Flo’s voice rang out from the phone early yesterday morning. “Your friend Jenny Fischer’s picture is on the front page of the Tribune! It’s a really big picture, too!” The photo in the Chicago Tribune accompanied a story about the success of some independent bookstores, and it opened describing the store where my longtime friend Jenny works: The Bookstore in Glen Ellyn, Ill.

The store is one of about 50 independent retail booksellers in the Chicago area. Not too long ago, all of them and the other roughly 4,000 independents across the U.S. were supposed to vaporize. By some estimates, more than 2,000 did.

But about 1,500 survived. And through a mix of obsessive attention to detail, lean inventory, an embrace of technology and resourceful salesmanship, they hang in there.

The photo shows Jenny helping a customer with a book selection, something she has enjoyed doing for years. Long before she even started at The Bookstore, I always knew to go to Jenny for a book recommendation. We met when I was 13 years old. I tagged along with a friend to a slumber party at Jenny’s. She was Jenny Foucre than, and I’ll never forget walking into their house. Her father was a handsome man with an exotic first name: Jacques. Her mother, Suzanne, was a stand-out blonde. I was mesmerized. Books were everywhere. The shelves went from floor to ceiling, packed with so many titles that the books spilled out onto end tables and countertops. “My mom loves to read,” Jenny shrugged.

As years went by I got to know Jenny’s mother and father and all the other colorful members of her family. I became especially close to Jenny’s sister Jill. The two of them stuck with me when I lost my sight. They took a 150-mile drive with their kids to visit after Gus was born – they were worried about me, and with good reason. Over the years they’ve invited me to parties, welcomed me at their kitchen tables for late night talks, and best of all: they’ve always treated me the same way they did before I lost my sight. Our children are all grown now, and when we meet these days we share a bottle of wine, catch up and talk…about books.

That's Jenny with Hanni and me at The Bookstore in Glen Ellyn.

The Tribune article quoted some expert saying bookstores are still the most powerful way to connect a reader with a book. He also predicted that the independent bookstores that have survived the recession will continue to thrive. From the story:

That’s pretty much how Shannon Stevens perceived it one afternoon this week at The Bookstore. She and her daughter, Katherine, 4, were hanging out waiting for Dad to arrive on the train from work.

“They’ve survived because they’re responsive to their customers and the staff knows their books,” Stevens said.

Jenny arranged a book signing at The Bookstore when my memoir, Long Time, No See came out. The line was out the door. Her review of my memoir for Book Sense helped put Long Time, No See on the map. She has lugged books to countless events in Chicago and the suburbs for me to sell and sign. She drove me to Springfield to the Illinois Library Association conference when Hanni and Beth: Safe & Sound debuted. She flew with me to New York City and guided me through the 2007 Book Expo at Javits.

Jenny and her sister Jill have been wonderful friends to me over the years, and I have their parents Suzanne and Jacques to thank for that. Suzanne died unexpectedly in 2009. We all miss her, but her spirit lives on through her daughters — and through their love of books. These days when people ask me if my friend Jenny still works at that little independent bookstore in Glen Ellyn, I just shrug my shoulders and say of course she does. “Jenny loves to read.”

With all the snow and ice this winter, and then with this week’s mayoral election, I just knew that the seniors in our memoir-writing class were getting phone calls. “Friends and relatives from warmer places are calling you, right? They’re asking you why you don’t move closer to them.” Their heads nodded in unison. A chorus of “uh-huhs.”

And so, the assignment for last week was: Here’s Why I Haven’t Moved to _________.” It was up to them to fill in the blank. as always, these writers did not disappoint. Audrey’s parents came from a small town in Edgefield County, South Carolina to Chicago during the Great Migration, and Audrey had considered moving there.

I’d see a lot of relatives on my visits. my aunts and uncles were so comforting. One of my older cousins coined the phrase “door poppers”: short visits to as many people as you can in a period of time. I think our top count was 15 in one area. No matter how short the visit, the people were glad to see you. 

When it came time for Audrey to retire, however, things in Edgefield County had changed.

