Harper and I head to Madison, Wisconsin today, and one of the things we’ll be doing there is this:

Apart from the conference, Madison is one my favorite destinations.

“The Lindbergh Lectures”
Thursday, September 29
12:00 – 12:50 PM
Room 1106 Mechanical Engineering Building
“Seeing a Bigger Picture”
Beth Finke
NPR commentator, Teacher and Journalist
Author of “Hanni and Beth: Safe & Sound”

Abstract:

Thanks in large part to assistive technology, people like Beth Finke, who are blind, live full, creative and pleasurable lives. But what if AT researchers stretched the boundaries even further? Beth Finke discusses the assistive technology she relies on today and the AT on her “What if?” list.

My “Seeing a Bigger Picture” lecture is free and open to the public. It’s in conjunction with AT Expo 2011 at the University of Wisconsin (also free and open to the public), and I was invited by Jay Martin, the director of the University of Wisconsin’s Assistive Rehabilitation and Technology Design sequence. Jay and I met last year when we appeared on a public radio show about technology that helps people who have disabilities.

Jay walked my (now retired) Seeing Eye dog Hanni and me to the University of Wisconsin Union after our interview, and that walk gave me a chance to ask him one question that didn’t get asked over the radio. “What motivated you to get involved in assistive technology in the first place?“ That’s when he told me about his son’s accident. Liam, now age 27, was paralyzed in a diving accident in 1999. From a University of Wisconsin article:

At the time of Liam’s accident, Martin was director of UW–Madison’s Engine Research Center and had studied internal combustion for nearly 20 years. But upon returning to work after his son left the hospital, he found that disabilities, rather than engines, were constantly on his mind.

Jay talked to a mentor in the engineering department about switching his research focus to assistive technology. A number of his colleagues were interested in doing similar research, and in 2002 the Center for Rehabilitation Engineering and Assistive Technology (UW-CREATe) was born, taking an engineer’s approach to improving the lives of people with disabilities. Again from that UW article:

Today, more than 10 faculty and staff researchers and four times as many undergraduate and graduate students carry out the center’s academic goals of teaching, learning and research.

Jay urged me to come to the AT Expo last year, and I’m sure glad I did. In addition to being exposed to all sorts of new technology, I got to meet his son.

Liam finished high school with his graduating class and went on to receive a degree in psychology from University of Wisconsin. When I met him last year, he was working at a booth at AT Expo as a mentor for Midwest Alliance, an effort to encourage students with disabilities toward careers in science, technology, engineering and math. He noticed me there struggling with my cell phone to call for the hotel shuttle to pick me up. “Would it be easier if we gave you a ride?” he asked. “I’ve gotta go back to my office anyway.” He and his colleague Chris ended up chauffeuring me back to the hotel.

This year I’ll be a bit more high-tech savvy, what with my talking iPhone and all. But if asked, I’ll sure let Chris and Liam chauffeur me home again.

How beautiful it is to do nothing, and then rest afterwards.

Spanish proverb

Last week Mike and I joined dear friends in a campsite in southern France, on the Mediterranean and just over the Spanish border. Every Morning we’d sleep until ten, toddle over to the boulangerie for fresh croissants, enjoy breakfast outside our luxury mobile home with our friends, then plan the outing du jour.

Sheelagh, Jim, moi and Beni just before we headed to dinner in Collioure.

One day we tested out my newly healed metatarsals on a footpath along the shore. They passed the audition, so on another day we walked from the camp site to the beach to enjoy the waves. It rained one day, tant pis pour nous, poor us. We took advantage by driving to a brasserie in nearby Banyuls for café au lait and, what else? A Banyuls!

The luxury mobile homes at the camp site in Argeles-Sur-Mer were compliments of our friend Jim Neill, founder and owner of Top Sun. Top Sun leases out holiday properties in beautiful spots in England and France, and Jim is considering adding a mountain home to his portfolio. so naturalement, we joined him way, way, way, up the Pyrenees for a real estate appointment one morning. Oo la la!

