and then ascend the stairs on the other side…safe & sound.

Whit and I often use Subway stops to cross under busy streets.

Not sure what Whitney and I will do with the free six-month fitness club membership when we win the “Walk For U, Go The Extra Mile” challenge at Easter Seals. Seems to me we already have a free pass to the gym: running errands in our neighborhood is like using a treadmill, and every El station is a StairMaster!

When we set the date for my talk with a book group especially for blind readers yesterday, I don’t think any of us realized that the date we chose — June 27 — was Helen Keller’s birthday. What serendipity!

The story of Helen Keller’s childhood is well-known: an illness left her both blind and deaf as a child, and the day 20-year-old teacher Anne Sullivan managed to communicate the letters for “water” while running water from a pump on Helen’s hand was a breakthrough.

Most people know that Helen Keller grew up to become an advocate for people with disabilities. What many people don’t know, however, is that she became a radical activist along the way.

She joined the Socialist Party in 1909, when she was 29, and then the Industrial Workers of the World. She supported Communist Russia and hung a red flag over her desk. The FBI opened a file on her. She advocated for women’s suffrage and for access to birth control. She helped found the American Civil Liberties Union.

Through all that Helen Keller remained the darling of newspaper reporters and columnists, the amazing blind and deaf girl who talks with her hands. When she came out in support of Socialist Party candidate Eugene V. Debs in his campaign for the presidency, though, that was the last straw. Newspaper columnists who had earlier praised her courage and intelligence started calling attention to her disabilities.

One newspaper claimed “the poor little blind girl” was being exploited by the socialist party for publicity’s sake, and the editor of the Brooklyn Eagle wrote that Helen Keller’s “mistakes sprung out of the manifest limitations of her development.” No matter where you stand politically, I’m sure you can appreciate what a blow this must have been to Helen Keller. She had waited to formulate her opinion until after procuring and reading books about socialism in German Braille, and then asking a friend to come three times a week to spell articles from The National Socialist into her hand. From an Essay by Helen Keller:

She gives the titles of the articles and I tell her when to read on and when to omit. I have also had her read to me from the International Socialist Review articles the titles of which sounded promising. Manual spelling takes time. It is no easy and rapid thing to absorb through one’s fingers a book of 50,000 words on economics. But it is a pleasure, and one which I shall enjoy repeatedly until I have made myself acquainted with all the classic socialist authors.

Helen Keller responded to that Boston Eagle article and referred to a time she’d met the editor years earlier:

At that time the compliments he paid me were so generous that I blush to remember them. But now that I have come out for socialism he reminds me and the public that I am blind and deaf and especially liable to error. I must have shrunk in intelligence during the years since I met him…

All this reminds me that the personal attacks and general nastiness in our public discourse and politics is not new. Helen Keller was a saint until she ruffled feathers, and then she was limited intellectually. Instead of addressing her arguments, her critics took pains to discredit her, herself. It’s a reminder to me about my own views: whether I agree with her politics or not, I value the “poor little blind girl” for having the courage to express them, and express them well. I’d like to treat others with whom I might sometimes disagree the same way.

This little tale also reminded me that lots of folks who eventually came to be revered by the broader society — Martin Luther King, Jr., Eleanor Roosevelt, … heck, even Muhammad Ali … were reviled as marginal troublemakers and suffered hateful treatment in their own time. It’s a reminder that changing things has never been and will never be easy.

The book group I’m speaking to tomorrow is a bit different than other groups I’ve visited: the members are blind.

The Skokie Public Library established a Book Club especially for people with visual impairments over 25 years ago — it was part of the library’s commitment to give visually impaired patrons access to reading, and, later on, to technology.

For this month, Skokie’s Talking Books Book Club chose to read Long time, No See. My memoir is available for free in Braille or on audio to those who qualify for the Library of Congress National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped, and I’m expecting this audience to look, as it were, at my memoir with a different pair of eyes than other readers. Taking care of our son Gus when he was little? Struggling to find employment? Making mistakes like grinding pinto beans to make coffee? These anecdotes might be intriguing to sighted audiences, but I’m afraid they fall into the “been there, done that” category with tomorrow’s group.

Gary Gustin, the group leader, told me that the people who drive book club members to the library have started to participate in the book discussions now, too. “They used to just mill around the library while we were discussing our books, so we invited them to join us.” A number of drivers are married to the visually-impaired participants — maybe I’ll ask what they all think of the way Long time, No See deals with relationships. It’d be a totally selfish move on my part — I’ll learn far more from my audience than they’ll learn from me, and hey, I may gather enough material to write a sequel!

A few years ago Mike volunteered as a writing tutor with Open Books, a literacy program here in Chicago. Tutors and students did the exercises together, and when they were asked to write about a family member, Mike wrote about his sister Kris. He sent the essay off to her when it was finished. Two years later, she was diagnosed with breast cancer. Kris died last Wednesday, a day after her 60th birthday. Mike agreed to let me publish his essay here.

