Today’s guest blogger, Andrew Bendelow.

I am pleased to introduce Andrew Bendelow as our guest blogger today. A retired school teacher, Andrew joined our weekly Zoom class this past year and generously agreed to share this little ditty — a fresh look at a classic holiday story — with you Safe & Sound readers.

It’s a Wonderful Lie

by Andrew Bendelow

Around this time of year, my wife and I look ahead to the holidays, when the desire to spend time with adult children and grandchildren is large. I make a suggestion or two for events that could bring us together with the younger generations, then she proposes something we’ve been doing every year for the past several. “Let’s reserve tickets for ‘It’s A Wonderful Life’ at American Blues Theater.”

“Well, we’ve done that the last several years. Maybe they’d like something else better.”

“It has always been wonderful.”

“Mmm. I guess you’re right.”

The discussion ends, because almost everyone finds it wonderful. I, too, am a sucker for the story. I, too, thrill to George Bailey’s supernatural happy ending. The film and its forms — like the one at the American Blues show — have been popular with Baby Boomers and Gen Xers since they were raised watching it on public TV in the 70s and 80s. But at least a couple of Gen Zers I know look forward to experiencing this “holiday classic” every year

I wonder why? What feelings, values, or hopes does this narrative carry for today’s young adults?

Perhaps the same that made Dickens’ A Christmas Carol a best-seller in the 1840s and after: its suggestion that something like social justice or fairness is possible within capitalism, that human compassion and “good will toward men” can actually win over greed.

Dickens’ mass audience of readers, well-acquainted with the horrors of the modern industrial workplace — child labor, huge wealth disparities, etc. — found in Scrooge’s story an escape from the dog-eat-dog marketplace to a wondrous place, where normal human lives mattered, and where even the frosty heart of a calculating businessman could open to the poor.

Tiny Tim’s “God Bless Us, Every One!” asserts a belief in a democratic benevolence sorely lacking in Victorian England, and thus fervently wished.

The 1946 Frank Capra fantasy directly descends from Scrooge, and as with Dickens, Capra’s Depression-era audience was wise to capitalism’s lies and abuses of power. His 1941 hit, Meet John Doe, according to a contemporary review, left film-goers with the hope “that some day, selfishness, fraud and deceit will be expunged from human affairs.”

Five years later, Capra delivered on that promise. He gave his audience “It’s A Wonderful Life,” set in a world where good guys like John Doe win in the end. To pull it off, his audience willingly accepts that the universe is unwilling to see a good man, in this case the Everyman, George Bailey, throw his life away merely for material reasons. Imagine a town in which people transcend self-seeking and surmount the merciless ethic of the marketplace. That place is Bedford Falls in Capra’s movie.

How nice to reside, even for the space of a two-hour show, in a world where individuals hold each other in high regard, and actually invest in each other’s well being. Perhaps there lies the secret of its appeal to Gen Zers, who know very well untrammeled ambition.

In the scene where George and his newlywed sacrifice their honeymoon money to keep the building & loan afloat, his words and generosity soothe the panic of the bank rushers:

“You’re thinking about this all wrong,” he tells the mob. “Your money isn’t here, it’s in Joe’s house, right next to yours, and then the Kennedy house, and then Mrs. Maclan’s house, and a hundred others. It’s what banks do.”

George is their teacher, reminding these wage-earners that the lending and housing markets can be human, too. “We’ve got to stick together,” he says. “We’ve got to have faith in each other!”

Fine and brave words. If only they were more often true!

I usually avoid reading fiction or watching movies starring characters who are blind. Too many writers and filmmakers portray blind characters one-dimensionally — we’re either heroic or tragic, bumbling or, particularly lately, blessed with super-powers.

But Netflix is releasing a limited series of four episodes of the film All the Light We Cannot Seetomorrow, November 2, and I am eager check it out.

The film is based on Anthony Doerr’s Pulitzer-Prize winning bestseller. I listened to the audio version when it came out in 2014, and if you ask me, he deserved that Pulitzer!

One of the main characters in Doerr’s novel All the Light We Cannot See is blind, but there’s much more to Marie-Laure LeBlanc than that. She grew up in Paris, her father is raising her on his own, and the two of them evacuate to a village in Brittany called St. Malo after Paris is invaded by the Nazis. Her father goes missing, and she’s a teenager by the time the Americans arrive on D-Day.

Written in third-person, Doerr’s chapters are very short — they swing back and forth between the changes young Marie-Laure is enduring in France and those that Werner Pfennig, an orphaned teenager in Germany, faces when placed in an elite Nazi training school there during WWII. The author avoids using visual descriptions in the chapters about Marie-Laure, since they are written from her point of view. So here’s a question for you blog readers who’ve read the book already: I bet you can describe Marie-Laure’s beloved Papa , but any idea what he looks like? Probably not, because the author never tells us that. There is little, if any, visual description of Étienne or Madame Manec (the pair Marie-Laure and her Papa live with in exile) either, yet readers come to know these characters very well, too. Here’s an example from early in the book, before Marie-Laure’s cigarette-smoking Papa goes missing:

Every time she comes within earshot, Marie-Laure hears the “Pfsssst!” of her father lighting another match. His hands flutter between his pockets.

