I am pleased to introduce new guest blogger Elisse Pfeiffer today – she and her husband live in Red Lion, Pennsylvania.

by Elisse Pfeiffer

Two weeks from now I’ll be meeting up with an old friend — one I haven’t seen in over eight years. You see, this particular friend has been very busy fulfilling her life’s purpose, and in doing so, she has been a great benefit to a wonderful woman who needed her to enhance her own quality of life.

My friend Whitney is an old lady now, about age 70 in human years, and she’s getting tired. I’m assured she is still in great shape, with many anticipated good years ahead of her, but as most of us know, age has a tendency to slow us down a bit, and our acuity begins to decline. We can still function, for sure, and continue to live a long and productive life, but when your job is to keep a person safe, you need to be 100% aware for 100% of the time you’re at work.

It’s time for Whitney to retire.

We have my daughter to thank for bringing Whitney into our lives. As a junior in her small country high school, Kate was President of the Leo Club. A junior division of the International Lion’s Club, the Leo Club encourages young people to do community service projects. Kate was 16, and she wanted to raise a puppy for the Seeing Eye.

I’m a dog lover, but I was reluctant at first: we already had a two-year-old Golden Retriever! Kate’s enthusiasm won me over, though, and shortly after we’d applied, we got a phone call from the Seeing Eye. An adorable six-week-old ¾ Yellow Labrador and ¼ Golden Retriever puppy named Whitney was available.

They told us we’d be required to attend frequent puppy-raiser meetings and go with our puppies as a group on outings to the movies, the airport, the malls, you name it. What they didn’t tell us was that our puppy would come with a four-inch-thick binder of instructions: commands to use, do’s and don’ts, other rules and regulations. Whew! This was going to be a lot of work!

Whitney, although cute as can be, was a handful. She did all the puppy things, but in mega-doses. She chewed up every toy we gave her, chewed up the molding in my dining room, ate countless shoes, and counter-surfed ad nauseum. She was so energetic that it bordered on her being crazy. We’d laugh at the way she spun around 2 to 3 times before laying down — I’m told she still does this!

She competed with our Golden Retriever, too. I’d throw a Frisbee as far as I could into our backyard and watch Whitney learning from Honey about retrieving toys. It didn’t take long before they reached the toy and brought it up together, tugging on it as they got closer to me, as if they were saying, “No! I’m bringing it to her!” Each dog eventually got her own designated playtime (to avoid the competition) and the two of them became great friends, often sleeping next to each other.

It was a great joy to raise Whitney, and it was hard to not get attached. Every single day I would tell Whitney that I loved her, but that she had a higher purpose. “You are going to be a great asset for a special person one day,” I’d say. I’m not sure if I was telling Whitney that for her sake or for mine, but I swear she understood. Her eyes are so expressive, and she’d wait for commands as if to say, “I’m here, I’m ready, what do you need from me?”

When we got the call that it was time for Whitney to go back to the Seeing Eye for her intensive training, we did our best to use our intellect over our emotions, remembering the original goal: helping someone we didn’t know who needed a dog to enhance their quality of life. An awesome thing.

The Seeing Eye sent us Whitney’s official graduation photo months later along with a letter saying Whitney had been given to an author in Chicago. We were so happy to hear she’d been matched with someone who we surmised was active, and later on, when we Googled “Blind author Chicago Whitney,” voila! Beth’s name appeared. We checked out Beth’s blog from time to time, but followed Seeing Eye rules and never contacted her directly.

Until a couple of months ago.

Our dearly beloved Honey had to be euthanized earlier this year after suffering renal failure, a result of that insidious disease called Lyme’s. Grief over that loss got me thinking about Whitney. I looked up Beth’s blog, only to read that after 8 years of awesome service, it was time for Whitney to retire. I commented to that blog post, letting Beth know I was glad to hear that Whit had been such a great dog for her and was sad that their time together had come to an end.

Beth emailed me personally then, assuring me Whitney would be in good hands with her great-niece Shelley in Minneapolis. Whitney and Shelley had developed a bond over the years, Shelley already had an older dog, Wilson, and was excited to take Whitney now, too.

I completely understood. With Whitney staying in the family, Beth and Mike would be able to visit her from time to time. I let Beth know I’d always dreamed of getting Whitney back one day but never expected that to become a reality.

When Beth told her wonderful great-niece about my message, Shelley was especially sensitive about our life without a dog now, and Whitney’s long ago friendship with Honey. It was decided. Whitney should retire with her puppy raisers.

I still can’t believe that in two weeks, I will be getting Whitney back – I am delirious with excitement and have already gotten her a new Serta sleeper bed, new food/water bowls, non-destructive toys (as I understand she still shreds a soft toy, haha), and have even darned Honey’s winter sweater as it will now belong to Whitney.

