So many dog lovers who see me out and about with Whitney stop, sigh, and say, “I wish I could bring my dog with me to the store.” This month, if you live anywhere near Chicago, you finally can!

My longtime friend Jenny Foucre Fischer works at The Bookstore in Glen Ellyn, Ill, The store is celebrating the dog days of summer this month — not only are they encouraging customers to bring their “furry, feathery and scaly friends” along when they come to shop for books, but they’ll give you a reward if you do. Don’t believe me? Here’s a quote from their August newsletter: “Stop by with your pet and meet us in person, — or show us a photo of your favorite animal companion (real, stuffed or imaginary) — and you’ll receive 10% off an animal-related book in August. What can I say? The Bookstore is a rare breed, ahem, and this story about them in the Chicago Tribune explains why:

The store is one of about 50 independent retail booksellers in the Chicago area. Not too long ago, all of them and the other roughly 4,000 independents across the U.S. were supposed to vaporize. By some estimates, more than 2,000 did.

But about 1,500 survived. And as the Tribune story says, “through a mix of obsessive attention to detail, lean inventory, an embrace of technology and resourceful salesmanship, they hang in there.”

The Bookstore has been extremely supportive of my books over the years, and of course Hanni and Beth: Safe & Sound is one of the books you can purchase with your discount when you bring your companion animal with you to shop there this month.</

“That’s Jenny with Hanni and me a few years ago at The Bookstore in Glen Ellyn.”

And wait. There’s more! Email The Bookstore at justbook475@yahoo.com to share a photo of yourself or someone in your family reading to your pets, and if you give them permission to use the photo on their website & social media pages, they’ll give you an additional 10% off an animal-related book, bringing your total discount to 20%. What. A. Deal.

My friend Nicole Dotto left Chicago this past week to move closer to her family in California, and I’m sure going to miss her.

That’s me as Annie Hall, thanks to Nicole.

Loyal blog readers might recognize Nicole’s name from a 2013 guest post she wrote here after Mike and I were invited to a costume ball for Mardi Gras. The theme of the party was “Hollywood” and Nicole helped me put together a costume. Nicole and I met as volunteers for Sit Stay Read here in Chicago. She runs an online vintage shop called DOTTO on Etsy and has a whole lot of handsome and classic items for sale there, along with what she affectionately calls “interesting train wreck pieces” (she tells me a lot of those are thanks to the colorful 1980s).

Nicole is moving her Etsy business with her to California, but before she left Chicago she was interviewed for a piece about her shop on the etsy blog. The story was on the Etsy front page for two days — a huge deal as far as Etsy goes.<!–more–>

She was pleased that Etsy included pictures of items from her store along with some behind-the-scenes shots of her Chicago apartment, but she did have one complaint. “They totally cropped one photo that had my cat employee snoozing on the ground next to me while I was taking shop photos,” she told me. “The nerve!”

In the Etsy interview, Nicole said that while in Chicago the past three years she lived and worked in a studio apartment and grew to love all parts of running her shop: finding clothing, cleaning, mending, measuring, editing, shipping, and answering questions. She models most of the outfits she sells on her ETSY site, too, an in the ETSY interview she claims she “can take photos with a timer like no one’s business.”

A story in the Lincoln Park Village newsletter this month by Bonnie Keplinger described Millennials like Nicole as:

• over 80 million strong in the US
• born roughly between 1980 and 2001
• self-directed
• tech-savvy
• confident
• multi-tasking
• upbeat

The Lincoln Park Village article said that if you’re a Millennial, your life-style and friends trump your work. “They aim to change the policies of corporate America to achieve better work-life balance: Hello meaningful, collaborative work and transparency; goodbye performance reviews and 60 hour work weeks.”

Nicole told me that starting her own small business and relying on it as a sole source of income from the start never felt like a huge risk to her. She gives a lot of credit to her family and friends who encouraged and supported her along the way and hopes others will consider opening their own small online businesses. “It can sound terrifying, but I want everyone to know that they can do this kind of thing, too.”