Afternoons he repairs things around Étienne’s house: a loose cabinet door, a squeaking stair board. He asks Madame Manec about the reliability of the neighbors. He flips the locking clasp on his toolcase over and over, until Marie-Laure begs him to stop.

Marie-Laure doesn’t have to be able to see her Papa to know he is anxious, and neither do we. If Marie-Laure could see, the author wouldn’t have pointed out that she sees the cabinet door he is fixing, he would have just said “he’s fixing a cabinet door.” And so, he doesn’t use extra words to point out Marie-Laure hears the squeaky cabinet door, either. We know he’s fixing the cabinet door the same way Marie-Laure would know, and that helps us stay right in her head and experience her life during WWII the way she is.

As I continued reading, I noticed how often Doerr chose the verb “find” rather than describing Mari-Laure “feeling through” something or “”touching” an object. Sounds simple, I guess, but to me, keeping it simple like this is brilliant. Over and over again, the author resists the temptation to sound trumpets to remind the reader that Marie-Laure can’t see, and that keeps readers in the moment. Here’s another example, this one from later in the book when Marie Laure is alone and escaping into the attic:

Only thing to do is climb. Seven runs up into the long triangular tunnel of the garret. The raw timbered ceiling rises on both sides toward the peak, just higher than the top of her head.
Heat has lodged itself up here. No window. No exit. No where else to run. No way out, except the way she has come.

The passage continues:

Her outstretched fingers find an old shaving bowl, an umbrella stand, and a crate full of who-knows-what. The attic floor boards beneath her feet are as wide across as her hands. She knows from experience how much noise a person walking on them makes.

Isn’t it something, the way that using senses beyond the visual can make writing more colorful? Aria Mia Loberti, who is blind due to a severe form of the genetic condition achromatopsia, plays Marie-Laure Leblanc in the Netflix adaptation, which also stars Louis Hofmann, Hugh Laurie, and Mark Ruffalo. I’m hoping to start streaming it tomorrow – stay tuned!

That’s me (and Luna) with Jason Benetti at a White Sox charity event.

Many of the things I take on are difficult to do without being able to see. Some are even scary.

I used to keep that to myself, afraid that admitting it would give others license to put me in a disability “box” and assume I have limitations that just aren’t there.

Enter sports broadcaster Jason Benetti, a role model for me since 2018. That’s the year he started doing play-by-play alongside baseball analyst Steve Stone for NBC Sports Chicago.

Broadcaster Jason Benetti was born with cerebral palsy, and When it comes to living above and beyond the pigeonholes some try to squeeze disabled people into, he’s my guy.

Back in 2021, Peter Sagal, the host of NPR’s “Wait Wait…Don’t Tell Me,” wrote a terrific piece about Jason for Chicago Magazine. The title of the story, “The Storyteller of the White Sox,” is followed by this fabulous tagline: “If you follow the White Sox, you likely know broadcaster Jason Benetti was born with cerebral palsy. But that’s just the start of his story.”

Jason was born 10 weeks early and spent his first three months of life in neonatal intensive care. Diagnosed with cerebral palsy as a toddler, he grew up in a south suburb of Chicago. Both of his parents are White Sox fans, and for Jason, doing play-by-play for the Sox is a dream job.

And that White Sox gig is by no means the only broadcasting he does. If you’re a sports fan, you might have heard him broadcasting other Major League Baseball games, or doing college football games (he’s doing Kansas-Oklahoma on Fox as I write this) and NCAA basketball, too. Jason is smart and funny and calls the plays so well that I, his number 1 blind fan, can picture them.

In his Chicago Magazine article on Benetti, Peter Sagal paints a pretty good picture in words, too. Here’s how Sagal explains the way Benetti — and many other people with disabilities — have to adjust our own attitudes sometimes. From the article:

Jason knows people stare at him. They always have. Jason knows that his legs are oddly curved, that he walks with a full-body hitch in his step, and that his eyes point in two different directions, making people who don’t know him think he’s congenitally stupid. Jason is far too kind to put it this way, and too well mannered, but his remarkable career and potentially unlimited success isn’t a triumph over adversity. It’s a message to everybody who ever called him a gimp, to parents who told their children not to stare, to the flight attendant who asked him three times if he could handle the weighty duties of sitting in an exit row.

Peter Sagal’s Chicago Magazine article is not one about Jason “overcoming” a disability or working “despite” his disability, but one about Jason’s work in a highly-competitive field. When it comes to sports broadcasting, Benetti’s achievements speak for themselves.

