Followers of our Safe & Sound blog know that my Seeing Eye dog Whitney will be retiring soon. She sleeps more than she used to, she walks slower when leading me through Chicago, and every once in a while she loses focus. All that said, she is still one smart dog.

Whitney, looking appropriately heroic. (Courtesy The Seeing Eye.) Who can fill her paws?

Whitney was leading me home from downtown Chicago a few weeks ago when I sensed her veering ever so slightly off the sidewalk. Not toward the street, but in the other direction.

The sounds of silverware and people chatting and laughing was a big clue. Aha! We’re in an outdoor plaza. Whitney must have smelled some good food and couldn’t resist.

I stopped a moment to get my bearings, and when a man came up and asked if I needed some help, I said yes. “I got off-kilter there for a second,” I told him, pointing in the direction I thought was south. “Am I still on the sidewalk on Dearborn, heading south?” He said I was, so I picked up Whitney’s harness and gave her a command. “Whitney, forward!” I said, and she pulled me forward.

But the man followed me.

”Where are you going?” he asked. “Do you live alone?” He told me he was single, kept following me, telling me how strong he is, how tall, how good looking, how much he could help me. When Whitney stopped at the next red light, the pedestrians waiting alongside us were a comfort.

But I couldn’t stay there forever.

When the light turned green, I focused on Whitney as she guided me across the street. ”You made it,” the man said. Oh, no. He was still there. He was still following us. I tried to stay calm, but inside I was panicking. C’mon Whitney, this is real. You’ve gotta get us home. I encouraged her to hurry along, but instead of continuing forward, she veered again, this time leading me to a door.

“That’s the bank,” the man following me said. “You don’t want the bank.” He was right. I did not want the bank. I’d never ever been to that bank. I didn’t even know there was a bank there. I just wanted to get home.

Just as I was about to scold Whitney for her mistake, a blessed thought occurred to me. “Oh, yes,” I said, loud enough for the man to hear me. “The bank. Good girl, Whitney!” I opened the door and left the man behind.

Inside, I stood in the middle of the lobby catching my breath and listening intently to the door I’d come through. I didn’t hear it open again. The man must not have followed in after me.

Did Whitney know what she was doing, leading me to that door when she did? I think yes. Her age may be affecting her physical work as a guide, but mentally she still knows ways to keep us safe. The lobby was small, and it didn’t take too long for a guy working there to notice the blind woman with the Seeing Eye dog there. “May I help you?” I had no idea what bank I was in, but I figured I didn’t have an account there, so I told him so and explained. “Some guy out there was following me, and…” I gave him the whole story. He asked if I wanted to sit down. “No,” I said. “I just want to shake that guy off my trail and get home.”

As it happened, this guy was a bank executive. He was off for a business meeting in a fancy building just south of there, the same direction I was going. “I’ll walk you,” he said. “Just give me a minute to gather my stuff.”

The exec told me his name, gave me his card, and walked Whitney and me two or three blocks in that direction. He looked behind us along the way, assuring me no one was following us any more. When he had to head in for his meeting, I felt confident Whitney would get me the rest of the way.

And she did.

Y’all have to know by now how I feel about Chicago’s North Side baseball team. Attending a game at Wrigley a couple weekends ago didn’t change anything. For all the improvements that have been made at Wrigley Field, one remains undone: Getting rid of that hideous chain link fence at the top of the outfield wall! I grew up watching both teams, and remember well how much better the ivied walls looked without the junkyard treatment up top. The fence was installed in 1970 to keep fans from interfering. Well, guess what! Now the fence routinely interferes—keeping outfielders from making great plays and yielding some of the cheapest home runs this side of right field in Yankee Stadium or Pesky’s Pole at Fenway. (It’d be nice to see relievers warming up in the bullpen in the flesh instead of on video, too.)

I say all this to reassure you that, no, I have not been been infected by a bad case of the Ricketts; this is the real Mike Knezovich saying this: Right now the Cubs and their fans are getting a raw deal!

I know they’re struggling, but they’re in the middle of probably the season’s last, best pennant race in all of Major League Baseball.

But if I turn on sports radio or anything Chicago sports, it’s all about…Bears angst. This after endless droning on, filling time, repeating stories again and again…about the Bears…before a game had been played.

There’s a lot more football left, and there’s plenty of time to blab on about it. The Cubs are in a pennant race, for crying out loud. So far all we know about the Bears is they are disappointing.