I am retired now myself and plan to get Whitney certified as a therapy dog through the American Kennel Club so that I can take her to Nursing Homes and to our local library for the kids “Read to a Dog” program. I don’t want to overwork Whitney, but this will be perfect for her: she’s used to being a working dog. If she is the Whitney that I remember, she will love interacting with people while still being able to be of service.

We will take nature walks, too, and go swimming and have play dates with my daughter’s dog –Kate got married this past year. I am so thankful to Beth and to her niece for making this crazy dream of mine a reality. I am blessed!

This photo was displayed on the big screen while Wanda’s StoryCorps conversation was playing, the two of us are always happy to be together, can you tell? Photo courtesy StoryCorps.

Couldn’t make it to the Chicago Cultural Center to hear writer Wanda Bridgeforth at StoryCorps Live: The Greatest Generation last Friday? Don’t despair! Now you can hear the five-minute excerpt they played online. One thing you’ll miss out on by listening at home is the positive energy in the room during Friday’s event. Ask anyone who was there (more people came than I’d anticipated!) and they’ll tell you. During the audience discussion afterwards a woman said, “It felt like a live history lesson!”

She was right.

As host, my job was to welcome the audience and introduce each of the six short excerpts selected from conversations with people over age 90recorded at the StoryBooth in the Chicago Cultural Center. Listening to their stories taught us a lot about Chicago history. You can link here to listen to all six stories, and among those five-minute excerpts of recorded conversations you’ll hear a Japanese-American man explaining to his son and granddaughter why his first job in Chicago, working graveyard shift at Oscar Mayer Meat Company, lasted only two months. . “One night an army colonel came walking through and spotted me. He told Oscar May’rs to ‘get rid of those Japs,’ so we were fired immediately.” In another conversation a woman tells her son about working in a laboratory at the University of Chicago in the 1940s and discovering later that her work was part of the Manhattan Project to develop an atomic bomb. “I didn’t know we were working on a bomb!” she tells him. “I had no idea.” Some people in the audience Friday gasped when they heard Wanda non-chalantly describe boundaries she grew up with on Chicago’s South Side. “We were blocked in,” she said. “We knew not to cross Cottage Grove, 51st Street or the train tracks. That was our neighborhood.” As a kid, if she crossed east on Cottage Grove Avenue a “policeman would come out of nowhere, ask where you were going and escort you right back across the street.”

Audience members stayed afterwards to enjoy a free lunch, talk with each other and meet the featured nonagenarians and their family members in person — Wanda’s daughter, Wanda, Jr., was there, too!

As I write this blog post, it occurs to me that maybe hearing StoryCorps Live helped people there feel less self-conscious? They sure sounded more open to conversation with others they didn’t know. The audience discussion afterwards was lively, it provided me with ideas for writing prompts for 2020 memoir-writing classes, no one hogged the microphone, we all seemed intent on, guess what? Listening.

I overheard dozens of conversations around me as my sister Cheryl and her daughter, my niece Janet, guided Seeing Eye dog Whitney and me out once the event was over. The two of them had surprised me by taking the train in from the suburbs to see Wanda (one of their favorites) and watch me host the event.

Janet is ten years younger than I am, she knows me well, and I have always been able to count on her to be painfully honest with me. “You were pretty nervous at first, I could tell,” she reported as we said our thanks and goodbyes to all the writers in my memoir classes who’d come from all over the city to be there. “But you got better,” she added.

Janet was right, of course. I did get better Friday, and I wasn’t alone: everyone there did! You can’t help but get better when listening to the Greatest Generation.

Many many thanks to Crystal Warren, Regional Director at Renaissance Court for letting StoryCorps Chicago know about the writers over age 90 in our memoir-writing class there, and to Amy Tardif, Regional Manager of the Chicago StoryBooth for listening! Bill Healy, the great guy who produces StoryCorps conversations for WBEZ was at Friday’s event and the StoryCorps staff members were a huge help in making it all go so smoothly: thank you Mary Bess Ser, Rocío Santos, Olivia Lindsley, Laura Saenz, and Juanpablo Ramirez. Link here to participate in the Great Thanksgiving Listen tomorrow and add your own story to the StoryCorps archive, too.

I wasn’t able to watch the impeachment hearings live, but I have seen selected highlights. Beth was able to listen to some morning testimony live, and she sort of helped me seek out things she thought were significant.

In doing so, she had a take on it all I hadn’t expected: Regardless of the president’s behavior, whether it rose to impeachable, or anything else political, she was inspired.

