The American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA) is challenging 50 shelters across the country to save a minimum of 300 more cats and dogs August 1 through October 31 2010 than they did during the same months in 2009. It’s a contest, and the prize is $125,000. The Wisconsin Humane Society WHS is one of the competing shelters, so if you live near Milwaukee and are thinking of adopting a dog or cat, now’s the time!

Live far away? Don’t worry. You can still help. Sign up to become a member of the Save More Lives Community and comment to a blog post that the Wisconsin Humane Society published about our visit there last Saturday — shelters competing in this ASPCA challenge also get credit for any comments left on their blog posts.

That's Zoe and her mom.

I hope you’ll go through the trouble to sign up and leave a comment there. I can tell you firsthand that the Wisconsin Humane Society does great work. They bid on Hanni and me last April (we had donated an hourlong presentation to the lucky winner of an auction put on by the Association of Professional Humane Educators–the auction helped fund scholarships) and they were sincerely excited when they won us. So were we! Thanks to their terrific organizational and promotional skills, every single thing about the trip Hanni and I made to Milwaukee last Saturday was swell.

• Dezarae Jones-Hartwig from WHS was waiting for us at the Milwaukee train station, and her van had not one but two car seats in the back seat. The kids were home with their dad (thank you, Heath!) but they had left plenty of Cheerios on the floor for Hanni to munch on during our trip to the Humane Society.
• When Dezarae realized we had time to kill before our 1 p.m. presentation, she wondered if I might want to stop somewhere for coffee. Dezarae treated. We love Dezarae.
• The WHS parking lot was full when we arrived, not a single spot where we could park.
• I would love to say all those people were there to see Hanni and me, but the real reason is even better. A small shelter in Kentucky was having a hard time finding homes for all its puppies. WHS had agreed to rescue 55 of them and folks were lining up to adopt these guys.
• Others were there to take advantage of the “Luck of the Irish” promotion. In honor of Irish Fest (going on at the lakefront last weekend), adopters had a chance to win a prize or discounts from 25-100% off their adoption fee.
• With all that going on, many filed in for our event, too!
• A friend from junior high and high school was in the audience — “I live near here and I read in the paper you were coming,” she said. Kudos to WHS for doing such a terrific job promoting this event!
• A teenager who is blind was there for the presentation, too. After I read a bit from Hanni and Beth: Safe & sound out loud, I gave my Braille version to Zoe. She was thrilled. So was I.

Zoe’s mom came to our table afterwards to asked me to sign a print copy of the book for Zoe’s friend Ana, who’d come along to our presentation. “Zoe worked with Ana at the library this summer,” Zoe’s mom explained. “Ana guided Zoe around, they made a great team.”

That's AnnMarie and me. Of course, it's all about Hanni.

I shook Ana’s hand. Zoe’s hand, too. Zoe’s mom was right. They made a great team. Before Hanni and I left to catch our train home, the WHS folks presented us with a thank-you gift. I’m wearing it in this picture. For my blog readers who are blind, here’s a description. In this photo I am back home in Illinois, sitting on a porch stoop with Hanni and my four-year-old great-niece AnnMarie Florence Czerwinski. I’m sure we are beaming in this photo, I often beam when I am with “Baby Flo,” the only offspring in our entire family to be blessed with my mom’s beautiful name. Plus who wouldn’t beam to be wearing this red t-shirt that says, “It’s All About the Dog” across the top?

A perfect souvenir of a perfect day in Milwaukee. Thanks, Wisconsin Humane Society. I hope you win the challenge!

That’s me and the class at Renaissance Court in the Chicago Cultural Center. Photo courtesy Audrey Mitchell.

A loyal blog reader commented to last week’s post suggesting I publish excerpts from student essays. I love it when you blog readers leave comments to my posts, and I want you to know: I take your suggestions seriously! So here goes with excerpts from last week’s memoir-writing class, when I asked each student to pick a coin, check the date, then write a short essay about something that happened to them that year.

Andrea opened her essay with a confession.

I chose my coin at the end of class, which allowed me the opportunity to cheat on this assignment. The first coin I pulled read “1994”. The year of Dave’s cancer and death. I didn’t want to spend time there. I put that coin back. My second coin-“2004”. That year I closed Kids & Clay and had eye surgery. Too heavy for summer writing. Back in the baggie.