My thoughts had been that I would come to a place that would remain a quiet country town, but it was getting quite busy. The next generations were unlike their elders. A home-cooked meal became take-out. No “door poppers” with them. They are hardly home. I thought I knew the traditions and behavior of the people in the area, but as generations change, so does the culture. 

It was so interesting to hear all the essays and find out, one, which place each writer had considered moving to, and two, what had kept them in Chicago.

Joette.

Joette’s piece about why, if she ever moves to L.A., she’ll take a plane, opened with a description of her Pop’s decision to close his Puerto Rican diner in New York City and drive the family (along with their flamboyant counterman and bus boy) to Los Angeles:

His cousin told him that it was the Promised Land and invited us to join her there.
My mother packed up a few pieces of clothing for each of us, and only one toy per child. Not much of a sacrifice. We were so poor the three of us kids didn’t have much to begin with. I brought my doll, although I would have preferred taking the Rock-ola. 

Joette’s description of the beloved jukebox they’d left behind in the New York diner reminded all of us why it is oh so important to include detail in our writing.

The counter guy Raul used to love to dance to the big beautiful Rock-ola juke box that blasted out a vast collection of tunes sung in Spanish. As a six year old, it delighted me to watch him dance as he went about his chores. I loved to lean on the huge wondrous music machine and feel its heartbeat pulsing with the amazing rhythm of its Latin soul. I liked to put my eyes close to its colorful lighted body and see the green and red world shining within it. Standing on tip toes I could watch the 45s drop into place and the record player arm move as if by magic into perfect place to play the number requested for only a dime, five plays for a quarter. 

Wondering why I haven’t moved away from Chicago? The answer is obvious. I’d miss this class too much!

My Seeing Eye classmates Denise, Marcus, Carlos--and me--and Steve, our trainer.

Jessica and Julia, two grad students from IIT’s Institute of Design, are working on a class project to come up with a product that will help people who are blind. They contacted me as part of their research, and one of the many, many, many questions they asked during an interview was whether there is one career that is common for people who are blind. Truth is, very few people who are blind have jobs at all. From a story in Forbes:

Despite the technical advances made to help blind employees, there is still a staggering unemployment rate among that population. Several organizations, including the American Foundation for the Blind, put it at 70% among people of employment age, a number that has stayed constant for many years.

I know firsthand how difficult it can be to find work if you are blind. That’s one (of many reasons) I’ve been so impressed when I’ve gone to the Seeing Eye to train with a new dog. All three times – first with Pandora, then Hanni, and now Harper — most of my fellow students there were employed. An article in Make It Better magazine puts it this way:

In fact, while 7 of 10 blind individuals are unemployed, 7 of 10 Seeing Eye graduates are working—a huge difference.

Which comes first? Do people who are blind get Seeing Eye dogs, then find work? Or do they find work, then realize they’d benefit from having a Seeing Eye dog? I don’t know the answer to that one, but I thought I might be able to answer Jessica and Julia’s question by telling them about the students I met when I was training with Harper.

Sixteen of us graduated with Seeing Eye dogs last December. The youngest of us was 24 years old, the oldest was 81. One woman had just graduated from massage therapy school, another was a computer programmer for the city of Madison, Wis. One had retired from teaching at a school for the blind, another was teaching blind students in the public schools.  A musician had founded an arts school for urban kids. One man worked for the IRS, one woman was a social media consultant. A number of students were social workers. One woman counseled inmates at a prison, and another social worker worked with Vietnam vets at a VA hospital. “My last dog was a shepherd named ‘Nixon’” he laughed. “No way could I show up at work with a dog with that name!” When he got home, he introduced his dog to others as “Dixon.”

