Four different editors at University of Illinois Press went over the rough draft of my memoir before they published it. All of them suggested changes.

One of the most common request? Stronger verbs. They also wanted descriptions that were more precise, more colorful, more heartfelt. Now, 12 years after my memoir, Long Time, No See was published, I am leading four memoir-writing classes every week and urging writers to , you guessed it: use stronger verbs and include precise, colorful, and heartfelt descriptions in their writing.

The requests from my editors forced me to return to certain settings in Long Time, No See and focus on how events at hand made me feel at the time. Not always easy. Some of the most life-altering events in our lives are ones we’d rather forget.

An example: Surgeons operated on my left eye first. That surgery was unsuccessful. The first Try with my right eye didn’t work, either. They operated on it a second time. Each surgery was painful. Each required month-long stays at the hospital to recover, and I had to keep my face down every minute of every day of those long months away from home. My head was down when I “watched” television, when I listened to books, when I walked to the bathroom. I slept with my face in the center of a donut “hemorrhoid” pillow – eye surgeons didn’t want to risk me turning my head in the night.

In Long Time, No See I write about the retina surgeon examining my eyes after the third surgery and breaking the news to Mike and me that I’ll never see again. In the rough draft I told readers that after hearing this, Mike and I walked out of the office and headed to White Sox Park for a baseball game. Whoa! Whoa! Whoa! University of Illinois Press editors read that and said I absolutely must tell my readers what was going through my head when we found out my blindness was permanent.

Not exactly a moment I wanted to relive – who wants to re-enter that room and hear that bad news all over again? In the end, though, rewriting that scene turned out to be GREAT therapy. I had to think. When I was told I’d never see again, was I disappointed? Angry? Sad? Scared? The answer is here, in an excerpt from the published version of Long Time, No See (University of Illinois Press, 2003):

“I’m afraid there’s nothing else we can do,” he said in a tone I recognized from his final report on my left eye.

All I could think to ask was, “Can I lift my head up now?”

He said I could. Thankful for at least that, I raised my head for the first time in over a month. I was struck by a sudden feeling of freedom and relief. No more lasers, no more operations, no more weekly visits to Chicago, no more worrying whether or not this all was going to work. We’d been at this for nearly a year; now it was finally over.

I swiveled my head as if to look around. I saw nothing. Mike talked to the doctor, asking sensible questions, I suppose. Turning toward their voices, I asked if this was really it, if we’d really exhausted the possibilities.

“I’m a religious man,” the doctor answered, “and in the religion I follow we believe in miracles. I believe God has cured all sorts of ailments. This could happen with you, but there’s nothing else I can do for you medically.”

We stood up to leave. I reached out for the doctor’s hand. He clasped mine with both of his, and I thanked him for all he’d done. He was shaking. I felt sorry for him; I would’ve liked to tell him we were going to be all right.

The White Sox were in town that day. Going to a ballgame after learning I’d be blind for the rest of my life was probably a strange thing to do, but it beat heading home and sitting on our pitiful second-hand couch and wondering where to turn next. From the book:

The White Sox were having a rotten year. There were maybe 8,000 people in the stands; Floyd Banister pitched, the Sox lost. But it was strangely pleasant, sitting next to Mike with my head up, not giving a thought to eyes or surgery. We each had a bratwurst and a beer. Between bites and gulps and giving me play by play, Mike bantered with other fans, cursing the underachievers on the team. I laughed at Nancy Faust, the Sox organist—she’s famous for picking songs that play on player’s names. Mike marveled at the endurance of Carlton Fisk, and we both wondered out loud why every time we went to a game, that bum Banister was pitching.

The three-hour ride home was quiet, and once we got there, we found ourselves sitting on our miserable couch, just as we’d feared, holding hands and trying to imagine how we’d cope. Our only decision that night was to go to sleep, and today being Valentine’s Day, I’ll end the post with that steamy scene — editors agreed with me that it didn’t need more description than I had in the rough draft!

