Seems like anytime an employer goes out of the way to thank you, you can bet on it: you’re being let go. Last week I got an email from WBEZ thanking me for the essays I’ve recorded for them over the years. The note went on to say WBEZ is reorganizing their local programming to emphasize live shows. They hope their new formatting will encourage listeners to comment on social media or phone in live and in person. Translation: they will no longer be airing pre-recorded essays like the ones I used to write for them.

Let’s be honest. I’m pretty lucky that WBEZ took me on to write essays in the first place. It sure felt cool to jump into a cab with Hanni or Harper and ask the driver to take me to Chicago Public Radio. So many times the driver was listening to WBEZ as we drove — one of them even asked for my autograph!

And what a kick it was to have someone call or stop me on the street after one of my essays aired. “I heard you on NPR!” they’d say. Or, “I thought the voice sounded familiar, and when I, like, waited until the end, they said it was. It was, like, you!” It was a very, very good run, and I’m sorry to seehear it come to an end.

The WBEZ arts editor did write to ask me to come and meet with her personally to see what this shift might mean for me, so I’m heading over to the WBEZ studio with Whitney tomorrow. Will it be my very last trip there? I hope not. Gee, guess we’ll all have to, ahem, stay tuned to find out.

Whitney and I visited Hendricks and St. Mary of the Lake Elementary schools in Chicago this week, and the kids at both schools had tons of terrific questions.

Whit and I had a great time at St. Mary of the Lake (pictured here) and Hendricks.

For some reason the first and second graders at St. Mary’s seemed particularly interested in color blindness. When one of them asked me if it’s true that dogs can only see black and white, I explained that dogs do see some colors, but they can’t tell the difference between red and green. “If we’re at an intersection with a stoplight, it’s my job to judge when it might be safe to cross.” I described the way I stand up straight, concentrate, and listen for the rush of cars. When it sounds like the traffic is going the direction I want to go, I take a guess the light is green and command Whitney to go forward. Whitney’s ears perk up, she listens for traffic and looks left and right to confirm it’s safe before pulling me across.

The students seemed satisfied with that answer and went on with other questions. Are you blind all of the time? When you were at the Seeing Eye school, what was your teacher’s name? Does Whitney like to lick a lot? What do you and Whitney do to have fun? Their thoughts eventually returned to colors, though.

“Do you just see the color black?” one girl asked. “Or do you just see the color white?” Another girl told me that the school uniforms they wear are red. “But does Whitney think they’re green? I gave that question some thought, and realized I couldn’t answer it. I remember writing a story for Dog Fancy magazine years ago about dogs and vision, so when I got home I looked it up:

Dogs see colors, but not the same way humans do. People can see variations of violet, blue, green, yellow, orange, and red. Dogs can only see blue, violet, yellow, and some shades of gray.

I checked my source list, and the information for that Dog Fancy story came from an article in the Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association called Vision in Dogs, written by P.E. Miller and C.J. Murphy. A credible source, but not sure it answers this sweet first grader’s question. If dogs can’t see the color red, what do they see instead? Blue? Violet? Yellow? If any of you blog followers have an answer, by all means leave a comment. I’m curious to know now, too!

As Whitney and I prepare for our trip to Hendricks Elementary School this morning, my husband Mike Knezovich weighs in with a guest post:

Beth listens to the radio a lot, and she listens with more attention than most. Last week she heard about a special show at a very special place: Levon

That's The Old Town School's new logo.

Helm and his current Grammy-winning band (not The Band of yore) playing a benefit for the Old Town School of Folk Music. With special guest Donald Fagen of Steely Dan. And warmup Shawn Mullins.

That’s a lot of goodness in one place, so we made an impulse buy. And on the night of St. Patrick’s Day, we traveled to Chicago’s Lincoln Square neighborhood for the benefit.

That's the inside of Maurer Hall, the performance space at The Old Town School.

