This Wednesday, April 20, my wise, unpretentious, courageous, empathetic, stubborn, hardworking, appreciative and absolutely gorgeous mother will be 95 years old.

Flo contemplates her 95th birthday dessert on the 95th floor of the John Hancock Building in Chicago.

Although Flo herself would never say this, her life has not been easy. Our father, Ed Finke, died when he was 47 years old. My oldest sister Bobbie is 20 years older than I am, and she was already married by then. The six of us younger ones were still at home. Flo found a job at a nearby bakery that allowed her to bring us little girls along to work on days she couldn’t find a babysitter. Once all of us were enrolled in elementary school, Flo studied, got her GED, and found a job as an office clerk. She worked there 20 years, burned the mortgage on the house, and retired at age 70.

Our father’s early death taught us a lot of things. One of them? Never take birthdays for granted. We’ll be celebrating Flo’s 95th all week long, and we kicked it all off last Saturday morning. My sister Cheryl drove Flo to downtown Chicago, Marilee flew in from Florida, Bev took a train from Michigan, and we all met for brunch at, where else? The 95th Floor of the John Hancock Center. My sisters wisely placed me with my back to the windows. Flo got the spot with a panoramic view of the Chicago skyline, but if you ask me I had the best seat in the house: directly across from the birthday girl.

Flo had never been to the John Hancock Center before. She was absolutely tickled. Our nephew Brian Miller flew back from South Korea that afternoon. His cousin Ben picked him up at O’Hare so he could join Marilee and Bev for a sleepover at their Grandma’s. Marilee had to fly back to Florida Sunday, Bev and Brian will be here until Tuesday, and on Wednesday Harper is guiding me to the train station to take a ride out to Elmhurst. I’ll meet Cheryl and Flo at a wine shop for a toast to the birthday girl. Harper’s work ethic has been improving since I published that last post, and if my sense of joy and exuberance on Flo’s birthday Wednesday wears off on Harper, I know he’ll get us all the way to the train station without balking once. We’ll all toast to that, too!.

Thats Beverle, Cheryl, Flo, Marilee and Moi.

During the car ride home from the Hancock Center Saturday, Flo thanked us over and over again for her big day out. “This sure was a special birthday celebration,” she said, and after pondering that for a moment, she added one last thought. “All of my birthdays have been special.” We agreed. Happy birthday, dear Flo. And many, many more.

Hanni met Harper recently and offered some advice.

Four months ago (has it been that long already?) Harper and I returned from Morristown to piles of snow here in Chicago. Poor Harper had never trained in snow, but he was a troopertrouper. He made the adjustment.

Is that why he’s cowering on our walks to the Loop now? Does he miss the snow? Or maybe it’s a delayed reaction to the van that turned right in front of us. The driver didn’t see us crossing, she said. Her van brushed Harper’s face, and he pulled me back from harm so strongly that I fell. My head crashed on the concrete. Maybe that near miss still has him scared. We’ve been traveling a lot lately. Is that confusing him? Can I blame the little snippy dog who nipped the tip of Harper’s ear off in the elevator? Post traumatic stress syndrome?

Harper’s cowering started the day after we returned from the Door County blizzard in Wisconsin. I had a meeting at Willis Tower with my co-workers at Easter Seals Headquarters that morning. Halfway there, along a normal length of sidewalk, Harper crouched to the ground. Wouldn’t budge. Not forward, not backward. After trying everything I could come up with to get Harper to move, I finally accepted help from a stranger. The man walked Harper and me to Franklin Avenue, and when Harper caught sight of the Willis Tower he took off like old times.

On the way home, though, he cowered again. Four different times. Now he cowers on the way to and from the memoir-writing class I teach, on the way to and from the pool I swim at, on the way to and from the train station to visit Flo. We eventually get to all these places, but it’s like driving a car that stalls all the time. It’s miserable. Both for Harper, and for me.

”It really doesn’t matter why he’s acting this way,” the instructor from the Seeing Eye said when I called the training department for help. “he just can’t act like this.” I’ve been back and forth with the Seeing Eye almost every day. They’ve been wonderful, listening to my concerns, giving me ideas to try, suggesting different ways for me to hold the harness and leash to remind Harper I’m back there and I mean business. “And be sure to overdo the praise when he does good,” they said. “Go really over the top.”

