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."

Harper didn't know what to make of the Jacuzzi.

While Harper and I were giving an evening presentation at Door County Community Center in Wisconsin last Tuesday night, it started snowing. The next morning, there was 15 inches of snow on the ground.

I tuned in to the local AM radio station and learned Door County has an army of 35 snow plows. Only one of them was assigned to Sturgeon Bay, where Harper and I were staying. “We’ll pass through all the major streets once today,” an official said during an interview with the radio host. “But if anyone especially needs a street plowed, call me at home.”

School was cancelled on Wednesday, and so were the three presentations we were scheduled to give that day. Harper and I were stuck in our hotel room. Ever seen the movie The Shining? Maybe if Jack Nicholson had brought a dog with him he wouldn’t have had such a rough time. Harper and I played endless rounds of fetch with his squeak toy, tinkered with the Voiceover feature on my new talking iPhone, listened to audio books, enjoyed warm baths in the Jacuzzi (well, I did, not Harper–though he was interested) and wandered outside now and then so Harper could pee – and play – in the snow.

A voice from behind the front desk called out a friendly hello during one of our lonely walks through the lobby. It was the hotel bookkeeper. “I live just down the street, so I could walk here,” she said. A cook had made it in, too, so the hotel restaurant would be open for lunch.

My friend Jenny is director of Women and Children’s Services at Ministry Door County Medical Center, and she’s the one who got the ball rolling for Harper and me to come “up north” to make all these presentations. Her husband Dennis owns a truck, so later that evening they plowed through the snow to rescue Harper and me and drive us to the only tavern open in the storm. Neighborhood Pub boasts a wall full of TV screens and was offering a Lenten Special Fish Fry that night. Leinenkugel makes a draft Pub Ale especially for Neighborhood Pub, and it paired well with the perch. By the time we left the pub, it was packed.

Jenny’s cell phone rang on the ride back to my hotel. A man named Ralph Bronner had come from Milwaukee to hear me speak that night. He’d booked a room at my hotel, and he was disappointed my event had been cancelled. Was I willing to meet him personally? I turned to Jenny’s husband Dennis. “As long as you guys come along,” I said. They agreed.

Ralph’s caretaker, a woman from Poland, had muscled their car through drifting snow to get to Door County. We joined Ralph and some of his friends in his room, and over a bottle of wine he regaled me with stories of his father.

If you came of age in the 60s and 70s, you must remember bathing with Dr. Bronner’s all-natural peppermint soap. Shampooing with it. Brushing your teeth with it, too. Even more fun than the soap’s peppermint tingle was reading all the quirky philosophical all-one-God beliefs Ralph Bronner’s father wrote on the label. That’s right: Ralph’s father was the Dr. Bronner who invented the formula for the famous soap.

From what I could gather, Dr. Bronner was more interested in his soap than his kids. Ralph grew up in 15 different orphanages and foster homes. Dr. Bronner was committed to an insane asylum in Milwaukee but escaped in 1947 and fled to California to start his soap company. “They didn’t think he was crazy there,” Ralph told me. Ralph and his brother eventually joined the soap company, and now it is run by Dr. Bronner’s grandsons. Dr. Bronner’s Magic Soap is still available in health food stores all over America, and the Bronner family is scrupulous about being an environmentally-friendly business. It gives employees generous bonuses and donates 70% of profits to charity. Over the years the Bronners have donated to arts programs in Door County. That’s how Ralph heard about my presentation, and that’s why he made the trip from Milwaukee to hear me speak.

We didn’t stay long in Ralph’s room. They needed to head out for dinner at, where else? Neighborhood Pub! Harper led me back to my room then for one last soak in the Jacuzzi. My trip to Door County may not have turned out the way I’d expected, but it sure was interesting. And here’s some good news: Jenny is going to try to work it out so Harper and I can return in the Fall to make up for the presentations that were cancelled. If Ralph Bronner makes the trip again, I’ll see to it that he gets a front row seat.

Harper and I woke up this morning in beautiful Door County, Wisconsin. My high school friend Jennifer L. Fischer is director of Women and Children’s Services at Ministry Door County Medical Center, and over Thanksgiving last year she had the wonderful, wonderful idea to have Harper and me come “up north” to do some presentations. Once Jenny got the wheels turning, everything fell into place. She’s quoted in a very flattering story in the Door County Advocate about the presentations I’ll be giving this week. The story is titled “Finding Joy through Adversity” and opens like this:

Beth Finke was always the life of the party, and that spirit wasn’t dampened when she lost her sight, says her old schoolmate Jenny Fischer

The story talks about my blindness, of course, but the part I found flattering was the way it described me as, well…a person. More from the story:

She also — because passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act was still five years away — lost her job. She found a few odd jobs — including nude modeling
for a university art class, which led to the career she settled into: writing.