Aside from that, football is…insane. The league-wide injury report this morning was hideous. I think it may have overtaken boxing and MMA for overall savagery.

How much do I love baseball and don’t care about the NFL? So much that I’d rather read/hear/view sports reporters talk about the Cubs than the Bears. That’s how much.

With that, I’ll leave you with the timeless wisdom of a guy who had it right:

I am pleased to have Hava Hegenbarth back as a guest blogger today. Hava volunteered as a puppy-raiser for Leader Dogs for years. We’ve never met face to face, but she’s been following our Safe & Sound blog since it started, so we feel we know each other. Hava is retired after a career in the diplomatic service, and longtime Safe & Sound blog readers will remember the poignant guest post she wrote in 2012 about her assignment at the U.S. Embassy in Rwanda. This new guest post by Hava demonstrates just how wide and varied her life experiences are – she’s an artist, too!

by Hava Hegenbarth

It was a rainy day in Botswana. Rain is a thing so rare in that desert country that the local name for their currency, “pula” means rain. Stuck indoors, I went net surfing, and somehow I ended up on The Seeing Eye’s web site.

I read the entire site, first page to last, and I was so impressed I sent them a donation. A thank you letter arrived later with an invitation to visit their school when I returned to the States, an invitation I took them up on. We’ve been friends ever since, and occasionally the Seeing Eye calls on me to provide artwork for them to use for notecards and jackets and such.

And then, last winter, a big project arrived. My veterinarian commissioned me to paint a mural for their office wall. I painted a scene of a stormy sky with cats and dogs falling onto a sea of colorful umbrellas. The title of my mural? ”Cloudy With a Chance of Golden Retrievers.”

When I sent a photo of the mural to my Seeing Eye friends, they asked if I’d do a mural for them on the walls of their new kennel.

Cloudy with a Chance of Golden Retrievers mural done of the office wall of a veterinarian. Shows all sorts of cats and dogs, twisting and falling out of a stormy sky onto a sea of colorful umbrellas. Just like the rain, that day in Botswana.

So who can say no to them? Not I. I was to go out for a month or so on the campus to paint my murals, but then the Seeing Eye had a second thought: they’d rather have hang-on-the-wall pictures instead of a mural.

One of the series of 12 pictures hung in the new kennel at The Seeing Eye. The picture shows a Seeing Eye employee handing a 7-week-old golden retriever puppy off to a volunteer puppy raiser. Just the hands and arms of the raiser and employee are shown, while the whole of the pup is visible. The pup has a sweet, innocent expression on its face, as if to say “I don’t know what this is all about, but I’m eager to please”. The caption reads A furry gift of love is given – to be returned.

I was disappointed at not being able to go out for a month, but once they pointed out that kennels can get dirty, walls are regularly washed and occasionally repainted, I could see their point. Washing and repainting are natural enemies of murals.

So I got to work on smaller paintings. I came up with a series of 12 paintings that tell the story of how the Seeing Eye transforms puppies into working guides and what it’s like to sent them out to do their work, and last month I traveled to Morristown, New Jersey for Family Day!

The Seeing Eye holds Family Day once a year to honor their puppy raisers. The raisers, all of them volunteers, got a chance to tour the new kennel and to see my paintings. Many were so moved by the story the pictures tell that they were brought to tears.

Some staff members told me the pictures affect them in the same way. “A book!” they said. “You need to put the picture story into a book!”

What do I know of writing books? Nothing. That’s when they told me to contact Beth and ask for her advice on how to get published. So I have done, and she has cheerfully obliged me with loads of ideas. So now to get to work as a writer. Who knows, next time you’re stuck indoors on a rainy day, a picture book about Seeing Eye puppies may provide you a good read.

Our guest blogger Ali Krage is on a role! In the post she wrote about returning for her last semester at Northern Illinois University (NIU), she talked about the challenges and rewards of being in college when you can’t see.

A week has passed since we published that post, and Ali is already so busy with classes and homework and social activities and her new part-time job at NIU that it may be a while before she can take time to write another guest post. To hold us all over , I’m sharing a wonderful post she wrote while still on summer vacation — this one originally appeared on the Easterseals National Blog. Enjoy!

by Alicia KrageSometimes I like to share my travel stories with other blind individuals. It gives us a chance to laugh off the mishaps that occur in day-to-day life — or, alternatively, it gives them permission to share their own stories, too. Conversing with other blind people about our experiences is something I really enjoy. The events can be totally unexpected, and it’s comforting knowing we are not alone in these kind of experiences.