On our walk home from teaching the memoir class today, I had no opportunities to praise Harper at all. He didn’t do anything well. Not one thing. I usually put music on and Harper and I dance around with his toys once we make it home safely, but there was no joy in Mudville today. “I don’t want to talk to you,” I told him. I unbuckled his harness, gave him some water and slouched into my office chair to phone the Seeing Eye. Again.

”An instructor is coming out your way at the end of the month,” the trainer on the phone said, asking which days would work best for them to visit Harper and me that week. Before hanging up I told her I’d planned on going to the pool this evening, but now I wasn’t so sure. She urged me to stick with that plan, arming me with another technique to try to encourage Harper.

*******

Hours later.

*******

Just got home from the pool. Never got a chance to use that new technique. Harper didn’t need it. He was perfect. He never balked. Never cowered. He stopped on a dime at every curb. And when I gave the “forward” command? By God, he pulled me forward!

Hmmm. I know Seeing Eye dogs are smart. Think Harper can read my blog posts?

Nancy graciously took time out on her last day to talk with me (and Hanni, of course).

I was out of town for yesterday’s home opener at White Sox park, so I listened to the game on the radio. The fans were loud, the Sox scored right away, Edwin Jackson struck out 13 batters and we won. All great stuff, but I couldn’t help but notice. Something was missing. For the first time in 42 years, legendary White Sox organist Nancy Faust was not playing on opening day. Loyal blog readers might remember the piece I wrote for the Chicago Tribune about Nancy Faust when she retired last year:

During one game, I had my Seeing Eye dog Hanni lead me to Nancy’s booth so I could thank her for helping me track

what was happening on the field. Nancy was absolutely lovely in person, and Hanni and I waltzed back to our seats to a pipe organ chorus of “How Much is that Doggie in the Window?”

A reporter interviewed Nancy for an article in yesterday’s Daily Herald about what she’d be doing on her first day off work. Probably watching the game on TV, she said. The story credited Nancy for reinventing the role of a ballpark organist by incorporating rock and pop songs into her repertoire, and gave a shout out to Rollie Hudson (another organist I’ve blogged about here). It also listed some of the clever songs she’d come up with over the years:

• A Whiter Shade of Pale for Henry Blanco
• In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida for player Pete Incaviglia
• I Could Have Danced All Night for Chone Figgins

Don’t get that last one? It’s a reference to Professor Higgins in My Fair Lady, of course. Rhymes with Figgins! My favorite literary reference from the Daily Herald article was this one:

Acquiescing to tastes beyond the literary library of most baseball fans, Faust once followed a fan’s suggestion to welcome Detroit Tiger Brandon Inge with The Hollies’ song “Bus Stop” in reference to the classic work “Bus Stop” by playwright William Inge. The next day, two fans excitedly rushed up to Faust to tell her that connection was brilliant.

“I guess I made three people happy,” Faust says. “The fan who suggested it and those two.”

Make that four happy people, Nancy. You may be retired, but these stories about you continue to make me smile.

Tomorrow Harper and I are taking a train to Champaign to give a guest lecture to an animal sciences class at the University of Illinois. I plan on telling the students what it’s been like transitioning to a new Seeing Eye dog, then going over some of the qualifications necessary to become a Seeing Eye trainer/instructor.

Trainers at the Seeing Eye need to have a college degree, and then they can apply for an apprenticeship. While some instructors go right from college into a Seeing Eye apprenticeship, most of the instructors I’ve talked to worked at other jobs before deciding to train dogs. From the Seeing Eye Web site:

Staff instructors are full-time employees who hold college degrees from various fields of study and have successfully completed three years of specialized on-the-job training. They relate well to dogs and people and are physically fit, since their jobs are physically demanding and involve working outdoors in all weather. Some of our current instructors came from teaching, business consulting and rehabilitation fields. Some were in the military and worked with dogs before, and many started out as kennel assistants here at The Seeing Eye.