Beverly had an easier time. She chose 1958, the year her daughter was born.

I do remember long conversations in the mornings and the evenings over the merits of the names we were considering. Marsh had pretty much settled on Arabella for a girl and was undecided for a boy.

Arabella Bishop was a character in the movie Captain Blood starring Olivia D’Haviland and Errol Flynn. She was the beautiful niece of the governor of the island where Dr. Peter Blood was being held as a slave. He kidnapped her and fled to freedom.

Beverly wrote that she preferred the name Ramona. Or Sabrina, from the movie of the same name. “Our beautiful daughter was born on January 18, 1958, and she was promptly named Arabella Berkenbilt,” she said, a chuckle forming in her voice. “So much for Ramona and Sabrina!”

Sheila did some research before penning her essay about 1996.

To spur my memory, I Googled the year. Up popped DA BULLS! They’d won their second consecutive championship title. Continuing up to page 52 on Google, nothing but the Bulls championship was noted. Certainly more had occurred on this earth.

Rather than write about Michael Jordan, Sheila described a temp job she had taken that year. “Typists were not allowed to converse,” she wrote. “Only sneezes and the click-clack of typewriters broke the silence.”

One of my students was born in Italy, lived there during WWII, then immigrated to Chicago in her early 20s. She agreed to let me excerpt her essay here as long as I used her nom de plume: Monica Salina. “Monica is the name of my paternal grandfather’s orchard of my childhood,” she explained in an email message. “And Salina is a small enchanted island in Italy, the island where the movie ‘Il POSTINO’ was filmed.” Monica Salina’s essay describes a 24-hour period in 1977 when she took care of her three sons and their cousins during a visit to Italy.

The evening turns out to be fun: kids playing games speaking two different languages with a dictionary as referee. I wake up the next morning sweltering and uncomfortable. “The sun must be high in the sky”, is my first thought. “I hope I’m not late”! Only… it’s not morning yet. And it’s not the sun. It’s a fire in the near- by hills. The trees crackle under the flames. People outside look. Point. Talk all together. We are far enough away to feel safe.

As for Andrea, she eventually did find a coin she liked. 1984 was the year she and her husband rented a place in Ypsilanti.

An Ann Arbor attorney owned the old farmhouse we rented. His secretary told us we could paint if we wanted to. Just give their account number at the Sherwin Williams store.
Did I hear her right? She had just given me a gift! A project. A reason to get up in the morning.
My eye condition HAD FORCED ME TO quit teaching in 1982. My job had been my life. Two years with no identity. Two years in limbo. Two years of hours to fill. But this young woman just casually mentioned a project that actually excited me! I loved to paint. And this house needed me!

Andrea’s eye condition is quite rare; it developed when she was a young adult. She gets around fine without a cane or a guide dog, but it’s difficult for her to read standard print. In class, When it’s Andrea’s turn to read, she makes her way to Wanda and hands her essay over. Wanda reads Andrea’s essays out loud to the class, and I always marvel at how well she can sight-read Andrea’s work. Of course it helps that the essays are so well-written, that makes them easier to read!

What a privilege to hear these writers tell their stories to me – and the class – every week. Thank you, blog readers, for asking me to share some excerpts with you. It is truly my pleasure.

Every Wednesday, the seniors in my memoir-writing class pass a pouch of Scrabble tiles around the table. Whoever picks “A” reads their work aloud first, then “B” and so on. Last week, I threw a wrench into the works. I passed around a Ziploc bag full of loose change instead. “Just pick a coin,” I told them. While the Ziploc bag went around the room, I’d explain next week’s assignment.

That was the plan, at least. One thing I hadn’t anticipated -– but should have–is how averse some older people can be to, ahem, change. One student chose a coin, passed the bag. The next student asked her neighbor why she was passing a bag of coins. “Where are the tiles?” The neighbor didn’t know. The student with the Ziploc shrugged her shoulders, gave in, chose a coin, passed the bag. The next student asked why she was passing a bag of coins. “Where’s the tiles?” “What happened to the tiles?” The neighbor didn’t know. A student across the table tried to explain.

