After we published Mike’s thoughtful post about my Seeing Eye dog Whitney’s upcoming retirement, caring friends and family have been asking if I know what breed my next dog will be. Do I know the name of my next dog, Will they tell you if it’s going to be a male or female? Hearing myself answer “not yet” so many times got me to thinking. Might those two words work as a writing prompt? Yes! Had I assigned something similar before? Not yet.

Bill Gordon

Writer Bill Gordon said he knew what he’d write about the minute he heard the prompt. After hearing him read his piece out loud, I asked if I could share it here on our Safe & Sound blog. Lucky for us, he did not say, “not yet.” Here it is:

by Bill Gordon

It was the fall of 2000. I was at O’Hare, ready to board a plane to Denver and on to Aspen. I was the scheduled keynote speaker for the Colorado Library Association. Just before boarding started, I was called to the desk and upgraded to first class because there was a vacant seat and I was a frequent flyer.

While I was settling into my aisle seat, the fellow next to me asked me what I did. I said I was the Executive Director of the American Library Association and I was on my way to a library conference. “What do librarians have to talk about,” he scoffed. “And why an association? No one uses libraries anymore.”

Before I could respond, the captain introduced herself and welcomed us to the flight. My seat mate was outraged that we had a female pilot. “She should be serving coffee,” he said. “Not trying to fly a plane.” I said I always prefer female doctors, lawyers and pilots because I know they had to work harder and be better than their male counterparts. That ended, thankfully, any further possibility of conversation.

We settled in. The plane was cruising at 35,000 feet. Suddenly there was an ear-splitting explosion. The plane rolled on its side. Some overhead compartments flew open. The contents scattered. Loud screams. Crying. The plane rolled back but it felt as if it were standing still, then it fell about 3,000 feet. The oxygen masks dropped.

There was more screaming, and then an odd silence. The plane settled and was moving forward, but it was shaking like a carnival ride, and there was the noise of metal scraping against metal.

The captain announced that an engine had blown up and caused extensive damage to the plane’s controls. She said the plane could only turn to the left. She was going to turn the plane and land in Des Moines. She would let us know when to get into crash position. My seat mate was crying and whimpering, and because of the odor, I knew he had wet himself. I did not feel afraid; I just felt sad. Was this to be the end? I needed some time to tell people what I had never said.

Had I told my sister Shirley, the last of my siblings, how much she meant to me? Well, not yet. What about Jan? Had I told her how beautiful she is and how much her love means to me. Not yet. Have I told Carsten, my best friend, how much I treasure his friendship? Not yet.

What about Charles who was so special to me and who always had my back? And Mike, my hiking and white water rafting buddy, who snatched me from certain disaster. Did I ever tell Joyce, my former wife, that she was the smartest person I have ever known and my ten years with her were among the best of my life? And what about all those people with whom I worked who made my career so special? I needed time to clear up all those “NOT YETS” in my life.

The Captain announced that she was going to do her best to land the plane. We were to put our heads between our knees and our hands over our heads. The plane was vibrating so badly it felt as if it could come apart at any moment.

Suddenly, we were on the ground. The plane bucked, tipped, and shuddered, but finally came to a stop. I looked up. We had landed in fire retardant foam, surrounded by emergency vehicles. It was quickly determined that there was no fire. The plane could be towed to a gate.

The pilot emerged from the cockpit to a loud round of applause and screams of “Thank you.” First class passengers deplaned first. I was met by an airline attendant who re-scheduled me, and in less than an hour I was back on a plane on my way to Denver.

I can’t say this experience cured me of letting some “not yets” get in my way. It certainly made me appreciate every day and moment, however, and has, generally, made me quick to tell people how much they mean to me.

We live about three blocks from the ginormous Hilton Hotel on Michigan Avenue—the one associated with the 1968 Democratic Convention. Well, things are a lot more peaceful there these days, and we go there to work out—the health club sells memberships. A fair number of people from our neighborhood are also members.

Beth swims there about every other day. She was there Thursday and reported that security was ultra-tight. As in, hotel guests couldn’t use the pool unless they’d called in advance and the staff confirmed that they were, in fact, a hotel guest.

Why? Lollapalooza. In an effort to avoid the slaughter that happened in Las Vegas in 2017, everything remotely near the annual festival in Grant Park is locked down. As in mailboxes have been sealed shut and the like. There are rumors that snipers are on duty, operating on hotel rooftops. Usually, I’d take that kind of thing as urban mythology, but having been here for the NATO summit, and witnessed the security measures, I tend to believe it.

It’s Sunday as I write this, and so far, Lollapalooza-goers have not been a target, thankfully. Wal-Mart customers in El Paso, Texas and bar patrons in Dayton, Ohio didn’t fare as well.

Americans have lost a lot of freedom. We have to go through magnetometers at sporting events and even at free concerts in the park. We have to register to swim in a hotel pool. And on and on.

All to appease gun fetishists who are a distinct minority, even among NRA members. Several common sense measures like universal background checks have broad support among Americans. Nothing can guarantee to stop these tragedies, but evidence suggests basic safeguards will make them less frequent. And the right measures will make them less deadly.