My Whole Sister

by Michael Knezovich

I’m told my big sister was not happy with my arrival. That at one point, she rolled me – in my bassinette – into a closet and closed the door.

Mike’s sister Kris, circa 1974.

That, I’m happy to not remember. What I do remember is she was always an exotic grown-up person who did stuff I wanted to do but wasn’t allowed and knew stuff I wanted to know, but couldn’t understand.

And that no matter how hard I pedaled, how fast I ran, what grade I was in, I would never catch up.

Aggravating.

I don’t remember when I learned she had a different father than I did. That hers had died when she was six months old after an awful fire at an oil refinery in Bakersfield, Calif. That my mother had remarried and that Kris got my dad, and eventually me, in the bargain.

This all made her even more exotic in my view; otherworldly, even. But we did the usual things – towel snapping fights while we did the dishes. Arguments over what was on our one TV. And always, when called out, blaming the other for starting it.

By 1969, she was a junior in high school. And the world was popping its rivets. Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy had been assassinated the year before. There was the civil rights movement, riots and a lot of fear. And there was Vietnam. As editor of the high school newspaper, Kris chose to run an anti-war poem, which got a reprimand from school administrators. When she wore a black armband on war moratorium day, she was nearly suspended.

My mother, a schoolteacher and something of a local institution, was mortified. And furious. And they fought, loud, hard and sometimes hatefully. Again and again. It was like all the conflicts of the ‘60s, the generation gap, the war, and the sexual revolution – played out in the little terrarium that was our home.

My dad was resolutely allergic to conflict and did his best to not be around during the worst of it.

Me, I somehow got it in my head to try to be peacemaker. I wasn’t very good at it and managed to succeed only when I irritated the two of them and they redirected the anger they had for each other at me, for the moment the common enemy.

My sister infuriated me, too. I wondered why she couldn’t just go along. Or sugarcoat or even be dishonest – in the name of keeping the peace. She left for college, which brought peace. And boredom.

And I missed her. I visited her there and we, without trying, became friends more than siblings.

As a senior in high school, I found myself in the superintendent’s office. I was editor of the paper and had run an editorial critical of budget priorities. My sister and I grew up with different surnames. But the superintendent knew the connection. To his credit, he smiled at the thought. He was generous and there was no threat of suspension.

To this day, some people will refer to Kris as my half-sister. And I laugh, because, like that school administrator, I only knew her as my sister, in whole.

Whitney met Hanni, the grand dame of Seeing Eye dogs, this week! The circumstances were not happy ones –we were in Urbana for a funeral. The meeting of the dogs helped take our minds off

There’s Whit with Hanni’s bone.

the sadness for a bit, though, and we were very grateful.

I’ve been to two funerals the past couple weeks, and Whitney came along to both. She could have easily stayed home — neighbors drove us to the first funeral, and we went with my husband Mike to the second. My friends, and of course Mike, were willing to lend an elbow to lead me through the funeral homes, but experience with previous Seeing Eye dogs taught me that having a dog there at wakes and funerals sometimes comforts fellow mourners. I am not about to claim Whitney qualifies as a “therapy dog,” but I do know she can serve as a distraction. And sometimes, when things are particularly sad, a distraction is, well, just right.

Speaking of just right, we stayed with our friends Steven and Nancy after this week’s memorial service – they are the wonderful couple who adopted Hanni. Hanni and Whitney are both Golden Retriever/Labrador crosses, but I had no trouble telling them apart. Hanni is a tail wagger –you know it’s her when you hear a thump, thump, thump on the floor. She’s taken on more and more of her Golden Retriever side in these matronly years: she wears her hair long and full now. Her coat matches her personality: fluffy.

Whitney, on the other hand, is a licker. When you lean down to pet her, she’ll give you a kiss before rolling over for a belly rub. And at two years old, Whitney is a lean mean machine, showing signs of childish jealousy around her predecessor.

Example: When Hanni walked into hour room Tuesday morning, Whitney immediately sprang up from a calm, quiet repose and grabbed one of Hanni’s bones, chewing it ferociously, trying to taunt her. Hanni nuzzled up to me, thumped her tail, and, I imagine, rolled her eyes.

Hanni ignored Whitney completely, choosing instead to watch me go through my pre-departure rituals –zipping my suitcase, finding my shoes. When she saw me pick up Whitney’s harness, she started jumping for joy. Jumping and jumping and jumping. It’d been a long time since Hanni had seen a harness, but she remembered exactly what it was. Hanni is 12 years old now, an arthritic retiree, but she was ready to go back to work if I needed her.

Aging. Aches. Illness. Disease. Dying. It all sure can seem senseless at times. As Mike puts it, “Who do we see about this?!” The past couple weeks have served to remind me just how delicate life is, and how fortunate I am to share my time here with such incredible people — and creatures. I’m off with one of those creatures now — it’s in the 90s, and while well-deserving retirees Hanni and Harper relax at home with their new people, energetic Whitney will guide me to the pool. Don’t worry, though, Whitney knows how to carpe the diem, too. She’ll be sitting behind the reception desk in air conditioning while I swim.