It got worse. Half the students (and not just the ones with diagnosed vision problems like me) couldn’t read the dates on the coins: too small. Wanda to the rescue. “Don’t worry!” she called out, digging in her bag. “I have a magnifying glass!”

Wanda always comes prepared. That’s her, helping me sign books last year at the Chicago Cultural Center.

Once everyone settled down and determined the date on their coin, I said I wanted them to write about something that went on in their lives that year. “I got 1978,” one of them whined. “I can’t remember anything that went on that year!” I suggested that if they got a year that didn’t ring a bell, they could do some research. Find out what happened in the news that year, maybe that would jog their memories.

”Keep in mind, though,” i told them.”I want you to write a memoir, not a report.” I told them that if, let’s say, they chose a coin with the year 2006 on it, I didn’t want them to write something like “The year 2006 was the year a coal mine disaster trapped 13 miners for nearly two days. Only one miner survived” and go on to write how some newspapers got it wrong, announced early that all the miners had been rescued when, really, they hadn’t. That is all very interesting stuff, I told them. But it’s a report, not a memoir. I want a memoir.

“But if you picked a coin with the year 2006 on it, and researching the coal mining disaster jogs your memory, reminds you how sad you were about that tragedy, how it made you think of your grandfather who was a coal miner, or how much the news inspired you to live more fully, then go ahead and mention the coal mine disaster in your essay. Give your readers some background.”

“What if you don’t have any coal miners?” one of them asked. “My people weren’t coal miners.” I told her to see me after class, we needed to get going. Otherwise we’d never have enough time to read this week’s essays, about The Very Best Summer Ever.

At the end of class a gaggle of students gathered with questions about the next assignment. One thought maybe 1986 was the year her husband left her, but she wasn’t absolutely sure. This student had no children, and she never married again. Last Wednesday was the first time she even hinted at writing about how she felt about her husband leaving. “How about you just say 1986 was the year that happened,” I whispered. “Creative non-fiction!” She giggled. Another student never was able to determine if her coin said 1966 or 1968. “how about if I write about 1967?” I said fine.

As Hanni and I got near the door to exit the classroom, a student kindly offered to walk us outside. She’d chosen 1968, the year she’d married her second husband. She and her husband were both very involved in labor unions, and I was thrilled that she, of all the students, had chosen the year 1968. “So much happened that year, I shouted to her above the Michigan Avenue street noise. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated that year. The Tet Offensive. The Democratic Convention here in Chicago. The Riots. “What month did you get married?” I asked. She told me it was May. “Oh,” I said, my voice growing somber.
“The same month Robert Kennedy was killed.”

RFK was killed a few weeks after they got married, she told me. Her husband used to leave the house around 6 in the morning for work each day, and on that morning she got out of bed to come down to kiss him goodbye. “I came down the stairs, and there he was, sitting on the couch, crying,” she’d never seen him cry before. “He’d turned on the morning news, that’s where he heard.”

This student’s husband died a few years ago. I asked if her children (they had a blended family, her husband had children before this second marriage, too) knew their dad cried when he heard about Bobby’s assassination. “No,” she said. “I don’t
think they know that.” I urged her to write about that morning in May, 1968.

I hope she does. I’ll find out tomorrow: We meet at 11:30.

After I lost my sight, and before I started writing, I volunteered for hospice.

Strike that. I should say, I trained to volunteer for hospice. After I completed the training, the agency was reluctant to assign me a patient. My Seeing Eye dog might scare a patient, they said. I might inadvertently knock over bedside medications. “We have a patient now who we thought about assigning to you, Beth, but he sleeps on an air mattress,” they said. How would you be able to tell when the mattress needed more air?” I calmly reminded them I still had my sense of touch. “I don’t know, Beth,” the hospice administrator continued. “We’re just afraid the families might see you as needier than they are.”

That's Gladys with her Husband John.

Later, I trained as a bereavement counselor and was assigned a woman in a nursing home. The other hospice volunteers had signed up for hospice because they wanted to visit patients in their homes. None of them wanted to work with Gladys.

My first Seeing Eye dog Dora learned quickly which room Gladys was in, and Gladys quickly became the most popular patient on her wing: she was the only one who had a dog visiting her once a week. Gladys loved a good joke, and she enjoyed talking about the past, particularly her childhood. Her husband had just died, and when I asked her questions about him she’d answer politely, change the subject, talk about her three children (and her beloved grandson Ben) instead. Gladys loved a good audience, and she had one in me.