That’s Nicole modeling the ‘WHO WOULD WEAR THIS?’ kind of thing she carries in her online vintage shop. (sorry, folks. It’s sold.)

I can’t vouch for the photos — you’ll have to link to the ETSY blog post and check them out yourself. I can tell you that the interview paints a beautiful picture of Nicole, though, and will end here with her answer to a question about what she loves most about having her own shop on ETSY:

I love the fact that DOTTO allows me to call the shots, give new life to clothing that otherwise might be discarded, pretend that I have the grandest closet in all the land, meet people from around the world, and put cats in my pictures, but what I really love about it is the glorious flexibility it affords me. I joined the Peace Corps after college because I wanted a broader perspective of the world, and I’ve continued volunteering in some way ever since. Having my days free lets me volunteer around Chicago a couple of times a week, which is truly what I love to do. I have working limbs and my wits about me; there is no reason I shouldn’t be helping others as much as I can.

That’s Fritz (or a reasonable facsimile)

If you’ve seen Monty Python and the Holy Grail, you know the scene: The black knight keeps having body parts lopped off, keeps coming back for more, and is eventually left behind by his opposing knight, shouting “Come back here, I’ll bite your legs off!”

Well, that’s about where our trusted 1998 Volkswagen Passat is. An exhaust pipe fell off, just disappeared last week—and it now sounds like a diesel locomotive. The rear view mirror fell off the windshield, and I superglued it back on — three times. The key fob hasn’t worked for years, and now the locks are haunted — they go up and down on their own. There’s a mysterious water leak behind the driver’s seat. The gas cap door release control stopped functioning a few weeks ago, and I had to pry it open to put gas in.

The license plates expire on March 31. That’s the day I will donate the car to some poor unsuspecting charity, and we will begin a new era: Beth and I are going carless.

I’ve already signed up for Zipcar, a car sharing service, and between that and all the public trans options we have downtown, we should be fine. We’ll probably save some cash in the process. To be honest,  I’ve been thinking about retiring our Passat for ten years, ever since we moved to Chicago. But you know, I’m just irrationally attached to the damn thing.

We bought it when we lived on the Outer Banks of North Carolina, so it carries some nice memories of cruising up and down the beach road with the windows down, the moonroof open, and marine air permeating everything. Our salesman was an African-born man named Fred. I met him when I did an exploratory shopping trip on my own—he said my wife would love the moon roof. Didn’t have the heart to tell him.

The only model they had on the lot was white—not my favorite color—but it would be cheaper (and faster) than ordering one. I came home to tell Beth that I liked the car, and explained about the white thing. We couldn’t decide, so Beth suggested we defer to our magic 8 ball. Will we buy the white Passat? Signs point to yes.

Gus still lived with us then, and one reason we liked the wagon was that the doors swung very wide open—easing the task of getting Gus in and out of the back seat. The cargo area was really large—making it easy to load his wheel chair in back without having to take the wheels off. In fact, we did not sign the contract until I went through that very test with Gus at the dealership.

The year was 1998, and I was awed by the technology—it had a trip computer that read out mileage, mpg, time, and temperature! It had electric windows (my first car ever with those)! Automatic locks! An indigo blue lit dashboard! ABS! Five airbags!

Just over 183,000 miles later, Fritz—as Beth nicknamed him—has lived on the ocean front, in Urbana, Ill., and on the mean streets of Chicago. I know other Passat owners have had trouble with theirs, but ours has been a champ, and to be honest—except for the roar of the engine, the car still runs like a top, and just hums at 75 mph. We’ve had a lot of great road trips in Fritzy. But it’s time.

Outside of one short stint in Washington, D.C., when I relied on my motorcycle and my roommate Pick for rides, I’ve had a car my entire adult life. So it’s kind of weird to contemplate. I know I’ll adjust. I certainly won’t miss the insurance costs, the monthly parking fees, the repair costs,.

But I think I will miss Fritz.

Bennett and his companion dog Journey.

