In my husband Mike Knezovich’s guest blog post about our trip to New Orleans last week, he described the “terrifyingly energetic” group of pre-schoolers who showed up to meet Whitney and me at the Latter branch of the New Orleans Public Library. What he forgot to mention was that a reporter from the New Orleans Times-Picayune showed up, too – along with a photographer!

Reporter Leigh Stewart had already interviewed me over the phone before Whitney and I arrived at the library, which was a good thing: she wouldn’t have gotten a word in at the event with all those curious kids there.

Valentine and I regale the kids.

From the Times-Picayune article:

At the library, Finke spoke to the children briefly, read a section of a Braille version of “Hanni and Beth” and invited the children to ask questions.

A class of sparkly-eyed kindergarteners from Morris Jeff Community School were among the most enthusiastic participants, asking questions such as “‘How do you know when to cross the street?” and “How does your dog know a good person from a bad person?” One youngster even asked all in attendance to quiet down, as he thought Whitney was trying to sneak a quick nap.

This boy’s schoolmates took him seriously, using ssuch hushed tones that their teachers had to encourage them to use their “Mardi Graas voices” so I could hear their questions. Kindergarten teacher Ashley Millet was quoted in the Times-Picayune story saying that their class is learning about rules and regulations, so our library visit made for a perfect field trip. “They get to see that even dogs have rules,” Millet said with a laugh.

I did emphasize rules in my talk with the kids, and after I told them the rule about not calling out Whitney’s name while she’s working, I suggested we come up with a fake name to use for her while we were there. “If you use her fake name to say hi to Whitney, she wont’ notice,” I said. “She’ll think you’re talking to someone else!”

The day of our visit was February 14, so I suggested we call her “Valentine.” All the kids loved the idea. Well, except for one. She raised her hand and objected. “It’s not nice to call names,” she said. Touché.

Contributing writer Leigh Stuart did a terrific job capturing the sweet spirit of the children in her Times-Picayune article, and if you link to the entire story online you can admire the pictures staff photographer Rusty Costanza took that day. From what Mike tells me, the photos are sweet, too!

I asked Mike to give you an account of our most recent trip to New Orleans. Here’s Mike Knezovich:

It’s Fat Tuesday, and only a week ago, we were flying home from New Orleans. It feels like it’s been a long time already.

But I do remember…

We snagged our fair share of beads.

…catching three or four pre-Mardi Gras parades without even trying. And catching a whole lot of beads.

…a breakfast dish at Lüke restaurant called “eggs in a jar.” Two perfectly poached eggs, floating inside a jar on bernaise, with a fried softshell crab for a lid. Whoa.

…chandeliers and chandeliers and chandeliers and tapestries and extravagant crown molding and…chandeliers at our grand old hotel, Le Pavillon. And the hotel bartender, a German-born woman who landed in New Orleans decades ago and has been there since. And the hotel piano player, resplendent in a purple suit, who sang a lot like Nat King Cole.

Eggs in a jar. Can still taste that soft shell crab.

…multiply-pierced and tattooed young people playing old-time traditional jazz on the street. Superbly.

Panorama jazz band at The Spotted Cat.

…a great band at the Spotted Cat that we enjoyed for the price of a one-drink minimum.

…leaving the Spotted Cat, crossing Frenchmen Street to see John Boutte (Down in the Treme´,  just me and my baby…) at DBA.

…Riding the streetcar to the Latter Library, where Beth and Whit held court in front of a terrifyingly energetic group of pre-schoolers.

…dinner at Upperline. Go there.

…gumbo at Herbsaint. Go there.

I found a nice, safe, and quiet spot in the library with wireless while Beth and Whitney regaled the kids.

…a brass band, on our last night, playing just off Canal. They weren’t quite Rebirth Brass band, but they might be soon.

…walking. And walking. And walking. Just enough, the scale tells me, to have balanced off the caloric intake.

…dinner with our friends Seth and Bess, who moved to New Orleans from our Chicago neighborhood almost two years ago now. They are a wonderful young couple, who — it’s somewhat bittersweet to say — are plainly as happy as clams in New Orleans, so much so that it’s hard to imagine them back in Chicago.

So, how was New Orleans?

Sublime.

And I can say, having been there countless times, that while we always leave New Orleans, New Orleans never leaves us.

Whitney and I squeezed in a school visit last week before we took off for New Orleans, and during my talks with kids at North Barrington Elementary School, I explained three rules

I took Whitney's harness off for part of the time at North Barrington School.

to keep in mind if you happen to see a guide dog with a harness on:

• don’t pet the dog,
• don’t feed the dog,
• don’t call out the dog’s name.