Steve Newman, the very handsome (from what he told us) man who trained Harper, got his college degree in accounting. He got his CPA, too, and worked as an accountant until he realized he likes working with people more than numbers. He found a job as a headhunter then, but when the economy went sour, so did that career. After that he spent a lot of time at a Starbucks, using his laptop to apply for other jobs.

That’s my little group from our 2010 Seeing Eye class. Steve, our trainer, is the one without the dog.

Turns out that the Starbucks Steve was hanging out at was the very one Seeing Eye trainers use to teach dogs to navigate tight places. Steve was so taken by the string of beautiful dogs coming in and out of the coffee shop that he asked one of the trainers what it took to become an instructor. “I knew I loved dogs,” he said. “And I like working with people, too, so I decided to apply.” During his interview, Steve was warned about the long hours (including some overnights once the students get matched with their new dogs). “I’d worked as an accountant,” he told me with a laugh. “Long hours didn’t scare me.” Steve got the job , passed the three-year apprenticeship, and has been training Seeing Eye dogs ever since. It was my great fortune, and Harper’s, too, that Steve was the one assigned to my group of four last December. He’s a smart man, loves the dogs, is good with all sorts of people and is easy to laugh.

When Harper and I arrive in class to talk with those students on Thursday, I’ll be sure to remind them that guide dog instructors don’t just work with dogs. They work with people, too. We blind folks are all different ages, and we have all sorts of different backgrounds and experiences behind us. Some of us are newly blind and still adjusting, others have been blind our entire lives. Although some of us might be easy to work with, a lot of us are brats. We test our teacher’s patience. God knows I tested Steve’s, and he passed! The Puppy Place (a Web site created by a group of volunteers who raise puppies for guide dog schools) says it well:

Guide Dog trainers must work with a variety of dogs within a given size range. A great deal of walking and upper body strength is required to mold hyper young dogs into responsible workers. In the beginning, when working with dogs alone, this may not seem bad, but soon the apprentice must team dog training with people training. You can’t leash correct your blind student, or give him/her a dirty look and expect the undesired behavior or wrong actions to stop. You must verbally communicate while physically managing to keep up with the dog. Coming out of yourself to work with both dogs and people is a special skill and not one to be taken lightly. 

Schools receive literally hundreds of applications a year from people who want to train guide dogs, so even opportunities to become an apprentice are rare. Most guide dog schools do require instructors to do an apprenticeship, and some apprenticeships last as long as four years. From my observation, apprentices work very hard. And from what I hear, salaries are quite low.

I have no idea what people are paid once they pass the apprenticeship and become full-fledged instructors. Considering that guide dog schools are non-profit organizations, I would guess the pay is far below what a lot of today’s college educated people expect to earn. If you’re looking for job satisfaction, though, this kind of work must be pretty dang rewarding!

For general information about working for The Seeing Eye, email jobs@seeingeye.org. That, or just start hanging out at the Starbucks in Morristown.

Usually when I volunteer to visit a Chicago Public School, a fellow volunteer drives us there. This Monday, though, Harper and I are taking a cab. “We’ll make sure there’s someone at the school waiting to meet you at the door,” the volunteer coordinator told me. “You don’t want to just get dropped off, not in that neighborhood.”

I gotta admit. Her warning scared me. And after I thought about it for a few seconds, my fear turned to sadness. If it’s not safe for Harper and me to step out of a cab in that neighborhood, can it possibly be safe for an eight-year-old to go to school there? Guess we’ll find that out when we meet the second-graders at Manierre School Monday.

Manierre is located right across from the Marshall Field Garden Apartments (a subsidized housing project) and 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 Harper and talk about being a writer. I hope my stories of learning new ways to read and write after losing my sight might encourage them to keep trying.

I’m looking forward to visiting Manierre Monday. It’ll be Harper’s first experience as a Sit Stay Read! dog, and I’m confident he’ll guide me safely from the cab to the school’s front door. Visiting other Sit Stay Read! schools with Hanni taught me there’s far more to these neighborhoods than gangs and crime. Kids live there, too. Thoughtful kids. Resourceful kids. Sweet kids.

Thanks to the generosity of my publisher--Blue Marlin Publications--all the kids in the Sit Stay Read programs Hanni and I visited the past few years went home with a free copy of "Hanni and Beth, Safe & Sound."