School closures this year meant our presentations to students were cancelled, too. It’s been months since I shared new questions little kids ask about working with Luna, my Seeing Eye dog. I miss them!

Big kids to the rescue! Here’s a sampling of questions students in my memoir-writing classes have been asking me lately, along with some answers:

• Did Luna miss Mike when he was gone because of his Covid-19 illness? Yes. As Mike likes to say, he and I had established “separate kingdoms” at home for the ten days he was sick here before being admitted to the hospital. I slept on a pull-out bed in my office, His kingdom was our bedroom, and as his illness continued to get worse, he spent days and nights in bed there with the door closed. I didn’t want to be far from home, so I kept Luna’s walks very routine. And short. Boring for her, and she expressed her ennui by lying flat on her stomach with her chin on the floor.
• After Mike was admitted to the hospital, do you think Luna knew he was gone? Yes. Afraid of being exposed to the virus, I kept the door to his kingdom closed the entire time he was away. Luna started looking out the window hoping to find him.
• Does she like to play? Yes! Dog parks in our area are closed right now, so she’s left to chase her ball and Nylabones around the house. Mike throws a ball better than I do, see above about her searching out the window for him while he was away.
• Was Luna a comfort to you while Mike was away? Luna was a tremendous comfort to me throughout Mike’s illness. She’s a good listener.
• Was it hard to take care of Luna when Mike was in the hospital and you were all alone with her? The Seeing Eye trains all of its graduates to care for our dogs on our own, whether we live alone or with others. It’s dark when she goes for her last outing of the day, and for safety’s sake here in the city he usually takes her out for that final “empty.” Without him here, I donned a mask for Luna’s nightly walk and, assuming bad guys are staying home during the pandemic, I wasn’t scared.
• Did you know that the city ordinance to pick up after your dogs specifically exempts blind people and their service dogs? Yes, but I always pick up aftr Luna anyway. Here’s why: I hate stepping in poop left behind by other dog’s. I couldn’t feel so righteous barking, as it were, about the negligence of other dog owners if I didn’t pick up after Luna myself. Bonus: picking up after her consistently is a good way to make sure she isn’t sick and/or hasn’t eaten anything rotten.
• But how do you pick up after her if you can’t see? We’ve designated a couple neighborhood spots for her to, well, go, and I take her harness off when we get there. With her leash still in my hand I can sense she is walking around in countless circles, and when she finally stops circling I feel for her back. If it’s rounded, it’s #2, I place my foot near her tail, slip a plastic bag over my right hand, reach down to feel through the bag for warm lumps, pick them up, fold the bag over my palm, tie a knot in the bag and deposit it in the nearest trash can.
• Does your dog get confused when you wear a mask? Well, she doesn’t balk if I’m wearing the mask and call her to come, and she follows my commands en route, which means she can hear my muffled voice through the mask. Her sense of smell is wayyyyyyyyy stronger than her sense of sight or sound, so if anything is confusing her right now, it’s my aroma: I didn’t used to wash my hands every 20 minutes!
• Are you (and Luna!) enjoying the relative lack of car traffic compared with normal times? Not really. I rely on the surge of traffic at my parallel to recognize when the signal is green, and with so little traffic now I’m not always sure.
• How does she do with social distancing? With Mike back home and feeling better now, I feel more comfortable going on long walks with Luna to keep her guiding skills sharp. Luna was trained at the Seeing Eye to slip us by obstacles (including people) without either of us brushing them when we do. She doesn’t know to keep six feet away, though! On these longer walks through the city, footsteps and voices of people walking ahead of us in the same direction alert me we’re coming close, and when that happens, I just stop, give Luna the “sit” command, and wait. When we can’t hear them anymore,. I pick up her harness, command “Forward!” and we’re off again. It’s harder to detect people standing still or walking towards us, especially if they’re the silent type. I talk more to Luna during walks now, trust others will look up, see us coming, and slide six feet away to the side. As far as I can tell, they do!
• Luna is so young, do you worry being home so much will make her forget everything she just learned at the Seeing eye? I wrote a post about a phone call The Seeing Eye had with graduates earlier this month, and during that call they assured us our dogs won’t lose their skills. They also reminded us how important it is to correct our dogs if they start getting a little sloppy. Luna is a bouncing bundle of black Lab energy — she loves getting outside and going to work. She is so enthusiastic, though, that when we get to a street without any traffic she sometimes forgets to stop. I give her a correction, either verbally or with the leash, then show her where she made her mistake by bringing her back to the curb and commanding “Sit!” I tap the curb with my footthen and praise her. “Good girl, Luna! Here’s where you stop. Good girl!” We take a few steps backwards then, maybe two dog lengths, and we re-work the approach to the curb. Luna almost always, always gets it right the second time. And when she does? I praise the bejeezus out of her. “Good girl,Luna! Attagirl!” I rub her up. Her tail wags. “Good girl, Luna. Good girl!” Luna eats it up, and she rarely misses that curb again.