The Old Town School of Folk Music is a music venue, but more important, it’s a part of the fabric of Chicago. Thousands of kids and adults from all over Chicago take lessons there every week. Who knows how many have picked up a guitar or mandolin or cello or whatever since the school opened in 1957. Beth and I have a half-dozen friends who’ve taken up instruments and taken music lessons there. And they all speak glowingly of their experience.

Before the performance Saturday night, we browsed the silent auction. Instead of sports memorabilia or luxury cruises, this one had lots of concert posters and handwritten playlists and other music memorabilia. One photo froze me in my tracks. There he was, a baby-faced John Prine, probably in his 20s, strumming his guitar while sitting next to the fairly ramshackle registration desk at the original Old Town School location. Hello in There.

There were photos of — and music by — Steve Goodman, the writer of The City of New Orleans. Like Prine, he was an Old Town School icon, but Steve Goodman died way too young. Everywhere I turned, I saw artifacts. Performers from Bob Dylan to Peter, Paul and Mary to Pete Seeger to Ladysmith Black Mambazo.

Levon can still drum. And he even sang a little.

The performance? Well, I’m still buzzing. Levon took his place at the drum set, aided by a second drummer. There was a trombone, two saxes, a trumpet, a Hammond B3, a bassist, two guitarists, and two terrific backup singers (though the term backup doesn’t do these women justice) including Levon Helm’s daughter Amy. And Donald Fagen at the electric piano with ultra-cool jazzman sunglasses. The band broke from lots of rootsy numbers into a couple Fagen/Steely Dan tunes, including “Black Friday,” and they did it perfectly. All the musicians were superb. None of the crowd was fiddling with their cell phones, all were enrapt.

Levon, who’s in his 70s now and has survived cancer, looked scrawny and a little frail, yet somehow he seemed to look exactly as he always has. I remember seeing him in The Last Waltz at The Lans Theater in my hometown — Lansing, Ill, in 1974. It was a film of The Band’s farewell performance – directed by Martin Scorscese. Even then, Levon Helm looked old and wise. I was all of 17.

But Saturday night, ages and dates and numbers didn’t matter. I didn’t feel old. I didn’t feel young. I just felt great. Here’s to Levon Helm and to the Old Town School.

As a kid, spending three days with a bunch of schoolteachers would have sounded like the ultimate form of punishment. I guess wisdom really does come with age — when the Illinois Reading Council contacted me last Fall to see if I’d be interested in coming to their annual conference and spend time with thousands of teachers from across the state, I considered it a privilege.

That's me at the SCBWI booth. Whitney's under the table. (Photo by Cheryl May.)

My sisters Cheryl and Marilee accompanied Whitney and me on the trip from Chicago, and when we stepped off the train in Springfield, our driver Brian was there with a sign. “It says your name!” they exclaimed, describing the B-E-T-H F-I-N-K-E in bold lettering. I felt like a star.

The star treatment continued throughout this well-organized and well-attended three-day conference. Award-winning author Esther Hershenhorn had published an extremely flattering post about Hanni and Beth: Safe & Sound just days before the conference started. Attention from Esther’s Teaching Authors blog brought a lot of teachers to the Illinois Society of Childrens Book Authors and Illustrators (SCBWI) booth to meet new Seeing Eye dog Whitney and me. I Brailled out words for the teachers to take home to their students along with a bookmark of the Braille alphabet. I could almost hear the wheels spinning in the teachers heads, conjuring up ways to use Braille to encourage their students back home to read print.

I gave a presentation, enjoyed time with the seven lively teachers at my table as one of the featured guests at the author luncheon, and attended a few sessions, too. Everywhere I went I heard dedicated teachers asking questions, looking for suggestions, sharing ideas, all of them oh so eager to learn tnew techniques and methods to motivate their students.

My Chicago neighbor Margaret MacGregor is one of those dedicated teachers, and so is my sister Marilee Amodt. Margaret teaches in the Chicago Public Schools, and Marilee teaches in the Orlando Public Schools. The two of them teamed up to lead a session about teaching vocabulary to students from lower-income families, and on our train back to Chicago Margaret mentioned how important it is for kids to learn a lot of vocabulary words before they start school.