“Staying still so long gave me lots of time to think about my writing, how to reformulate a lead, how to get across a certain idea,” she said. “In fact,
I used that quiet time to put together my very first published essay. I composed it in my head and then typed it into my talking
computer the minute I got home. Nude Modeling: Going In Blind was picked up by Alternet and published in alternative newspapers all over the country.”

The refusal to be held back by her blindness, and the decision to pose for the art class, are examples of why Fischer said one word sums up her old friend.

“She’s fearless,” Fischer said. “She always was.”

We’ll see if I’m fearless enough to let Harper take me for a walk this morning — Door County is a wondrous place, with more shoreline (298 miles of it, according to the Door County official web site) than almost any other county in the continental United States. Harper and I haven’t been for a walk on Chicago’s lakefront this year yet — it’s ben too cold — so today’s walk will be a test. We’ll see if this male yellow lab of mine can resist taking me into the water with him.

In the next two days we’re visiting with students from Sturgeon Bay, Southern Door and Gibraltar middle schools, plus meeting with physical therapists informally at the medical center. I’ll be giving talks to the general public, too. The community events, presented by Ministry Door County Medical Center, are scheduled at 7 p.m. March 22 at Southern Door Community Auditorium in Brussels and 7 p.m. March 23 at Door Community Auditorium in Fish Creek. If Harper and I don’t show up at one of these visits we’ve scheduled for this week, don’t worry. Jenny has a nephew in the Coast Guard.

That's Brian, the happy groom, walking me and Harper to the altar just before the ceremony began.

After officiating at my niece’s wedding Friday (and dancing up a storm at the reception afterwards) I needed a little blog break. Mike Knezovich to the rescue!

With a vengeance

by Mike Knezovich

I’m starting this post at a Barnes & Noble in Orlando, Fla., where Beth’s making a Hanni/Harper and Beth appearance. I’ll leave it to Beth to  fill you in on the wedding, but I can tell you is this: She and the wedding couple were perfect and everyone had a wonderful time.

But there were a few anxious moments the night before we flew south. I came home Wednesday night after a couple days in Urbana for work. I noticed some red spots on the floor. It looked like blood. This isn’t a totally uncommon experience–sometimes Beth gets a paper cut, or hits her forehead on a corner, and she bleeds without knowing it. Plus, she does frequent finger sticks for her blood sugar checks. Sometimes her finger keeps bleeding. It used to unnerve me a little, coming home after work to a little Lizzie Borden scene. But it’s always been something minor, and usually a little hydrogen peroxide and band-aid do the trick.

This time I looked at Beth’s forehead and fingers. Nothing. Almost at once, we both thought about Harper. I sat down next to him, and sure enough: red spots on his paws, and  his hip. Finally I found the source: A cut on the very tip of one of his ears. Beth immediately guessed what had happened. Earlier that day, as she and Harper tried to get on the elevator to go downstairs, a couple of small dogs growled and leaped at Harper. Flustered, she and Harper chose to wait for the next elevator.

Apparently, though, one of the little rats had gotten a piece of Harper’s ear. So I cleaned it and put some disinfectant on it. Harper was unfazed, a total trooper. I, on the other hand, was envisioning myself as an NFL placekicker, imagining little dogs flying end-over-end through goalposts. Followed by their owner. I hadn’t felt like this for awhile–kind of primal in wanting to set things right after that fact, to protect my little clan. Very Godfather like–you whack my brother, I whack yours. I’m sure I’ve always had this trait, but it was sharpened by by this sense that with all the unavoidable medical stuff that was visited on Beth and Gus, I just couldn’t tolerate any  stupidity that caused any more grief. I made a secret pact with myself:  anyone who made them feel bad would be made to feel at least twice as bad. (If they were lucky, only twice).

I made good on my pact. And for a long time, it worked for me. As I age, though, I find I have less energy for the anger–and less to be angry about. Gus is safe and sound in a little house in a little town by the river in Wisconsin. Beth takes me on business trips. We are back in Chicago after a wonderful wedding weekend in Orlando. Life is good. So as for the dogs,  I just sent a polite email to our building manager, asking that she inform the owners and ask them to take better care with their dogs. (And that if they didn’t, the dogs would swim with the fishes. No, not really.)

But I haven’t completely lost my edge. Here’s how I know: I’m an Illinois basketball fan. If you’re an Illinois basketball fan, you really loathe Bruce Pearl, who is the current coach of the Tennessee Volunteers. (If you’re not an Illinois fan, it’d take too long to explain–just trust me on this.) I’ve been diligently sending hateful thoughts his way for a long, long time.

Well, I managed to keep an eye on the NCAA basketball tourney between wedding festivities. And Tennessee was totally annihilated in their first round game. I mean, humiliated. And I learned that Pearl is likely going to lose his job because of NCAA rules infractions. And yeah, I admit, this made me very, very happy.

Which is all a long-winded way of saying, I might be mellowing some, but if you have little dogs, best to keep them on a short leash.