Unlike other schools I’ve visited with Seeing Eye dogs, the students at North Barrington seem nonplussed by these rules. They’d already read Hanni and Beth: Safe & Sound, and, more importantly, one of their teachers is raising a puppy for Leader Dogs for the Blind.

Cindy Hesselbein, the Reading Specialist at North Barrington, brings Labrador retriever puppy Rory to school with her every day. At home, she and her husband and their four children all volunteer their time, money and efforts to raise puppies, and once the pups are a year old they return them to Leader Dogs headquarters in Rochester, Mich., to begin intense training to become a guide. Cindy’s youngest son Daniel was in the car when she picked Whitney and me up at the train station, and he admitted he cried when he said goodbye to Mack, their first pup. “We all did,” his mom added. “But we know it’s all for a good cause.”

Those are the Hesselbein kids, returning Mack to school for further training.

More than a dozen schools scattered throughout North America train dogs to guide people who are blind or visually impaired. Most guide dog schools place their puppies with volunteers until the dogs are anywhere from 14 to 18 months old. While Leader Dog puppy raisers are not responsible for training dogs to guide, they do teach social skills, obedience and how to walk in a lead- out position (not like normal obedience training where the dog is behind you at your heel). Cindy got a kick out of watching Whitney turn her head left and right, scanning the environment as she led me through the school. “They don’t do that when they’re puppies,” she observed. “It’s so fun to see the finished product!”

Policies and practices vary in the different guide dog programs in North America. Leader Dogs, where the Hesselbeins volunteer, allows puppy raisers to name the dog they take home. (Mack was named for Michigan’s Mackinac Island, where the Hesselbein family first learned about Leader Dogs.) The Seeing Eye, where I train with my dogs, opts for naming puppies at birth to help keep track of them all.

Another difference: Seeing Eye grads don’t meet the families who raise our dogs as puppies. Leader Dogs has an “open adoption” policy, and it gets mixed reviews from the Hesselbein family. Cindy enjoys keeping up with the young man in Baltimore who is partnered with Mack now, but her youngest son Daniel lamented that attending the Leader Dog graduation to meet the pair meant “having to say goodbye to Mack all over again.”

Cindy asked if Whitney might want to meet Rory while we were at North Barrington School, and I’m sure Whitney would have loved that. She is so new to her job, though, that I thought it might be prudent to keep her on a, ahem, short leash. The two dogs did catch each other’s eye when Rory went out to “empty” during a lunch break. Rory barked out a greeting, but Whitney did not respond in kind. She sat up, and her ears perked, but she stayed quiet, setting an example. After all, Rory was still learning. He’s just a pup, not a professional. Not yet, at least.

That's the Latter Library on St. Charles Avenue, New Orleans

February is Love Your Library month, and I’m celebrating in style: I’m in New Orleans with Mike and Whitney, and tomorrow morning I’m the guest storyteller at the Milton H. Latter Memorial Branch of the New Orleans Public Library.

I am, and have always been, a huge fan of books and libraries. I am among millions of American kids who remember looking forward to trips to the library for a new stack of books to bring home every week. Flo flushes with embarrassment when she recalls dropping me off at the library one evening before heading to the grocery store, coming home and putting those groceries away, then realizing she’d forgotten to pick me up. “There you were, waiting all that time at the library door with your pile of books!” She says. “I felt terrible!” No reason for Flo to feel bad — I was in seventh heaven! I was so busy flipping through the pages and anticipating which new book I’d start first, I didn’t even realize she was late.

When surgeons told me in 1986 that the eye surgeries hadn’t worked and I’d never see again, one of my first concerns was how I would survive without being able to read. The National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped (NLS) came to my rescue.

The Library of Congress administers NLS, a talking-book and Braille program available for free to those of us whose low vision, blindness, or physical handicap makes reading regular print difficult. A few years ago Woman’s Day Magazine published an essay I wrote about the talking Book Program, and that essay is still available on the American library Association’s “I Love Libraries” web site.

NLS mails books and magazines in audio and in Braille directly to enrollees at no cost. These days some materials are also available online for download, which means I can keep up with my book club — I’m the only one in the group who can’t see, and thanks to the new digital NLS program I don’t have to wait long to read new releases anymore.