Our bed felt wonderful. I was home for good. Despite everything, a powerful relief came over me, a sense of security, such a change from how I’d felt during those months in my hospital bed. And I realized right away that sight isn’t needed under the covers.

And now, an update on a few favorite female friends.

Eliza Cooper ended up not racing in that Brooklyn Bridge Swim after the NYC Swims director decided that athletes with disabilities would have to pay an extra fee to participate. A few weeks later, Eliza and her volunteer guide from Achilles International swam 1.2 miles in the ocean, rode a tandem for 56 miles and ran 13.1 miles – they completed a Half Ironman Triathlon, and they finished one hour earlier than they’d anticipated. But wait. There’s more! This past week Eliza started her first day of graduate school –at Columbia University.

Our sensational sister Cheryl was there to visit Flo every single day for the past couple years, whether Flo was still living alone in her condo, or in the hospital, or in a rehab facility. Cheryl went with Flo to doctor visits, she helped Flo with paperwork, and she was there with her kids and grandchildren at Flo’s side the day she died.

Cheryl flew to the Pacific Northwest last month for some well-deserved quiet time on her own, but before she left she went through Flo’s things and divided them into boxes for the siblings. She returns next week, and before then I’m heading to Blind Service Association (BSA) in downtown Chicago with a bag full of papers from my Flo box. Many of the papers are letters I wrote that Flo saved, and the generous readers at BSA have volunteered to read everything out loud to me. I’ll supply the Kleenex.

Nancy Faust just signed a contract to play for the Kane County Cougars again next season. The Cougars are a minor league team in Geneva, Ill., and when I say Nancy is playing for them, I of course mean she’s doing that on her Hammond B3!

I’ve been a fan of the Kane County Cougars ever since they hired me to work in their ticket office in 1994, and now that they’ve rehired Nancy to play every Sunday home game between May and September next year, I’m up for season tickets. All they need to do is come up with a “Nancy Package”: Sunday games only.

This season The Cougars have the most wins of any major or minor league baseball team in the country — the last time they had a championship season like this was back in 2001, when the team was led by Miguel Cabrera and Adrian Gonzalez. The first game of that series was on September 10, 2001. The Cougars won that game, but everything was cancelled after that.

Myrna Knepler is a writer in my memoir class. In a guest post here called when your birthday falls on September 11 she describes the reaction she gets when people at banks, at airports, or at doctor’s offices ask her for her date of birth. “They always comment,” she says. “And sometimes, they commiserate.”

Myrna has learned to refer to the date as “the eleventh of September,” but says figuring out how to commemorate it is still a conundrum. She’ll be 80 years old this year. I say we celebrate the entire month.

Which one is 4, and which one is 14?

Hanni is still going strong, and her human companion Nancy Bollero reports that The 14-year-old star of Hanni and Beth: Safe & Sound is getting creative in her old age: she taught herself to turn the quilt she sleeps on inside-out so she can shape it into a giant ball. “She rolls the ball to a new spot every day,” Nancy told me, describing the artful way Hanni arranges her favorite toys and bones once the ball reaches its new destination. ”And she still wags her tail like mad, thwomping it against the hardwood floor to let everyone know she’s proudof her work.”

It’s been a pretty stimulating month so far:

From front to back that’s Anita, Floey, Moi, my sister Cheryl, and Ray at the Cougars game. My niece Janet took the picture.