No matter what we did by day, we were always home in time for a long afternoon nap. After that? Dinner, of course! Fresh anchovies served with red peppers in oil, soupe du poisson, grilled scallops, roe, fresh oysters, roast duck, foie gras, mushroom risotto, grilled shrimp, steamed mussels, grilled dorado. Each and every dinner was accompanied by stories, laughter, and an an assortment of local French bread, cheeses and wine. Deliseuse! The only night we stepped out of our dinner routine was Tuesday, French Keraoke night at the camp site. But that’s a story for another time.

The trip was bookended by huge hugs with Sheelagh at the Barcelona airport when we arrived, then double the hugs upon our departure last Friday. Sheelagh is, as she puts it, “in good form.” Being with her was by far the highlight of the

That's me and Jim during our visit to his prospective mountain home.

trip. The only outward sign that she has had any illness at all is the PICC (Peripherally Inserted Central Catheter) cannula attached to her upper arm. “It’s no bother, really,” she assured me, explaining that the PICC is there so that she doesn’t have to have a needle inserted with every chemotherapy treatment. This second round of chemo should end in December, and early scan reports show tumors on her liver are shrinking and even disappearing. Sheelagh and Beni went “off the drink” after Sheelagh’s diagnosis last year, and the two of them have become connoisseur of alcohol-free beers from around the globe — we all lifted our glasses many, many times to Sheelagh’s good health.

On the last day of our trip we traveled to the lovely Hotel Can Misse in Collbato, Spain — in the shadow of Montserrat — for a belated celebration of Sheelagh and Beni’s July wedding. Okay, their July “civil partnership.” Over a delicious dinner of Iberian croquettes, lamb chops, grilled fish, roasted vegetables and red wine, Sheelagh and Beni explained that civil partnerships give same-sex couples in Northern Ireland the same rights and responsibilities of marriage.

The happy couple wrote their own vows, and a registrar in Belfast oversaw the ceremony. Bride A(Beni) wore blue trousers and a white linen blouse to the affair. Bride B (Sheelagh) donned a sleeveless lime green dress, purple tights and purple shoes. The Moroccan multi-colored silk stole she wore over the ensemble was a gift from her sister Fiona, and Sheelagh said it conveniently hid her PICC. “I looked like a child’s drawing,” she said with a joyful laugh. “Complete with a huge silly grin on my face.”

You know what? That huge silly grin of Sheelagh’s is contagious. I’m wearing one right now, just thinking of her and Beni and Jim.

Harper needs a break. So do we.

Friends have offered Harper a week of peace and quiet at their house in the suburbs, and while he’s Safe & Sound for a week or so in Wheaton, we’re heading…where else? The south of France!

Here’s the story. A hundred years ago (well, really, more like 30 years ago) I was the Assistant Director of the Study Abroad Office at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign. When I lost my sight, I lost my job. That was way back in 1985, before the Americans with Disabilities Act was passed.

During my tenure I met a lot of foreign students, and two of them are dear friends to this day. Jim Neill lives in London and owns Top Sun, a company renting holiday properties in great locations Normandy, Brittany, the Mediterranean, and the south of France.

Sheelagh Livingston lives in Portaferry, Northern Ireland with her partner Beni (they were recently married in Northern Ireland). Sheelagh was an exchange student from Belfast in 1986, the year Gus was born. She’d

That's Sheelagh and Beni on the right, pictured during a break from the bike path along Lake Michigan during their visit. Also riding that day were Chuck Miller, Chuck Gullett, moi, and Mike Rogers.

signed up for volunteer work at the University of Illinois to “meet people from the community” and I can still hear the stammer in her voice the first time she phoned. “So are ya still needing a reader, then?” The answer was a definitive yes. Sheelagh started coming once a week to read to me, and in exchange we fed her dinner.

Turned out Sheelagh liked to go for long walks, too. She’d escape her dormitory room and come to our house three, sometimes four, times a week and walk Gus and me to the grocery store, accompany me to Gus’ medical appointments, or just sit at a coffee shop with us over a cup of hot tea.

When Sheelagh reported news of her volunteer work to her mother in Belfast, Mrs. Livingston was horrified. “Sheelagh!” she warned, “You don’t know a thing about wee babies!” Sheelagh had done volunteer work in Cornwall at a camp for adults with physical and mental disabilities. She had pushed heavy wheelchairs over hills, through woods and even to the oceanfront, and now she squeezed Gus’ pram through tight spaces I never thought possible. If Sheelagh’s mother had seen her stopping in the middle of busy streets to swear at the bloody cars who wouldn’t stop for us, Mrs. Livingston would have hopped on the next plane to physically stop her daughter from doing more “harm.”