When I was at the Seeing Eye training with Whitney I met a woman who loves — and uses — the talking book program even more than I do. If you watched that short one-minute Seeing Eye promotional video I linked to in a previous post, you saw Karen Keninger — she’s the graduate who gets a little teary-eyed in the video. On our last night of training, Karen and I sat down together over a glass of wine to talk about books and writing. She was heading home to Iowa the next morning (Karen is director of the Iowa Department for the Blind) but then getting on a plane again with her new Seeing Eye dog Jimi the very next day. “I have a job interview in Washington, DC.,” she said to me in a hushed tone, explaining that she was being considered for the position of Director of the National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped.

The folks at the Library of Congress obviously liked what they saw. Karen got the job. People who can read print may not think much of this position, but to those of us who rely on NLS, this appointment is absolutely huge. I was sworn to secrecy about this new appointment until Karen passed security clearance, and she emailed over the weekend to tell me it’s official.

Karen Keninger was born and raised in Vinton, Iowa, the third of seven children in a happy and lively farming family. She was diagnosed with retinitis pigmentosa as a child and was completely blind by the age of 20. She graduated from Drake University in 1973 with a B.A. in Journalism and went back to school and graduated in 1991 with a masters degree in English. She served as Rehabilitation Consultant with the Iowa Department for the Blind, Program Administrator for the Iowa Library for the Blind and Director of the Iowa Department for the Blind before accepting her new position. In addition to all of that, she raised six, count them, six children!

I could go on and on about Karen Keninger, but hey, this is my last night in New Orleans, and Mike, Whitney and I are heading out to meet friends for one last decadent meal, and we’ll toast to Karen then. What a comfort it is to know that my beloved National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped will be in such good hands.

My friend Stephanie is a librarian in New Jersey, and she came to the Seeing Eye to visit while I was training with Whitney in December. Sometime after that she noticed a very calm, beautiful, healthy Golden Lab mix sitting in the back of the Well Read Bookstore in Hawthorne, NJ and thought the dog had a striking resemblance to the dogs she’d seen at the Seeing Eye.

Another shopper entered the store and asked the shop owner what the dog’s name was. Her reply: Vondra. “That’s when I knew for sure!” Stephanie laughed. “With a name like that, this had to be a dog from the Seeing Eye!”

Puppies born in each litter at the Seeing Eye are given names that start with the same letter of the alphabet. To avoid repeating names too often, the Seeing Eye finds itself getting a little creative at times. They must have already used Vicki, Veronica, Valerie and Venus by the time Vondra was born.

Vondra is nine years old now, and the bookstore owner’s family adopted her from the Seeing Eye when she was 18 months. Vondra had been deemed unfit to be matched with a blind person during puppy training because she was too much of a people person. From the Seeing Eye web site:

When a dog is removed from consideration as a guide, it is offered to the volunteer who raised it as a puppy. If the puppy raiser does not adopt the dog, it becomes available to other homes. If the dog has potential to work in law enforcement, those organizations are given priority in selecting dogs. If the dog does not go to one of these agencies, we place the dog with a family in the community.

The Seeing Eye asks a standard adoption fee of $500, but that is reduced if you are willing to take an older, retired dog. Whatever you do, if you adopt a dog from the Seeing Eye, don’t assume you’ll get a dog with a normal name — we Seeing Eye grads sometimes feel at the mercy of the staff member who names the pups!

Veterinary Pet Insurance Co (VPI). Has published its list of the most popular names for cats and dogs in 2011, and I’ve never met a Seeing Eye dog with any name on this list:

Top female dog names for 2011:
1. Bella
2. Lucy
3. Molly
4. Daisy
5. Maggie
6. Sophie
7. ChloeTop male dog names for 2011:
1. Max
2. Buddy
3. Charlie
4. Rocky
5. Bailey
6. Jake
7. Cooper

That's Hanni, on the morning of her 12th birthday (Mike was in Urbana visiting). Even at 12, her tail's a blur.

What?! The name Hanni didn’t make that list?! Hanni is my retired Seeing Eye dog — she was born in the “h” litter. Her name sounds like Bonnie, I used to tell people, but it starts with an ‘h’.

”What does it mean?” people would ask.

“Hmmm,” I take my time, act like I was thinking of an answer. “It means…it means they ran out of all the normal female names that start with ‘H’.”

In the end, of course, the dog’s name doesn’t really matter. And believe me, the name Hanni grew on me when she started guiding me safely through busy city intersections. It’s Hanni’s 12th birthdaytoday (happy birthday, dear Hanni!) and I can’t imagine her having any other

That's Hanni right after she moved in with Steven and Nancy in 2010. In a less dignified pose.

name — she’s a perfect Hanni.

For more information on adopting a dog from the Seeing Eye, email the adoption office at dogadoptions@seeingeye.org or call (973) 539-4425, ext. 1877.