One recent Saturday morning, I was up bright and early. I wanted to get out of the house for a bit and do some reading at Dunkin Donuts. I used Siri to ask, “What time does Dunkin Donuts open?” Siri confirmed that it was already open. Next step? Using voiceover on my iPhone to schedule my Uber. Once the Uber app gave me my driver’s name, I pasted a text I have drafted in my notes on my phone:

Just so you know, I’m blind so I won’t see your vehicle pull up. Please come get me when you arrive.

This note ensures that I am getting into the right vehicle: the driver will address me by name or introduce himself after approaching me. And so was the case on that early Saturday morning. The ride was short, and when we arrived, the driver offered to lead me to the door.

“That’d be great, thanks!” I replied. “I should be good from there.” I didn’t memorize this layout to the Dunkin near my parent’s house the way I did with the one in DeKalb (that’s where I go to college) but I felt confident I could find the counter to order. I can usually find a Dunkin’ donuts counter by listening for clues — either people ordering their drinks while I enter, or the familiar sound of the card machine.

So my Uber driver and I approach the door, and I pull on the door to open it, and…it wouldn’t budge. That led to an interesting back-and-forth between me and the Uber driver.

”Am I…supposed to push this? Am I pushing on a pull door again?” I asked, laughing. Pulling on doors I’m supposed to be pushing is more common than he realized.

The driver laughed, too. “No, you’re doing it right,” he assured me. “But it’s locked.”

“It is?” I said, surprised. “My phone said it’s open.”

Pause.

I imagined the driver was looking around to see if there was a sign on the door. When he said the drive-through was open, I contemplated briefly. I really was counting on enjoying the coffee shop atmosphere for a while. There was another Dunkin Donuts pretty close, But that would involve taking another Uber back home. We were already here.

“Would you mind taking me through the drive-through?” I asked. “I mean, if it isn’t too much trouble…?” I felt confident he wouldn’t leave me standing there, but I never want a driver to feel obligated. Who knows? Maybe the line of cars was long? I understood if, for whatever reason, he didn’t want to spend his time taking me up to the drive-through. .

His reply came immediately, and there was no trace of annoyance. “Sure, I can do that.”

Truth is, I’ve had driven through a drive-through a few times before in an Uber. I hadn’t known you could actually do that until one day, on my routine trip to Dunkin, my driver asked me if I was going through the drive-through or going inside. “I’m going inside,” I told him. But then, as an afterthought, I asked, “But, for future reference, if I did want to go through the drive-through, how would I do that?”

He told me that I would just add it as a stop, and add my dorm (or where ever I was headed next) as my destination, and let the driver know I was going through the drive-through instead of running inside.

So, I did that. A few times, actually. Most of my drive-through experiences came before night classes, and I went through the drive-through that morning the Dunkin lobby was closed, too. The driver laughed about what an adventure this was so early in the morning, and after we’d determined the main door was locked, he offered perfect sighted guide on our walk back to the car.

As we headed to the drive-through, I asked the driver if he’d mind ordering for me when we got there. “I don’t know where the speaker is…I kind of, well, can’t see it.”

Note: it is not uncommon for me to lighten the mood with some blind humor — or a “blind joke” as I often refer to them.

But back to the story: my driver laughed again and agreed. As I type this now, I realize that since the microphone is typically on the left side, I could have just moved over in the back seat to that side and spoken into the microphone, but I just didn’t want to risk my aim being off. I truly just didn’t feel confident enough. Maybe this will be something I ask sighted friends or family to help me with first before I try it.

Anyway, since it was so early, there was no line. We ordered. “Thank you,” I told him, and just like that, I had my favorite drink in my hands. “What a morning, right?”

We learned that Dunkin had some unexpected maintenance going on, which is why the lobby was closed. And that is exactly why I have drivers lead me to the door rather than just dropping me at the curb and driving away. I guess you never know when something like this could happen!

Being blind, I am learning to just take the mishaps as they come and laugh them off, but I’m still working on this.

I mentioned in a previous post that I’m not a patient person. But these small events — the detours we have to take in life — are stories worth telling. Taking these detours with friends and family who exude nothing but patience and good conversation makes the story even better.