The Seeing Eye divided us into four groups with four different trainers, and I got to know the three others in my group especially well. In our class photo Steve, our trainer, is way over there on the right. He’s the one without a dog – he’s not blind! And then, from left to right are

• Denise and Wonder. Denise was born blind, received her doctorate from University of Wisconsin and speaks fluent French and Spanish. She is a Federal employee and works in Washington, D.C. for the Department of Agriculture.
• Marcus and Garrett. Marcus is a motivational speaker. He had just started college in Missouri and was out with friends, sitting in the passenger seat, when a drunk driver slammed broadside into their car. The accident left Marcus blind. He speaks about alcohol awareness at college campuses all over the country and hopes to attend grad school at Columbia in New York this Fall.
• Carlos and Exon. Carlos is the Technological Services Specialist at the New Jersey Commission for the Blind and moonlights as the overnight switchboard operator at his local VA hospital. He grew up with low vision from retinal problems but attended regular school. “Doctors told me not to play sports or get into fights or I might go blind completely,” he said with a laugh. “You show me a kid growing up in East Orange who doesn’t get into fights!” He went totally blind when he was 17 and told me going to college with a Seeing Eye dog made him a chick magnet. (Marcus concurred.)
• Me and Harper. You know about us.

Blindness affects people from all walks of life, and, when allowed, we do all sorts of work. Last Friday Harper and I took a train to speak at the Wisconsin Vision/O&M Teachers Annual Conference. Their focus this year was on technology, and they asked me to talk about my career in writing and radio. Before my speech I had the privilege of meeting one-on-one with a junior in high school who is blind and can’t decide whether she wants to be a writer or a lawyer. We were just about done with our meeting when an elementary school kid who is blind burst into the room. He’d already written four books, he told us. “I’m going to charge a dollar a page and get rich!” His vision teacher at school taught him to use an accessible personal digital assistant (PDA) with a Braille input keyboard to help him write his books. A quote in that Forbes article from Barry Honig, who is blind and president of Honig International, a Manhattan-based executive search and management consulting firm, says it all.

Honig, the executive recruiter, says the current knowledge-based economy produces exactly the type of jobs blind people are easily able to do. In many cases, it’s a matter of getting the software that enables the computer to “speak” to the user. “With technology today, there is no excuse to not be able to get a job,” he says. “We’re in a unique time for blind people because employees aren’t only laboring with things requiring vision like working with a saw or drill. Most people sit in front of a desk with a computer and a phone.”

Amen.

If you can learn to play piano, you can learn to play accordion. Good ol' Gus has always been a good sport about me practicing.

I was lucky enough to be home this afternoon to hear Terry Gross play an excerpt from her 1986 Fresh Air interview with George Shearing. The jazz piano great died yesterday. He was 91.

Shearing was born blind. When Terry Gross asked him if his piano teachers thought a blind person could learn to play, he said playing was no problem. It was reading music that was difficult.

There is such a thing as Braille piano music, but if you think about it, wouldn’t it take three hands to read and play it at the same time? I asked another blind jazz piano great, Donnie Heitler, this question when I interviewed him for a newspaper story years ago. Like George Shearing, Donnie Heitler learned to read Braille piano music in a school for the blind.” But you don’t use it when you’re performing,” Donnie told me. “You use it to learn the piece, and then you memorize what you’ve learned.” From my story:

Although Braille music uses the same format – six dots arranged in 63 different ways–  the dot combinations mean different things in music than in literature. Where the 1 and 4 dots mean “c” in a book, they signify a “slur” symbol in music. 

Donnie claimed Braille music wasn’t difficult to learn. “I learned it in the second grade,” he said with a shrug. “Things are easy to learn when you’re a kid.” I know what he means. I learned to play the piano when I was five. I was always a pretty good sight reader. Ironic.

Blind musicians like Heitler and Shearing read piano scores a bit at a time, learning one measure in the right hand, then switching to learn that measure in the left hand, then putting them together. “It’s like chewing off little pieces of spaghetti,” Donnie told me. “You take one bite at a time and finally finish the whole thing.”

I was 26 when I lost my sight. Since then, I’ve been learning to play by ear. Over the years four different piano teachers have sat at my side on the bench, patiently walking me through chord progressions and teaching me theory. It hasn’t been easy – for my teachers, or for me. Compared to learning to read Braille music, though, playing by ear is a walk in the park. I’ll keep working on it. You know, save the spaghetti-eating for the dinner table.

The memoir-writing class I teach for senior citizens at the Chicago Cultural Center was cancelled on Feb. 2 due to the blizzard. You know, I’ve seen other winters, and I’ve made it through, but this one doesn’t seem the same. After a phone call to Flo to make sure she was doing alright, I dialed Wanda’s number to see if she was weathering the storm, too.

