On this, the day after the Super Bowl, an annual circus in itself.

A Super Bowl won by a team that plays in Missouri, a victory for which the American president congratulated the people of Kansas (not mentioning Missouri at all).

On the day of closing arguments during an impeachment trial of said president.

On the day of the Iowa Caucuses, an absurd way to start a primary season.

At a time in history people make 3D models of themselves.

And when people pay for alcohol-free booze.

On this day, all I got is George Carlin. Man do I miss him. But his wisdom is eternal:

“When you are born in this world, you are given a ticket to the Freak Show, and when you are born in America, you have a front row seat.”

Try to have a good week.

Okay. Only one dog-related reference in this post. Honest. I promise.

That’s Wanda and me.The two of us are always happy to be together, can you tell? Photo courtesy StoryCorps.

Because here’s the thing. We are wayyyy overdue on news about Wanda Bridgeforth. If you’ve followed our Safe & Sound blog for a while, you know who Wanda Bridgeforth is: she’s witty, she’s talented, she’s 98 years old, she’s been attending the memoir-writing class I lead in downtown Chicago for over a decade now, and guess what? She’s in the news again.

This time it’s The Streeterville News, a Chicago neighborhood paper. She was profiled in a story called Chicagoan Ready for Round Two of the Roaring 20s! The story explains that the year 2020 gives us another opportunity to celebrate the Roaring 20s,and Wanda still remembers growing up in Chicago’s Bronzeville neighborhood during the 1920s. She especially remembers yearly visits to downtown Chicago to see the Christmas decorations during that decade. “We got dressed up to come downtown with gloves and hats!” As a kid, Wanda saw neighbors stick together through thick and thin. “The Depression came when I was about six or seven,” she said. “That’s when everybody’s life turned upside down. We had a closeness and a strong community spirit that we don’t have now.”

Wanda credited that same togetherness for helping her when her husband was stationed overseas during World War II.

“When he went overseas it was 56 days from Chicago to India,” she said, explaining that she wasn’t allowed to know exactly where he was stationed, she just knew he was far away from home.

I was interviewed for Wanda’s story, too, and when the reporter asked me how it was that she and I hit it off so well from the minute we met, I told him the truth: everybody hits it off with Wanda right from the start. When he pressed me for more about our enduring friendship, I tried my best to come up with something brainy and important, you know, to make me sound thoughtful and heady. I pointed out to the reporter that Wanda has been profoundly deaf since childhood, and I am totally blind. Maybe our disabilities contribute to our bond, I said. “We both acknowledge our disabilities without letting them defeat us,” I told him. “We both are resourceful, we have to figure out ways to do certain things that others do with their ears and eyes.”

And now, dog-reference spoiler alert. When the reporter asked Wanda that same question about our special bond, she told the simple truth. The story ends like this:

Bridgeforth said there was another reason she was drawn to Finke. “We clicked immediately,” she said. “Primarily through Beth’s guide dog. I love animals.”

For decades now, hosting friends for dinner has been a cherished ritual in
our lives. I’ve always liked to cook—I began learning as a kid. But cooking and entertaining took on an added dimension some time after Beth lost her sight, and later, when Gus was born.

We leaned heavily on friends in those days. For rides, babysitting, you name it. And we had very little discretionary spending money. So, one of the best ways we could thank them was to make dinner for them. Beth learned to bake bread, I tried various cuisines, and we have always had some of the very best times of our lives enjoying meals and conversations with friends.

And that’s what happened yesterday, when we had four neighborhood friends over to meet Beth’s dog—and to catch up with Beth: She’d been gone three weeks.

Beforehand, we went through the familiar ritual: Do we want to have people over? Do we have the time? Energy? Then…the cookbooks. Beth and I narrow it down to, say, a cuisine. Then I haul out the cookbooks and pore over them, running recipes—some new, some familiar—by Beth. (She claims she always tells me what she wants and I always make something else. Not true!)

This past weekend we settled on pasta, so the Italian cookbooks came out. My mom was born to Italian immigrants, so I have some stuff committed to memory. But some of the more complex ones are preserved in handwriting.

I came across one this past weekend—my dad had handwritten my mom’s recipe, essentially recording it as she dictated it to him. Not sure why—might have been when her health wasn’t great.

I must’ve read it 10 times. Not because it was so complicated, but because I experienced that thing where when you happen upon an old handwritten letter or thank-you note, something kind of magical happens. More than the words are communicated. A time, a face, the person who wrote it is there.

On a grander scale, Beth and I visited the LBJ Museum at the University of Texas-Austin several years ago. First, it’s well worth visit. One of the exhibits was Jackie Kennedy’s thank-you note to the Johnsons for allowing her and her children to stay in their White House residence a few days in order to make moving arrangements. It was warm, it was sincere, it reflected an impossible poise given the circumstances.

Somehow, I doubt that an email pulled from a digital archive and displayed on a screen would carry the same impact. Or even the printed email.

Apparently, handwriting may offer other powers that electronic communication doesn’t. Evidence has been mounting for awhile that writing by hand stimulates areas of the brain that typing doesn’t—kids learn better and faster, for example.

So, I’ll try to bear that in mind from time to time, and fire off some snail mail for old time’s sake.

Only one problem: I do it so infrequently that it’s hard to even write my name legibly.