Luna is curled in a ball sleeping under my desk as I type this, but once I hit the “save” button and grab my shoes, she’ll jump up ready to go. I’ve been trying to keep a routine going, and that includes an hourlong walk each morning. It’s good for both of us.

If you missed it, grab a Kleenex and read this beautiful post Mike wrote about his experiences for his Mondays with Mike column after returning home from the hospital clear of COVID last month.

I’ve had the dreaded virus, and though the jury’s out, it’s fairly likely I have some immunity for some time. That means it’s likely I’m a pretty safe bet to be around for at least awhile.

But.

My fancy mask, courtesy of Donna Hippensteel.

I like wearing my mask.

I like signaling to people around me that I’m taking this seriously, and that I care enough about them to make this tiny little effort. It’s a show of solidarity. And I appreciate seeing others doing the same thing. Besides that, evidence shows if we wear masks, we can drastically reduce the spread of the disease.

I also completely understand that how one views this virus thing has everything to do with where they are sheltering in place. At the board of directors Zoom meeting of the organization I work for, one member told us that in Maine, where he lives, covid19 is just not much of an issue up there. (Though, it is an issue at the local nursing home, which is why even in such places, we should be careful.)

Our friends in Champaign-Urbana are having a substantially different experience than we are up here. It’s an issue there, to be sure. Students are taking classes online, dorms are empty. And residents are mostly taking it seriously, according to some good friends we’ve been in touch with since this started.

They don’t have the problem back in our old stomping ground that we do up here in Chicago. And they’d like to keep it that way. But our friends there tell us that people from surrounding towns come into Urbana and Champaign to shop and do other business, and apparently, just don’t bother with the masks.

Beyond that, a friend’s father-in-law had to go to an emergency room for a heart-related issue in Decatur, Illinois. He’s 89. People in the waiting room weren’t wearing masks. He asked the security guard about it. “I asked them to,” the guard replied.

The kicker is, at one point, he had to ask a nurse, a NURSE, to put on a mask.

Yeesh.

I simply don’t understand that. I understand concerns and reasonable arguments about when and where to suspend the lockdown orders. But I don’t understand laziness and selfishness. And I call bullshit on the freedom people. Freedom doesn’t mean an absence of social obligation and responsibility.

It’s crazy. I feel like I’m that kind of old guy Republican from my youth telling shaggy-haired callow young guys like me that freedom didn’t equate to sitting around and smoking dope and having sex all day. (Still an attractive thought, though,)

Only now I’m telling people that freedom doesn’t mean being able to carry rocket launchers around in public and ignoring the health and safety of fellow citizens.

Whatever happened to that kind of Republican?

I am pleased to introduce Ann Parrilli as our featured “Saturdays with Seniors” blogger today. Ann joined our “Me, Myself and I” class at the Chicago Cultural Center this past year and continues writing — and reading — essays while that class meets via Zoom.

Born and raised in Chicago, Ann moved to San Francisco right after college with two suitcases and a radio and stayed for eleven years. After leaving the West Coast she spent 6 months in Rome and one year in New York City before finally returning to Chicago. Here she is with an essay many of us can relate to.

The World inside out

by Ann Parrilli

I seem to have lost all means of measuring these days. It used to be I’d know exactly what time it was without having to look at my watch. Now I’m constantly surprised by where I am in relation to Greenwich Mean Time. Days slide into one another, and my list of things-I-want-to-accomplish today grows longer instead of shrinking.

My organizational skills have morphed from the precision of an erector set to a dish of melting ice cream. I’ve had to give up on quaint things like instinct and finally make a physical checklist of things I need to have in hand when I exit my house. Besides the usual suspects (sun glasses, money, Kleenex, sun screen, cough drops and phone) I now have to remember hand sanitizer and a face mask. Oh, and add wipes to that list, too, for all door handles I touch leaving and re-entering my building.

I’m glad no one is here to see the contents of my refrigerator. Once in the grocery store, I am held captive by visions of an impending collapse of the food-supply chain. I throw things into my cart that will sustain me through the apocalypse, somehow forgetting that I live alone and am a pretty light eater to begin with. The colorful vegetables that looked so inviting in the store regard me with reproach every time I open the fridge door. I’ll get around to making that daily salad, I promise myself. But then suddenly it’s two o’clock and I haven’t yet taken my bounty of produce out of the fridge to warm up to room temperature. And who wants to eat a cold salad? Too late for today, I say as I reach for peanut butter and a slice of bread. My freezer is stocked with home made dishes I’m saving for when fights break out in the grocery store.