Sheelagh was a terror on our bicycle built for two as well. With Gus on back in a bike seat, it was actually a bicycle for three. Sheelagh often forgot that we were longer than the usual bike, and Gus got more joy rides than he bargained for.

Mike got more than he bargained for with Sheelagh as well. He fretted when he found out I’d made plans to have Sheelagh go out with me one night to hear some live music. She’d be the first new friend to take me out without Mike coming along. Sure, I had gone places on my own with old friends, and my sisters had taken me out now and then. But these were people Mike knew well, and they’d learned “Sighted guide techniques” slowly and carefully as I gradually lost my sight. But Sheelagh! Could she be trusted?

Mike stood at the doorway and strained to watch Sheelagh and me depart down the driveway into darkness. “Bye, bye Mike!” Sheelagh kept repeating.” Don’t worry!” she’d say, waving his way and laughing with joy. “I promise I’ll have her back home.” Mike watched us from the front porch until he couldn’t see — or hear — Sheelagh and me anymore. Then he hoped for the best.

Nature’s Table was packed when Sheelagh and I arrived. Who would have thought so many people were interested in Irish music? My new friend barreled through the crowd with me on her arm — much as she did with Gus in the pram. She pressed my palm onto an empty barstool, stood on her tiptoes to get near my ear and shouted, “What will you take to drink?”

“A Guinness!” I yelled back. Sheelagh ordered a pint for herself as well and held it up for a “Cheers!”

That was the extent of our conversation that night. Sheelagh jiggled my thigh every once in a while to let me know she was still there ,having a good time. I sat back, sipped, and enjoyed the music. When the night was over, Sheelagh, of course, got me home safely. Mike, of course, was waiting up for us. A good thing, because I was eager to tell him all about the big night.

That night, rather than struggling to recreate something I used to enjoy when I could see, I was doing something completely different, and with a new friend, who seemed to like me even
though I couldn’t see her.

Me, Beni, Sheelagh, beer & vodka at 2007 Warsaw wedding reception

Sheelagh and I have kept up ever since by sending cassette tapes back and forth, and I met up with her twice while she was living in Berlin, twice in Italy twice in Northern Ireland and once in Poland. She’s come back to the US to visit Mike and me in Urbana, in the Chicago suburbs, in North Carolina and here in Chicago, too. Last year around this time she sent a cassette with news I didn’t want to hear. Sheelagh has been diagnosed with ovarian cancer. I wanted to drop everything and come see her right away, but she urged me to wait. She already had lot of people coming to see her, and she wanst sure how the chemo treatments would go. “Besides, my dear,” she assured me. “I’m going to be around a long, long time.”

When Jim heard the news about Sheelagh, he generously offered a couple of the “luxury mobile homes” he rents in Argelès-sur-Mer to us for free. And so, tomorrow Mike and I take off for France to meet up with Jim, Sheelagh and Beni in the south of France. I won’t be typing out any blog posts until we return to Chicago at the end of September — my hands will be occupied buttering croissants, slicing French cheeses, lifting glasses of red wine and, especially, hugging Sheelagh. As she would say, it will be “luvly.”

The great Roger Ebert.

Roger Ebert’s memoir Life Itself comes out today, and I’m eager to read it. From what I’ve heard, he writes a lot about his middle-class Midwestern upbringing in Urbana, Ill., a place Mike and I were proud to call home for many, many years, and the town where our son Gus was born. Ebert was born in Urbana in 1942. Early reviews say he glows about his dad, an electrician at the University of Illinois, in his book.

You might remember me glowing about Roger Ebert in a post I wrote when he was given an award from Access Living, a disability advocacy organization here in Chicago. Access Living’s Lead On award “recognizes national leaders who have helped reframe the understanding of people with disabilities and who have helped to remove the barriers–physical and attitudinal–that exclude people with disabilities from career pursuits and everyday life.”