My husband Mike, a big White Sox fan, read the Chicago Magazine story out loud to me when it came out. That way I wouldn’t have to hear it online in my talking computer’s robotic voice. When he got to a part where Sagal writes about Jason’s view of the tendency to make poster children out of people with disabilities, Mike said, “You know, I’ve always felt this way, too, but I never would have been able to articulate it like Jason Benetti does!” From the article:

I ask him about his role as a symbol of hope and triumph to the disabled and abled alike. He remains sensitive about it, especially the suspicion — fading but still lingering — that he got his chances to succeed only so he could make everybody else feel better. “You know those video clips where, say, the high school football team lets its disabled manager suit up and take the field and the other team lets him score a touchdown? I have an aversion to those. It’s like dropping food on a country in a famine. It’s nice and a good thing … but what’s going to happen after that?”

The part I myself related to the most came towards the end of the article, when friends from his days at Syracuse University chime in. One of them points out that back in college, Jason tripped an fell more than others did:

And we were walking one night home from a party, and he tripped and fell. And none of us cared — it was very normal. It’s not like he was being bullied by anyone…He was trying so hard to not have his disability be a factor that when it did, he … got angry.”

The angry part? I’m afraid that’s the part I could especially relate to. When coming back home after a walk with my Seeing Eye dog, I sometimes grope for a while before finding the door handle to get back inside. When crossing the streets here, we aren’t always exactly in the middle of the crosswalk. I know where the local mailbox is, but I don’t always find the slot to put the letters in right away.

I’m fine with making mistakes like that…unless someone sees me do them. Then I get flustered, worried how they’re judging me, frustrated. I read that last excerpt over again and see that my role model’s old college friend used past tense when mentioning Jason’s reaction: he got angry. That implies he doesn’t get that way anymore. Time for me to make that change, too.

I hope you’ll read Peter Sagal’s 2021 piece in Chicago Magazine. But if you want a quick take on Jason Benetti, check out this children’s book I wrote about him for anItty-Bitty Bio series that
Cherry Lake Publishing Group, an educational and children’s book publisher based in Ann Arbor, Michigan, published this year.
Cherry Lake has been publishing books for first graders for years, but this year they decided to seek out published authors who have disabilities to write about a role model of theirs who also has a disability. As one of the selected writers, of course I singled out Jason Benetti as my role model.

Earlier this year the publisher set up a Zoom meeting so I could do an online interview with Jason to learn more about him, and a month ago I had the wonderful privilege of meeting Jason Benetti face to face at a White Sox Charities luncheon at White Sox Park. I’ll leave you here with a Jason Benetti quote I especially like and used for his Itty Bitty Bio: “I think it’s good that people are all different from each other.
That way the world is ever changing, more open minded, and ever beautiful.”

ChatGPT has brought artificial intelligence—and discussions about AI—into the mainstream. On one hand, some see infinite possibilities, on the other, skeptics see aspects of dystopia. AI was a major sticking point for the writers guild during its strike, and remains an issue during the ongoing actors strike.

Major technological advances have always been seen as a panacea by some and as threats to society by others. It has always been thus. The telephone, the automobile, nuclear energy, the television—you don’t have to search hard to see that some thought technology was sure to bring either utopia or doom.

We are really good at technology. It marches on and offers us previously unimagined possibilities, as well as the prospect of it being used for evil.

But there’s the rub. It’s not the technology stupid, it’s the people. Or, as the immortal Pogo put it, “We have met the enemy, and he is us.” We’ve gone from the stone age to space travel. But after all this time, human beings haven’t figured out how to get along with one another. Until we do, technology is beside the point.

In Chicago, summer brings an avalanche of stuff to do—all around the city there are neighborhood street fests, music fests, concerts, food fairs. This year downtown rocked with Lollapalooza (an annual event), Taylor Swift, Beyonce, Ed Sheeran, and a NASCAR race. it’s like drinking from a fire hose. But it doesn’t shut off on Labor Day, and every year, a sort of ceremonial end to crazy fun season is marked by the Chicago Marathon.

I grouse about the bigger events like Lolla and NASCAR because they shut down big parts of Grant Park and nearby streets. Still, they do make for great people watching, and I’ve made peace with it all. But the Marathon I don’t just tolerate—I’ve come to look forward to it each year.

For a weekend a bunch of fit, eager people are out and about, staying at local hotels and spending money all over the place. There is a palpable excitement in the air, and something else—just a bunch of goodwill.

Usually Beth and I know someone running it, and it’s fun to stake out a spot to cheer them on for the brief moments as they stride by. Not this year, but it didn’t stop us from strolling down to Michigan and Roosevelt, very near the finish. Beth brings noisemakers, and when a group shouts the name of their runner, she joins in the chorus.

I ran a half-marathon once. When I was training for that Beth told her mother what I was doing. And Flo, the practical, down-to-earth person she was, asked, incredulously, “What do you win?” Back then I needed to lose weight after quitting smoking and re-discovering junk food of all stripes, and training helped me do that.

But these days, I’m totally in solidarity with the “What do you win” thing. The challenge, the satisfaction of meeting it—nah, not for me.

But I’m really glad that it was for the 48,000 runners yesterday, and I look forward to next year’s event.