This is what our street looked like on the night of the blizzard. (Photo courtesy Lora Delestowicz-Wierzbowski, friend, neighbor, White Sox fan and artist.)

My regular blog readers know Wanda from some of her essays I’ve excerpted here. When she heard my voice on the phone, she excused herself to turn down the radio. “I’m tired of hearing all those people calling in anyway,” she said. “All they’re doing is complaining about their long waits for the bus or the train, or the way the city didn’t shovel their street.” Wanda is 88 years old, and she is not a complainer. She credits her own upbeat attitude to her hardworking mother and her beloved uncle, Hallie B. “Hallie B. always told me that people who sit and mope with their head in their hands, well, they never see the good things coming their way.” When I asked her to describe the storm to me, she started out by using her favorite four-syllable word. “Bee-you-tee-Full.”

Wanda has lived in more than 50 different apartments or houses in her lifetime. Her mother was a “domestic” and had to leave Wanda every Sunday to take off and live at the houses she took care of. Wanda lived with one relative one week, a friend the next, and sometimes, with complete strangers. “I tell you, Beth” she said to me once. “I could tell you stories about growing up that would make the hair curl on a bald man’s head.”

These days Wanda lives alone, perched in a small apartment in a South Side high-rise that overlooks Lake Michigan. She writes her essays for class while sipping on coffee, looking out her kitchen window and watching the birds and boats on the lake. “There was absolutely no horizon during the storm,” she told me. “The sky was white, the ground was white, the lake was white. Like someone had draped a fuzzy white blanket over my window.”

Wanda woke up at 3 a.m. the night of the storm and sat staring out of her window for hours. She’d never seen anything like it. It was stunning. “I drank coffee until I was drunk!” she laughed. “It was Bee You Tee Full!”

My regular blog readers are also familiar with Hanna, the oldest student in our writing class. Hanna turned 91 in January and plowed through the snow with Speedo, her walker, to make it back to class last Wednesday. “He doesn’t like the snow,” Hanna admitted. “But he got me here.” She brought an essay she’d written about the blizzard, and I’m excerpting from it here :

The snow muffled the sounds. The silence is stunning. The view is interesting, the ice shelf hugs the shoreline totally, the lake is miles away. It’s all white as far as I can see. Almost blinding. The trees stick out and relieve the monotone, the shoreline and Belmont harbor are clearly defined, but all white. The sky is light gray. I wish I could paint this totally deserted moonscape with nothing moving, the gray sky just a few shades darker. 

And of course, by writing this essay, Hanna had painted the landscape for us. She just used a pen rather than a brush. I walked home after class with a spring in my step. The Yaktracks on my feet were working, Harper could guide at full speed, and Wanda and Hanna’s positive words were helping me look at snow in a different way.

Once home safe & sound I found a message in my inbox that lifted my spirits even higher. You might recall that Francine Rich, my publisher at Blue Marlin Publications was so moved after reading excerpts of Hanna’s writing here on my blog that she volunteered to collect and format all of Hanna’s essays for her. Francine is making sure she sticks with Hanna’s original text but is making all necessary grammatical changes and, in some cases, renaming the stories.

All this work is taking Francine longer than she had anticipated. The email message that made me so happy came from Hanna, she’d heard from Francine. Three files had been formatted that morning, and the task had taken Francine a little over an hour to complete. From Francine’s note to Hanna:

There are 83 files. If I try to devote an hour a day to this, it should take me about four weeks to complete the process. So I figure I’ll be done about mid-March.

This is such a generous, generous gesture on Francine’s part. Thanks to Francine, Hanna will have all her essays organized, formatted and ready to send out to agents and publishers before her 92nd birthday. “I’m having fun with it,” Francine wrote in her note to Hanna. “And may even surprise you with the end results…”. If all those agents and publishers out there are too dimwitted to take on Hanna’s book, it will already be formatted. Hanna and/or her family can self-publish.

All you Hanna Bratman fans out there get ready to stand in line. I predict a trail around the corner and down the block at her first book signing.