Remember my post about Vision Forward, the conference about educating kids who are blind? I signed more Braille copies of Hanni and Beth: Safe & Sound at that conference than print ones, and this thank-you note from the mom of a five-year-old boy I met there was so moving that I wrote her back to ask if I could share it with my blog readers:

Dear Beth,

I met you at the Vision Forward Conference in Milwaukee this past weekend. I purchased your book, Safe and Sound, for my blind 5 1/2 year old son, Bennett.

My husband read it with him tonight, while I worked on homework with my 9 year old. Bennett was so excited about the book. He told me, “I loved that book you got me. It’s a true story mom. And no one ever writes true stories for kids about people who are blind like me.”

His reaction caused me to think. He is right. If I look on Amazon, there isn’t much out there. Thank you for writing this story and reaching out to children who can not see. Bennett has a Children’s Companion Dog and he said when the story started, he thought for sure it was about his dog Journey.

Thanks again. And it was a pleasure meeting you. Keep writing and we will keep reading 🙂

I swear, any time I’m feeling blue, all I gotta do is read this note. It always makes me smile. A lot of thoughtful people teamed together to make sure Hanni and Beth: Safe & Sound came out in Braille the exact same day it was published in print. That hardly ever, ever happens: Braille is so expensive to publish that “braile presses” usually wait until a book becomes a best-seller before putting it out in Braille.

Hanni and Beth: Safe & Sound is available in a Print-and-Braille format. The Braille and print match line for line, with the print just above the Braille (no pictures). I can tell you first hand, so to speak, that it’s “good Braille” = the dots are stiff, they stand up straight, They’re easy to read. The only problem for me? The Braille version of Hanni and Beth: Safe & Sound was produced in contracted Braille, a form of Braille I’ve never been able to master.

Contracted Braille has a bunch of shorthand symbols (contractions) for commonly used words and parts of words: there’s a cell for the word “and,” another for the word “the,” and so on. Most of the letters of the alphabet are also used as shorthand for common words, such as “c” for “can” and “l” for “like.” Kind of like texting, only you can’t make as many mistakes!

When I wrote Bennett’s mom back to thank her for her note,  I apologized that my book was only available in contracted Braille, and poor five-year-old Bennett would have a hard time reading it. No problem, she said. Bennett started learning Braille this past summer. “He knows the whole alphabet, all of the “secret” words for the letters when they are alone, and he just started the words that have 2 Braille letters together, like bc for because,” she said. “Not to brag, but this little guy is a genius!”

I say she should go ahead and brag. Not only about Bennett, but about herself and her husband, too, and the family they are raising, all of them supporting Bennett’s love for reading. A little known fact about Braille: less than 20% of the 50,000 blind children in the United States are proficient in Braille. The American Foundation for the Blind reports a severe shortage of certified teachers of the visually impaired (TVIs), especially in rural areas or in small school districts, and without qualified teachers, it can be a lot easier for parents of children who are blind to just let their kids listen to books on audio or hear words on a talking computer. Technology is cool, but if children who are blind never learn Braille, how will they ever learn to spell correctly? How will they know where to put commas, quotation marks, paragraph breaks and so on?

My children’s book publisher, Blue Marlin Publications, teamed up with Seedlings Braille Books for Children (a non-profit organization in Michigan that creates Braille books for kids who can’t see) to produce my children’s book at a reasonable price — the Braille/print version is actually less expensive than the print version. .Blue Marlin didn’t charge Seedlings a penny for the rights to publish the book in Braille, and wait, there’s more: Blue Marlin Publications also decided to donate a portion of the sales of the print version of Hanni and Beth: Safe & Sound to Seedlings so they can continue creating books in Braille at a reasonable cost for kids who need them.

I do know enough contracted Braille to read the first couple of pages of my children’s book out loud, and with Safe & Sound available in Braille, I’ve been able to read it aloud at school presentations and show kids what Braille looks like and how it works.