I can’t remember the day I last gave the apartment a good cleaning, but the afternoon sun discloses dust particles on every surface outside of the kitchen counters, which, yes, I wipe regularly.

Okay, already, I’m busted, I get it. I add “dusting” to my list of things to get done. Maybe someday I will actually put on my pearls and do a June Cleaver imitation, vacuum and dust cloth in tow.

For some reason my car seems to be an oasis of calm in all this disarray. Contained in my own little world with no schedule to adhere to, I enjoy a leisurely drive to the north suburbs. The soft green of an awakening spring soothes my ragged soul. I put aside the imperative of exercise and give into the soft underbelly of comfort and ease. The radio is off limits. I crack the window to hear my avian friends celebrating life. It’s back to the 50’s, when the Sunday drive was a family event. And, ecology suspended for now, it feels just right.

Remember life in January? That’s when I spent three weeks in New Jersey at The Seeing Eye with 20-plus other blind people, all of us training with new Seeing Eye dogs . What a stroke of luck to have been matched with one-year-old black Lab Luna then. She’s the perfect dog for me, and I got her just in time: shortly after our class ended, the Seeing Eye had to make the very difficult decision to close the campus and cancel all classes for the foreseeable future.

My group’s graduation picture from the January class. I’m so lucky I got matched with Luna before the pandemic.

Nearly 2000 people in the United States and Canada currently work with Seeing Eye dogs, and last Friday The Seeing Eye invited all of us to a conference call with Glenn D. Hoagland, CEO and President, and Dave Johnson, Director of Instruction and Training. Other staff members joined in on the call to help explain how The Seeing Eye is continuing operations during the Coronavirus crisis. They started the call by sharing a timeline of recent events:

• the March, 2020 class started with caution
• students were scheduled for that class based on their geographic region and asked to self-report any symptoms of illness and/or cancel attendance prior to traveling to The Seeing Eye
• everyone who showed up for class on March 2 was temperature-checked upon arrival — anyone with a fever was sent home immediately
• the Seeing Eye campus was deep cleaned, and wiping of door knobs and hand rails continued throughout each day of training
• extra hand sanitizer dispensers were installed throughout the campus
• training for both dogs and students in New York City or other crowded destinations that month was eliminated
• public tours and other visits to The Seeing Eye campus were cancelled

Dave told us everyone there was paying close attention to the news, and every day another adjustment was made.

Whew. Training at the Seeing Eye can be intense under normal circumstances — imagine adding all that to the mix! Fifteen days into the March 2020 class, , amidst talk of the United states closing borders to Canada, The Seeing eye made the difficult decision to send all students home early with their new dogs and cancel upcoming classes as well.

Since then, most staff members have been working from home. The Admissions Department continues processing applications from people who are blind who are seeking a place in a future class, the Instruction & Training Department continues to provide follow-up support by phone or video conference to graduates who need it, and employees are still being paid.

So people at The Seeing Eye are being cared for, but what about the dogs at The Seeing Eye? Over 200 dogs had been living at the Seeing Eye campus and breeding station when the campus shut down in March. Some were puppies waiting to be placed with volunteer puppy raisers, many dogs were in the midst of training, and dogs who’d completed training were all set to be matched with blind companions who would have been arriving in April.

So The Seeing Eye couldn’t shut down completely. Employees who worked directly and cared for the school’s amazing dogs at the veterinarian offices, the breeding station, the kennel, all continued coming in person, working in areas where they could maintain a safe six foot distance from others. They wore protective equipment and yes, they washed their hands.

As the number of COVID cases in New Jersey started to soar, keeping Seeing Eye employees safe became paramount, and staff got to work finding new temporary housing outside of campus for the kenneled dogs and puppies at the breeding station.

All in all 203 dogs — 88 of them puppies — were transferred to local puppy raisers, staff members, and families. “All those dogs placed in ten days,” Dave marveled over the phone. “They’re all living the good life with families right now — some families took more than one dog, too!”

“We are making adjustments every single day, we work well as a team, and that’s what we do here, ” said Angela McDyer, Manager of Graduate Services and Admissions. As to when classes will start up again? “Everything is off the board, some people are talking about how they’re sure they’ll be in the first class once the Seeing Eye opens again, but wee don’t know if we can constantly stick to the class schedule the way we did before. We’re in a really hard position, and the part I hate the most is the questions we get that I can’t answer.”