I didn’t really get it until I listened to parts of the State Department folks. When I did, I understood. These people, despite what anyone wants to smear them as, are true public servants. A lot of their testimony served as a sort of civics lesson in just what the heck the diplomatic corps does. The answer is, a lot, and under very difficult circumstances, working for very different leaders every few years.

We live in an age when skepticism about government has grown from healthy to malignant. Hard scrutiny about the limits of what government does, and oversight of government—local, state, and federal—is absolutely a good thing.

But dissing every one and every thing in the government is a cop out. It abdicates the whole idea that we hold some responsibility for the conduct of our government. It doesn’t delineate between the things government can and should do, and those things that perhaps, despite the best intentions, aren’t practical. As such, we get into binary thinking—all good, or all bad. And we never have the constructive conversation and debate.

I once worked at a wine importer and distributor, and one of the women I worked with was whip-smart, she had gone to Princeton, was making a good buck, and…she decided to join the Peace Corps. After that experience, she joined the State Department, and has repeatedly moved to points around the globe for her work. She’s now in the United Arab Emirates, reviewing visa requests to visit the United States. Not an unimportant task in that part of the world.

She’s proud of her work, completely apolitical in her observations about it, and I’m glad she’s on the case.

There are a lot of good people in government—we heard a few of them testify last week, and thanks to my friend in the UAE, I know it for a fact.

Drivers running red lights. Drivers causing gridlock. Drivers texting. Drivers watching TV on their phones. Pedestrians walking and texting or reading their phone. Bicyclists who don’t use those bike lanes we gave them. Pedestrians who walk in bike lanes. People who buy a damn plastic vest and slap it on their ill-trained dog and fake that it’s a legitimate service dog. People who let their dogs pee anywhere.

Sometimes people get on my nerves. And it’s beyond annoyance–lots of this stuff is dangerous. Last year was the worst for pedestrian fatalities in decades. This despite inroads on reducing drunk driving, cars that stop themselves and correct their courses themselves. There isn’t a smart automotive device that can make up for our stupidity sometimes.

I have this dream. A superhero who swoops down and smites people at just the instant they commit these various offenses. OK, maybe not smites them, but scares the bajeezus out of them. Something like what I experienced growing up—just about the instant I did or said something stupid, my mom was somehow right there and she’d thump the top of my head with her finger—as if if she was testing the ripeness of a melon. It didn’t really hurt but man it got my attention.

Anyway, I’d call the superhero BM Man or BM Woman. As in Behavior Modification.

Just think. Traffic would move better, walking wouldn’t be an adventure, dogs would only go where they should, we’d all learn to live in fear in of BM Woman and consequently, treat each other lots better than we do.

I see a graphic novel here.

The suggestion box is open.

Anyone who has followed our Safe & Sound blog for a while knows who Wanda Bridgeforth is. You’ve seen her photo here. You’ve read her writing here. But do you know what she sounds like? Now’s your chance!

Earlier this month I spent an hour with Wanda in a StoryCorps booth in Chicago (aside from their studio in New York City, StoryCorps has two satellite sites: one in Atlanta and the other in Chicago). While there is no guarantee Wanda’s interview will air nationally on NPR, I can tell you this: a short excerpt of the conversation Wanda and I recorded will air at a special StoryCorps event in Chicago this Friday. How do I know this, you ask? Because I’ve been selected to host the event!

I know. I didn’t believe it when they asked me, either. But check out this official invitation from StoryCorps:

StoryCorps Live: The Greatest Generation

Since StoryCorps Chicago first opened in 2013, more than 200 people aged 90 and above from the Chicago community have visited us to record their stories and memories. Join us for a public event featuring excerpts of these recordings, plus audience discussion and refreshments. Hosted by author, teacher, and journalist Beth Finke.
WHEN: Friday, November 22, 2019 at 11am

WHERE: Renaissance Court, our neighbors in the Chicago Cultural Center, at 78 E Washington Street. (Accessible entrance at 77 E Randolph.)

Selected interviews have been edited down to five-minute pieces, I’ve been given bios of the nonagenarians interviewed in those, and I’ll be introducing their pieces at the event. Among others, you’ll be hearing from a Japanese-American man who talks of internment camps in the 1940s; a woman whose work at a University of Chicago lab in the 1940s was part of the Manhattan Project; a Hyde Park resident who talks about the complexities of growing up in early 20th century with a white mother and a black father; and a fabulous writer we all know who relives her memories growing up in Chicago’s lively Bronzeville neighborhood.

That last member of the Greatest Generation is, of course, our 98-year-old Wanda. Snacks and refreshments will be served at the event, an ASL interpreter will be on hand, and the event is free. All you have to do is RSVP online here or phone Renaissance Court at 312.744.4550 to let them know you’re coming. Look for me there — next thing you know, I’ll be hosting the Oscars.