• August 1: A lot of talented writers attended my Getting Your Memoir Off the Ground workshop at Northwestern Summer Writers’ Conference, and now I can look forward to reading their memoirs once they’re published!
• August 2: Sat in on Kevin Davis’ two-hour workshop at the writer’s conference. My neighbor Margaret was at the conference, too, and on our walk home together we talked about all the new ideas we have now to make the characters we write about come alive.
• August 3: Took a commuter train to the suburbs with Whitney to join family members for a Kane County Cougars baseball game. Renowned baseball organist Nancy Faust has been playing for Sunday afternoon home games for the Cougars ever since retiring from her White Sox gig in 2008, and my friend Amy Mason is the Director of Ticket Operations for the Cougars. So of course Amy set us up with a row of tickets right in front of Nancy — we could actually turn around, name a song, and have Nancy play it instantly on her Hammond B3. I requested Stevie Wonder’s “I wish” and marveled at how she nailed the bass part on the organ’s foot pedals. She played a UB40 tune for my niece Janet, a song from Beauty and the Beast for Floey, and even managed to honor five-year-old Raymond’s request:“Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star.”
• August 4: Put together a post for my part-time job moderating the Easter Seals blog in the morning, hopped on a CTA bus with Whitney to lead my Monday memoir-writing class in Lincoln Park in the afternoon, then put on a fancy dress and headed to the Chicago Shakespeare Theatre. The opening reception for the Leadership Exchange in Arts and Disability (LEAD) conference was in the lobby there, Mike came along with me, and few things make me happier than being on the arm of a handsome man and having wait staff come around with teeny-tiny unidentifiable concoctions for me to try. Heaven.
  

  That’s me and the legendary baseball organist Nancy Faust. (Cub fans, that’s what a World Series ring looks like.)

• August 5: Our panel at the LEAD conference about the challenges and successes in accessing arts programs if you can’t see was a hit, but that was no surprise — I had Sally Cooper (Volunteer Coordinator at Blind Service Association here in Chicago) and George Abbott (Director of the eLearning Center at the American Foundation of the Blind in New York) at my side! At lunch afterwards I had the good fortune to be seated next to some very fun people from the Pittsburgh Arts Council, and now, who knows, maybe Whitney and I will be heading out there sometime to give presentations and check out the Pittsburgh art scene.
• August 6 & 7 Led my Wednesday and Thursday memoir-writing classes and made some progress on the book I’m writing about all I learn from the writers in those classes . Their topic for next week is “The Best Job I Ever Had,” and after reviewing everything that went on this week, I’d have to say that, hands down, the best job I’ve ever had is the one I have right now. Who could ask for anything more?

My writer’s group met last Tuesday, and when we got to talking about editing I brought up a part from my published memoir, Long Time, No See as an example of the value of good editors.

It’s been a while since I read that book, so after the meeting I dug up the excerpt to read it again. When I read to the last line I thought, gee whiz, this same part could work as a (somewhat unlikely!) Valentine’s Day blog post, too!

But first, the editing part. Before University of Illinois Press published Long Time, No See they had a couple editors go over my manuscript. One checked the medical information, the other copyedited and suggested literary changes, and, surprise, surprise, I discovered I actually enjoy being edited. Those University of Illinois Press editors would ask me to choose the exact word to describe something, and that would force me to put myself back into a situation and really think hard about what it felt like at the time. Not always easy, but very therapeutic.

In my rough draft, I wrote a scene where the retina specialist examines my eyes after all the surgeries and breaks the news to us. The day was July 25, 1985, just three days short of our one-year wedding anniversary. The doctor tells us I’ll never see again, we listen, and then we walk out of the office and head to White Sox Park for a baseball game.

The editors read my version and absolutely insisted that I tell my readers what was going through my head when we found out my blindness was permanent. I didn’t exactly want to describe that time of my life in detail: doing so would force me to put myself back in that room, hearing that bad news again. I did it, though, and writing that scene turned out to be GREAT therapy. I had to think. When I was told I’d never see again, was I disappointed? Angry? Sad? Scared? The answer is here, in that excerpt from Long Time, No See (University of Illinois Press, 2003):

“I’m afraid there’s nothing else we can do,” he said in a tone I recognized from his final report on my left eye.

All I could think to ask was, “Can I lift my head up now?”He said I could. Thankful for at least that, I raised my head for the first time in over a month. I was struck by a sudden feeling of freedom and relief. No more lasers, no more operations, no more weekly visits to Chicago, no more worrying whether or not this all was going to work. We’d been at this for nearly a year; now it was finally over. I swiveled my head as if to look around. I saw nothing.