“Books have a lot of words in them that kids don’t hear spoken out loud,” Margaret said. In fact, children’s books use twice as many words as kids hear

That's Margaret on the left, with Marilee, before their presentation. (Photo by Cheryl May.)

on regular TV. And even, get this, twice as many, like, words, like than, like, college students like, use when they are, like, talking to each other.

Margaret told me about the Hart-Risley Study, which says low-income children hear, on average, 30 million fewer words spoken than their more affluent peers before they turn four. Margaret was not misspeaking, and that is not a typo. I looked it up when we got home. 30 million fewer words.

It seemed particularly fitting to be listening to Margaret and Marilee’s presentation the weekend before Whitney and I head to Hendricks Elementary School on Chicago’s Southside. Hendricks is one of the Chicago Public Schools participating in the Sit Stay Read! (SSR) program I volunteer for. In order for a school to participate in Sit Stay Read!, 95 percent or more of the students enrolled must qualify for the National School Breakfast program. The University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) Center for Literacy helped Sit Stay Read! design the program to coordinate with school curriculum — it’s meant to improve children’s reading fluency, encourage them to become successful readers, inspire them to explore the world through books, and help them learn to respect people and animals. A Chicago Tribune story by Rick Kogan explains:

SSR’s mission is fueled by sad statistics: On average, a child growing up in a middle-class family will have the benefit of as many as 1,700 hours of one-on-one picture-book reading before he or she enters school, while the child in a low-income family will have 25 hours.

Sit Stay Read! uses dogs and volunteers in all sorts of clever ways: children read aloud to specially trained therapy dogs, human volunteers visit as “book buddies” to help individual kids, and people like me come as guest readers – the books we read to the kids always have something to do with, guess what? Dogs!

Guest readers also teach the kids about possible careers – when members of Chicago’s Lyric Opera visit, they read The Dog Who Sang at the Opera to the kids. Firefighters read Firehouse Dog during visits, and visiting police officers read about police dogs. I was asked to come with Whitney and talk about being a writer.

I’m looking forward to visiting Hendricks Monday. It’ll be Whitney’s first experience as a Sit Stay Read! dog, and I hope my stories of learning new ways to read and write after losing my sight might encourage the students at Hendricks to keep trying, too.

On Monday morning Whitney and I caught a commuter train to Easter Seals DuPage and the Fox Valley Region to visit the Lily Garden Child Care Center, a preschool and child care program that mixes classes up with kids with and without disabilities. The center is working on a new project this year that features guest authors who come to read to the kids. They thought it would be especially appropriate for me to read from a Braille version of Hanni and Beth: Safe & Sound, and they were right. Our son Gus was in a program like this when he was three and four years old, so I felt right at home with the students. and, hey, I work part-time for Easter Seals, so I’m familiar with the work they do.

I’m the Interactive Community Coordinator at Easter Seals Headquarters in downtown Chicago. That’s a fancy-schmancy title that means I moderate the Easter Seals and Autism Blog. I keep my ear open for articles and events involving autism, then ask spokespeople at Easter Seals affiliates across the country to write blog posts about those things. They email the posts to me, I edit them and add html code, and, presto! Their posts get published on the Easter Seals blog.

Come to think of it, You have Easter Seals to thank — or blame — for this Safe & Sound blog — it was at Easter Seals that I learned to use the blogging tools. I wrote about our trip to the child development center Monday for a post on the Easter Seals and Autism blog — thought you all might like to read an excerpt from that post here, too:

I’m sure some of the kids at the Lily Garden Child Care Center had autism, but truth is, without being able to see them, I couldn’t tell. Some were scared of Whitney, some couldn’t stop petting her, others gave her kisses. Some seemed shy, others went on and on and on and on and on and on about their own dog at home. Which were symptoms of autism, and which were symptoms of … well … childhood? Who knew? All we did know is that something different was happening in the room today, and that we were all having fun.

A big thank you to the folks at Easter Seals DuPage and the Fox Valley Region for inviting Whitney and me out to their child development center on Monday. We had a ball!