On my visits to Gladys I’d often run into her youngest daughter Nancy, who was a nurse at a local hospital. Nancy took to walking Dora and me out of the nursing home, sometimes lingering with me on a corner just to talk. We became friends, and when Gladys died Nancy asked me to speak at the funeral.

Nancy and her partner Steven are coming to visit us in Chicago this weekend. They visit often, and we always, always have a terrific time together. When Hanni and I take the train down to Urbana, we stay at Steven and Nancy’s. To be specific, we stay in Gladys’ room. It’s a totally handicapped accessible room with it’s own bathroom — Steven and Nancy provided it for Gladys so she could move out of the Urbana nursing home before she died.

When I tell people how I met my friend Nancy, some react with an old cliché. Everything happens for a reason, they say. Really? The hospice agency was ignorant about my abilities, and then Nancy’s father died, and Gladys’ MS got bad enough to land her in a nursing home just so I’d meet Nancy? I don’t buy it. An omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent force would find some other way. I find it more comforting to think there is not some God-like force making bad things happen to us.

My friendship with Nancy is precious, but it cannot possibly make sense of the suffering her mom went through. Or the suffering her family went through as Gladys’ MS progressed. The reasons Nancy and I are friends? Because Nancy was good to her mom, because I didn’t let ignorance keep me from volunteering, because Gladys loved her family and because we all were open to letting strangers into our lives.

This weekend, when Nancy and I lift a glass (or too) at the local tavern, we’ll toast to Gladys. We miss her, and we celebrate that her spirit lives on through our friendship. Gladys: Here’s to you.

The panels I sit on at writing festivals connect me with some pretty cool authors. At the Words & Music Festival in New Orleans I appeared on a panel about memoir writing with Rick Bragg. I had the privilege of sitting on a panel called Dogs and Their People with Sonny Brewer (we’ve both had books published about our beloved dogs) at the Arkansas Literary Festival in Little Rock. The theme for the panel I sat on last Friday at the Northwestern Summer Writers Conference was Writer’s Point of View: How I Got Published, and one of my co-presenters was Angela Jackson. Her first novel, Where I Must Go, was published last year by Northwestern University Press.

Where I Must Go is the story of Magdalena Grace, a young black woman from an urban working-class neighborhood who attends an elite predominantly white university in the late ’60s. Angela herself entered Northwestern University in 1968 and began making notes for her book when she was still a student. She teaches African-American literature at Kennedy-King College in Chicago now, and her “How I got Published” story Friday taught our audience the value of perseverance. It took Angela forty years to finish all the rewrites of her novel while she was working to put herself through school, then teaching at various places and writing poetry and plays. “I’m not a natural storyteller,” she told them. “I am a poet. That’s different.” From a review in the New York Times:

Ms. Jackson, 58, a poet and playwright here whose collection “Dark Legs and Silk Kisses: The Beatitudes of the Spinners” won the 1994 Carl Sandburg Award for poetry, said {that with the novel} she sought to breathe life into the experiences of the first wave of black students into mostly white universities, a story that she said had not been told nearly enough.

“They transformed the nature of American universities because of their activism,” she said of the black students, “which gave us black studies, women’s studies, Asian studies. Not only did we benefit from an elite education, but universities benefited from our being there.”

I had a chance to talk with Angela for just a short bit after our panel was over. Like me, she comes from a big family — five surviving sisters and two brothers. Asked if she’d be able to stay and enjoy the rest of the day at the conference, she said she needed to get home to check on her mother. Angela is single, has never been married, and lives with her mother in the house she grew up in on Chicago’s south side.

She said she wrote her novel using pen and paper, then transferred it all to a computer. She doesn’t use Facebook or Twitter to promote her writing, and said Northwestern University Press has done an excellent job in distributing and promoting her book. And, of course, a favorable review in the New York Times never hurts! Where I Must Go will eventually be part of a trilogy that follows some of the same characters in this, Angela Jackson’s first novel. As soon as I hit the “publish” button on this post I’m going to check if this debut novel is available in audio format yet — I’m eager to read it!