It’s only been three days since Mike met Whitney my new dog and me at O’Hare, and in

That’s her!

that short time my new 53-pound bouncing bundle of Labrador Retriever energy has successfully guided me to:

• The Chicago Cultural Center (to prepare for our walk there Wednesday to lead a memoir-writing class)
• Grail Café (for a hot cup of coffee and croissant to celebrate our successful walk to the Cultural Center and back)
• Fifth Third Bank (she uses the small plot in front to empty)
• Half Sour (to take advantage of Thursday afternoon happy hour specials)

Today’s conquest? The pool where I swim laps. There we’ll find out if she’s able to sit quietly at the side of the pool while I swim, or if she needs to stay with staff members at the reception desk while I’m underwater. So far none of our walks have gone without a mistake or two (or five, or nine), and we are still working on our choreography, but we’ve been getting where we need to go, and returning home safely. “Good girl!”

This young 22-month-old Seeing Eye dog has never been to Chicago before, of course, so I am the one who tells her what direction to go to get our errands done. We travel one block, she stops at the curb. “Good girl!” I say, then give her a direction. “Left!” She turns left, I tell her how smart she is, and we proceed to the next curb. “Atta girl, good girl!” I say, then give a direction. “Right!” She turns right, and we’re off again.

This new dog really really loves getting outside and going to work. She is so enthusiastic, though, that sometimes when I command “Forward!” she forgets to stop when we get to the next curb! That’s when I step into my role as teacher. I give her a correction, either verbally or with the leash, then show her where she made her mistake.

Next, I bring her back to the curb, tell her to sit, tap the curb with my foot and praise her. “Good girl! 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. She almost always, always gets it right the second time. And when she does? I praise the bejeezus out of her. “Good girl, atta girl!” I rub her up. Her tail wags. “Good girl! Good girl!” She eats it up, and she rarely misses that curb again.

Praise is really what it’s all about for Seeing Eye dogs, and to that end, one thing The Seeing Eye urges graduates to do during our first two weeks at home is keep our new dogs attached to us. Literally. 24/7. So picture me now, working at my computer. My dog is chewing her Nylabone, her leash looped around my ankle. Any time I stand up to head to the kitchen to warm up my coffee, she looks up, stops chewing, and drops her beloved bone. “Heel,” I say, and she walks at my side to the microwave. “Good dog!” When we get to the microwave, I give her another command. “Sit!” She sits. “Good girl!” I want her to stay there while the coffee warms up. “Rest,” I say. She does. “Atta girl, good girl!”

Having a dog on leash 24 hours a day is strangely exhausting, and it sure is tedious. Understanding the method behind the 24/7 attachment madness makes it easier to execute: having them at the end of the leash all the time gives us plenty of chances to tell them how great they are. If your Seeing Eye dog sits when you tell them to, you praise them. When they heel, lie down, rest on command, they are praised. On the other hand, if my Seeing Eye dog misbehaves (sniffs inside a garbage can, nibbles at crumbs on the kitchen floor) I can feel her movement through the leash and catch her in the act. We can’t see our Seeing Eye dogs, but if they are only a leash away while they’re being naughty, we can correct them.

All of this transfers to our work outside, too. I praise, and often pet, my dog anytime she stops at a curb, or at the top of the stairs to the subway. If she messes up, I correct her and give her a chance to do it right. And if she succeeds the second time, guess what? She gets praised!

And so, as much as we Seeing Eye graduates would like to think it’s clear sailing after our three weeks training in Morristown, the work continues, and in some ways really starts, once we get home. I’m looking at the months ahead of us as a ten-year investment in my new dog, and in our work as a team. So while having her on leash all the time has been tedious (for both of us!) it’s well worth the investment. These first three days at home have really flown by, and before you know it, it’ll be February 7, our two weeks will be over, and then watch out, world, my new Seeing Eye dog and I will be unleashed (at home, at least)! Right now, though, it’s time to warm my coffee. “Heel. Good girl!”

…no one. They didn’t play any song at all over the intercom to wake us up on our last day at the SeeingEye!

Speedo is already settling in at home.

A majority of the Seeing Eye graduates going home with our dogs yesterday were scheduled on early morning flights. Each of the four Seeing Eye trainers in our class was charged with driving a van full of Seeing Eye graduates and their dogs from Morristown to Newark International Airport, then arranging for special passes to accompany us through TSA, and finally seeing to it that each dog-and-human team reach the right gate for take-off.

My new dog and I were scheduled for the 4:30 a.m. van, which means my wake-up call did not come as a song. It came as an individual phone call at 2:30 in the morning. That call was followed by a knock on my dorm-room door at 3:30 a.m. My assigned trainers wanted to make absolutely sure I was awake.

My new dog and I are settling in extremely well here in Chicago so far, but I’m feeling a vague sense of jet lag. Maybe she is, too. As I write this note, she is sleeping under my desk, keeping my feet warm. Awwwww!

But back to the wake-up call contest. Just about everyone who was flying home yesterday had left for the airport before 5:30 a.m., the time the Seeing Eye wake-up call is usually played over the intercom. No trainers were there yesterday to decide which song to play, and hardly anyone was left there to hear the song if they’d played one. My guess is that the few remaining students were woken up yesterday the same way I was: each got a phone call and/or a knock on their dorm-room door (but at the much more reasonable time of 5:30 a.m.!)

During each of the four “park times” on Wednesday, the day before our departure, I regaled the trainers with new song suggestions I’d received from you blog readers. Many of your ideas got good reviews, but it’ll be ten more years before I find out if they really did add any of your suggestions to their repertoire. It’s my plan to work with this new magnificent dog of mine for at least a decade!

I was blown away by how many of you responded to that little ditty blog post I wrote. You came up with some good ones! So forget what I said about no one winning. Everyone was a winner, right? So here’s the deal: anyone who got their song suggestion to me before we took off on Thursday will soon receive an email message from me with Speedo’s real name in the message. Stay tuned, and…thank you.