When will the dogs be able to return to campus? Will they still be able to train and match as many dogs? When will instructors be able to come out in person for follow-up visits again? Will classes be as big as they were before? How long will New Jerssey be quarantined?

”Classes at the Seeing Eye represent a real melting pot, we bring students in from all over North America, many of them by plane,” Dave Johnson reminded us. He acknowledged that once the Seeing eye reopens they’ll be limited at first as to how many they can take care of at one time. “We just don’t know how many can come, we don’t even know if we can send staff out to visit students, we need to pay attention to so many things, and safety of staff and students is critical.”

New Jersey is second in the list of states for the most U.S. coronavirus cases (after New York) and the quarantine there has been extended into June. “Everyone here is as eager as you graduates are to get back to work,” Angela told us. “But the virus is driving this whole thing.” The call came to an end about then, and Angela left us with a Helen Keller quote I hadn’t heard before:

“Alone we can do so little, together we can do so much.”

Wondering how/if Luna’s ongoing training has been affected by stay-at-home orders? Stay tuned for Part Two, where I’ll give you a Luna update. Have questions of your own? Leave them here as a comment, and I’ll do my best to answer in my next post.

Looking forward to our next Brewers game together.

Most readers know about our son Gus—but just in case: Gus was born with a rare genetic condition that left him with pretty severe developmental and physical disabilities. Since 2002, Gus has lived under the care of an organization called Bethesda Lutheran Communities. Bethesda offers a wide range of services to people with developmental disabilities in several regions across the country. Gus lives with three other guys in a group home Bethesda operates in Watertown, Wisconsin, which lies about halfway between Milwaukee and Madison.

Typically, Beth and I get up north to visit Gus about once a month, usually combining it with a getaway night in downtown Milwaukee. Like all routines, that’s been on hold, and based on the latest from Bethesda, it will remain that way for a good long while.

Last week I joined a town hall meeting—audio only, no Zoom. On the call were the CEO of Bethesda Lutheran Communities, Mike Thirtle, as well as other Bethesda executives and staff. I’d talked to Thirtle a few years back when he took over—he made it a point to talk to parents, guardians, and other loved ones early in his tenure. I was deeply impressed. He’s a veteran and has an incredible civilian resume, but beyond qualifications, he was refreshingly transparent, frank, and has remained accessible throughout his time at Bethesda.

That’s how the town hall went—Thirtle and his team were direct and thorough in describing what they were doing to keep the people in their care safe and healthy.

And it’s a lot.

All the Direct Service Professionals (DSPs)—the people who do the hard work of caring for people like Gus—are following strict PPE and cleaning protocols. The DSPs are also taking pledges to limit their own contacts outside of work.  And they’re taking scads of other special measures to help keep a pretty vulnerable group of clients safe and healthy.

People who rely on Bethesda’s services come with a wide range of cognitive abilities, and many have been frightened by staff wearing masks and goggles and agitated by interruptions in routine. For them, Bethesda has developed and distributed programs to calm residents.

The Bethesda team at the town hall clearly had a firm grasp of the virus and its epidemiology. And they were compassionate and honest. It couldn’t have been easy to tell dozens and dozens of us parents and other loved ones on the phone that the end of this lockdown isn’t really in sight. And that they couldn’t tell us when we will be able to see our people again. Having more testing available would help, but they’re in the same boat the rest of the country is.

They did describe what would have to happen in terms of case statistics before we can visit. But, “We’re not even halfway to the peak,” we were told.

Even so, during the Q&A, some attendees asked when they could see their sons, daughters, siblings, and friends again—as if they couldn’t believe what they’d heard earlier. One woman came to tears, and there was a kind of despair in others’ voices.

It was a difficult call, sobering, but ultimately comforting and inspiring.  On a personal level, I was reassured that our son is in good hands. On a broader level, I was deeply impressed by the intelligence, presence, and shear goodness of all these people taking care of other people. I always have been, really, but this test brings my gratitude and admiration to a new level.

During the call, I learned that Bethesda (and lots of other similar organizations) will not receive any support from any of the current federal coronavirus relief packages. Bethesda also made clear that the virus crisis is hitting its finances hard.

I’m lucky, I’m still working. So it was easy, immediately after the call ended, to hop online and make a donation. Selfishly, I invite you to do the same.

But more important, I hope you’ll be generous in your support of any organization you choose that is helping people hit by the coronavirus.

All those hero commercials are nice. But for those of us who are able, let’s put our money where our hearts are.