Roger Ebert represents the very embodiment of what the award stands for. Thyroid cancer has left him unable to speak. He has no lower jaw, and friends tell me his face can be difficult to look at. Others might stay inside, slow down, retire. Not Roger. He just keeps on doing the work he loves–reviewing movies, blogging, attending film festivals and continuing to manage his own festival, too.

I pretty much gave up on movies after I lost my sight. Until Roger Ebert started his Overlooked Film Festival in Champaign Urbana, that is. Mike, Gus and I were living in Urbana at the time, and the before-and-after lectures made the overlooked films more accessible to people like me. My guess is Roger didn’t have people with disabilities in mind when he decided to host talks and panels before and after films there, but hey, ain’t life grand when ideas like that turn out to be “universal design?!” Roger Ebert’s Film Festival, affectionately known as “Ebertfest” by locals, helped me realize I can still appreciate movies.

Roger Ebert uses a text-to-speech program called “Alex” to make presentations at film festivals and conferences now. “For me, the Internet began as a useful tool and now has become something I rely on for my actual daily existence,” he told an audience at the Ted Conference earlier this year, explaining why he considers himself fortunate to be born in this era. “[If this had happened before], I’d be isolated as a hermit; I’d be trapped inside my head. Because of the digital revolution, I have a voice, and I do not have to scream.”

I can relate. I mean, sure, technology can be annoying at times. For many of us with disabilities, however, technology is a lifesaver. Thank you, Roger Ebert, for the courage and fortitude you’ve shown in getting your voice heard. We all benefit from hearing your reviews, and now, thanks to technology–my Victor Reading Stream and the National Library Service–I can look forward to reading your life story, too.

This week The Bark published a post I wrote for them about guide dog Roselle and her blind partner Michael Hingson. The pair were on the 78th floor of Tower One of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. They worked in tandem to get out safely, taking 1,463 steps one at a time. From my post on The Bark blog:

I met Michael Hingson five years after the September 11 tragedy. He and I were in Raleigh, N.C., with our guide dogs, both of us presenting at a 2006 conference for people who work in blind services. Michael’s speech about experiences with Roselle on 9/11 wowed the crowd.

“You have got to write a book!” I told him at the hotel bar after our presentations.

Michael was way ahead of me, of course. He was already working on a book. We kept up with each other via email after the conference, and Thunder Dog: The True Story of a Blind Man, His Guide Dog, and the Triumph of Trust at Ground Zero by Michael Hingson with Susy Flory was published by Thomas Nelson Publishers last month.

I interviewed Michael over the phone for The Bark story, and he said that Roselle’s guide work after 911 was fine, she did not seem traumatized. Not at first, at least.

Two years later, however, Roselle’s body started attacking her blood platelets. Michael’s beloved yellow Labrador Retriever was diagnosed with immune mediated thrombocytopenia. He was able to control the disease with medication, but after a while the medication and the stress of guide work got to be too much for Roselle. She retired from guide work in March of 2007.

While it would be absurdly presumptuous to compare Harper’s life here in Chicago with the unbelievable trauma of 911, Roselle’s story, along with my life with Harper the past ten months, tells me that dogs, like humans, can take a while to process trauma.

Here’s what happened to us: On a cold day back in January, Harper stopped at a busy Chicago intersection, I listened, heard the traffic going straight at our parallel, and commanded “forward!” The woman driving the van said later that she didn’t see us. Maybe she was on her cell phone as she made that right turn. Texting? I have no way of knowing, because I couldn’t see her, either. Thank goodness Harper was watching. He saved our lives, pulling us away from the van with such force that I fell backward, cracking the back of my head on the concrete. Later on, when Mike inspected Harper’s harness, he discovered it was bent.

Harper worked fine for weeks after the accident. It wasn’t until a month or two later that he started showing fear around traffic. A Seeing Eye trainer came out to help in April. A second trainer visited in August. A third trainer was here last week, and after observing Harper’s behavior on the street (tail between his legs, head down, panting, trembling) he doesn’t doubt that the near-miss last January is the cause.

So, can dogs suffer from something like post-traumatic stress disorder? Thanks to Roselle and Harper, Michael Hingson and I are alive to tell you. Yes. They can.