I brought a Braille copy along to a visit with the fourth graders at Crow Island School in Winnetka yesterday, but those kids didn’t need any explanation of what Braille is: Jalena, a smart and cheerful 9-year-old in their class, is blind. I invited Jalena to sit with me and help me during the Q & A part of yesterday’s presentation, and she was happy to do so. We answered questions about whether we feel sad not being able to see colors, if we sleep with our eyes open, and how we put our pierced earrings in our ears without looking in a mirror. Not one kid at Crow Island asked about Braille, though: they’re all experts! Lots of Jalena’s sighted friends are in the school’s Braille Club and have learned uncontracted Braille, the version I know.

When the afternoon was over, I thanked Jalena by giving her the Braille copy of Safe & Sound that I’d brought along, and she was delighted. Gail Wilson, her TVI, told me later that after school sometimes Jalena reads with a book buddy who can see. “We have a hard time finding print/Braille books like yours,” she said. “I know for sure what they’ll be reading later today!”

To find out how to order a copy of Hanni and Beth: Safe & Sound in print/Braille, or to donate to Seedlings to help them create more books in Braille for kids, link to www.seedlings.org.

Mike and I were invited to a costume ball for Mardi Gras last month, and when I found out the theme of the party was “Hollywood” I asked my young friend Nicole Dotto to

That’s me as Annie, thanks to Nicole.

help with my costume. Nicole and I met as volunteers for Sit Stay Read here in Chicago. She runs a vintage clothing shop on Etsy and generously agreed to write this guest post about picking out a costume for me.

Wait til Beth feels what I got her!

by Nicole Dotto

Put together an outfit for someone who will not be able to see it?

Oh not daunting at all.

One of Beth’s memoir students cleaned out her closets recently and gave her two really beautiful designer suits: one bright red and one stunning green. Beth asked if I could think of any movie characters who wore either of these—that way she could wear one of the suits and dress up as one of them for the party. I found a photo of Ava Gardner in a red suit. Rear Window’s Miss Lonelyhearts wore a green dress that could have passed. Beth would have looked amazing as Tippi Hedren in The Birds, though Tippi’s suit was pale green. When we realized that my Hollywood characters would require some serious explaining at the party (“No, remember? the lady he was watching across the street? Lonelyhearts”), Beth shrugged and said she’d be happy to go as Annie Hall.

The more I started to share Beth’s real deal crush on Annie Hall’s look, the more we decided that this was the only way to go. and bonus: it was a little less daunting to complete that outfit. I perused the men’s section at two different thrift stores and found khaki pants, a white shirt, green tie with polka dots, black suede vest, and felt hat in less than two hours. the thrift store is my battleground.

I’d never been a personal shopper before Beth asked, although technically I’ve been personal shopping multiple times a week for the past three years. But that’s just for people that I make up in my head. I run an online vintage shop called DOTTO, and even though I have a whole lot of handsome and classic items for sale there, I carry a number of interesting train wreck pieces we can all thank the 1980s for, too.

That’s Nicole modeling the ‘WHO WOULD WEAR THIS?’ kind of thing she carries in her online vintage shop. (sorry, folks. It’s sold.)

I grew up with a slight aversion to shopping but then discovered it’s pretty fun when I am searching for everyone else in the world but myself. I try to vary what I offer in terms of size and style and BRIGHTNESS. I cannot physically stop myself from heading straight toward anything neon or overloaded with sparkle. My true test for items has always been this: if I can’t imagine someone wearing it, it’s just right for DOTTO. Those are the sort of items I am secretly really happy to offer the world.

But back to Beth as Annie Hall. Let’s be honest here. Beth would have loved the outfit even if I’d gotten all of the colors wrong or hadn’t been able to find the right vest or hat, but watching her feel each item and put everything together while I explained just how dapper the high waist and cuffed pant looked and how the tie had to be worn as long as possible, well, that was icing on the cake. The whole time I was there we kept talking about just how cool Diane Keaton is, but I was kind of thinking, huh, don’t you think the same is true for Beth in general?

Nicole asked me to let you blog readers know she’ll give a 10% discount20% discount discount at DOTTO to anyone who tells her they read this Annie Hall post. Look for the discount code here in the comment section, and shop away!