Mike talked to the doctor, asking sensible questions, I suppose. Turning toward their voices, I asked if this was really it, if we’d really exhausted the possibilities. “I’m a religious man,” the doctor answered, “and in the religion I follow we believe in miracles. I believe God has cured all sorts of ailments. This could happen with you, but there’s nothing else I can do for you medically.”

We stood up to leave. I reached out for the doctor’s hand. He clasped mine with both of his, and I thanked him for all he’d done. He was shaking. I felt sorry for him; I would’ve liked to tell him we were going to be all right.
The White Sox were in town that day. Going to a ballgame after learning I’d be blind for the rest of my life was probably a strange thing to do, but it beat heading home and sitting on our pitiful second-hand couch and wondering where to turn next.

The White Sox were having a rotten year. There were maybe 8,000 people in the stands; Floyd Banister pitched, the Sox lost. But it was strangely pleasant, sitting next to Mike with my head up, not giving a thought to eyes or surgery. We each had a bratwurst and a beer. Between bites and gulps and giving me play by play, Mike bantered with other fans, cursing the underachievers on the team. I laughed at Nancy Faust, the Sox organist—she’s famous for picking songs that play on player’s names. Mike marveled at the endurance of Carlton Fisk, and we both wondered out loud why every time we went to a game, that bum Banister was pitching.

Wedding day, July 28, 1984. We’re headed for our 30th this year.

The three-hour ride home was quiet. Once there, we found ourselves sitting on our miserable couch, as we’d feared, holding hands, trying to imagine how we’d cope. Our only decision that night was to go to sleep. Our bed felt wonderful. I was home for good. Despite everything, a powerful relief came over me, a sense of security, such a change from how I’d felt during those months in my hospital bed. And I realized right away that sight isn’t needed under the covers.

We moved from Urbana to Geneva, Illinois in 1994, and during our three years there I worked for the Kane County Cougars (a minor league baseball team) in their group sales office. The staff was young, and refreshingly unimpressed by my blindness. Amy Mason, a recent college grad, was the one who hired me. She figured I could help answer the phone, route calls, and take ticket orders.

On my first day on the job, however, we discovered one small problem: their phone system used lights, rather than sounds, to indicate which line was ringing. Unfazed, Amy had me make outgoing calls instead. The kind of calls they hated making—contacting groups who hadn’t paid up, or trying to interest schools in special promotions. I didn’t much like these calls, either, but I figured it was a fair bargain. Free game tickets weren’t bad either!

That’s Flo throwing out the first pitch at the Cougars game on her 80th birthday. (Photo by Cheryl May.)

I made a lot of friends at the Cougars during my years there, but I felt especially close to Amy. During one summer when our then-rambunctious-now responsible-nephew Robbie was staying with us, Amy took him out of my hair by putting him to work as an intern. She was a talented athlete and had played high school and college sports, and she cheered on my great-niece Anita, who was a toddler then, to become the basketball superstar she is today. Flo turned 80 in 1996, and when we all decided to invite friends and family to join us in celebrating FloFest in a big tent at a Cougars game, Amy was instrumental in making everything go smoothly, including making arrangements for Flo to throw out the first pitch. It rolled right over the plate.

I sold a lot of tickets for the Cougars, and during my time there I helped the group sales office expand their schools program. Working with a minor league team’s energetic, upbeat and goofy staff helped rebuild a lot of the confidence that had slipped away when I lost my sight.

Today Amy Mason is the Director of Ticket Services and Community Relations for the Kane County Cougars, and the Cougars are now the A Team for the Chicago Cubs. The Pitch and Hit Club is honoring Amy with their Woman of the Year Award tomorrow night, and Mike, Whitney and I will be in the audience cheering her on.

Some other notables will be there as well: former White Sox manager Tony La Russa and Hall of Famer Rich “Goose” Gossage are the headliners, and the entertainment will be provided by, who else? My beloved baseball organist Nancy Faust. The biggest star there, of course, will be Amy Mason. She still stands out as a model for how, with a little patience and very little fanfare, hiring someone with a disability can work out well. For everybody.