We get stuck on fatality counts. The fatalities are tragic. But the injured live on, often severely impaired. Survivors live with physical disabilities and PTSD, and their families will never be the same either. (This report from the Center for Investigative Reporting covers the lasting damage from these events.)

I refuse to get used to this. So I encourage you to join me and continue to press your lawmakers and do whatever you can to move us toward sanity. If you’re an NRA member, speak up and push for leadership changes.

Because what’s at stake is our inalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Hey, did you read that piece Chicago Tribune columnist Heidi Stevens wrote last month about the memoir-writing classes I lead in Chicago? It’s the most well-written and accurate piece any journalist has ever published about how I got started teaching memoir-writing and why I love my classes so much. Bonus: I hear the photos are pretty great, too!

Heidi Stevens did a great job, and so did the photographer.

Heidi first learned about me from my childhood friend Jill Foucré. This past May, Heidi appeared at a fundraiser for The Ross K. MacNeill Foundation that was hosted by Marcel’s Culinary Experience in Glen Ellyn, Illinois. Jill owns Marcel’s, she and Heidi got to talking at that event, next thing you know an email lands in my in box from the Chicago Tribune. Heidi Stevens wants to interview me!

Heidi offered to come down to meet me in a coffee shop here in Printers Row. Her initial questions were about the people who take my classes, the benefits of writing  — and teaching — memoir, that sort of thing. As the interview was drawing to a close, she wondered out loud if being blind might be an advantage when it comes to teaching memoir-writing classes for older adults.

I had to think a bit before answering. Heidi is a good listener and did not rush me. “Not being able to see them means when I sit there in class, I really listen and focus on what they are reading,” I finally said. “I picture them as the people they are describing in their essays. I don’t think about what they look like or what they aren’t able to do anymore or how old they are. I get lost in their writing.”

That quote made it into the published piece, and it led to another question from Heidi. “May I visit one of your classes?” She explained that observing a class would give her a better picture of how it all works, Mondays would work best for her, the writers in the Monday afternoon class I lead for The Village Chicago approved the visit, and Heidi showed up the next week with a photographer.

Having a busy newspaper columnist spend 90 minutes with me and a coffee shop was plenty flattering, but then she takes the trouble to visit a class — and arrange for a photographer to accompany her, too?

Well, hey. Good reporters are thorough with their research. And Heidi Stevens is a good reporter. “Her students write about grieving for spouses with whom they spent decades,” she wrote in the column. “They write about children who died far too young. They write about unhappy childhoods and happy childhoods and a city that has changed, dramatically, in their lifetimes.”

I was on Cloud Nine the day the story was published, and I haven’t come down yet. I’ll say goodbye here with one last excerpt, and I do hope you’ll take the time to read the entire piece. It’s a tribute to the writers in my classes and the value of preserving their stories:

Earlier this week, I attended one of Finke’s Lincoln Park classes. Toward the beginning, the students explained why they were there, learning to write and share their stories.
“My mother, as a gift to her children, wrote her own memoir and sent it to us in letter form,” a student named Bill said. “Over a period of about 20 years, every week we’d get a new installment. And it’s one of the great treasures of my life.

“And it stimulated in me,” Bill continued, “this notion, even though I have no children, of how much a memoir can mean.”

I was one of the last kids in school to actually see Hamilton the Musical here in Chicago. Before I saw it, I was regaled again and again with frenetic excitement from those who’d just seen it. So much so that I expected that Hamilton could not possibly live up to the hype when I finally went a couple months ago.

It did. That’s all I’ll say out of respect for any of you who hasn’t seen it and/or doesn’t care.

Whether or not you care about the musical, Hamilton: The Exhibition is a worthwhile afternoon but you better go soon.

I liked it enough that, when our friends offered to treat us to an afternoon at Hamilton: The Exhibition, Beth and I accepted.

The Exhibition is well off the beaten path in an obscure location on Northerly Island. Without signage, you wouldn’t find it. But there, on what were once Meigs field airport runways, stands a temporary giant black box that looks more like a heavy equipment storage shed than a historical exhibition.

In short, it’s a 34,000 sq. ft. popup museum. You travel through 18 rooms, each themed with a time period/event or both. Visitors wear a geeky little audio device that…actually works! As you move through the rooms and time periods, the voices of creator Lyn Manuel Miranda, other cast members, and a heavy-duty history academic automatically narrate major passages of history. Throughout there were little portals labeled “More Information.” If you want extras, you just point the little audio pendant to hear the rest of the story. Technology is used constructively, not slavishly. There are just endless exhibits of replicated documents, sculptures, paintings, contextual history placards, models, maps and little framed explanations that come clean about where Miranda took liberties in service of art.

But there weren’t that many of those and I needn’t have worried that it would be kind of an extended shill for the play. Now, you will likely want to see the show again, just because the earworm music is playing in the background all the time. And yes, you leave the exhibition only to pass through a gift shop.

But man, I learned a ton. It’s just dense with history. Hamilton’s arc of life is just a vehicle to tell the fuller history of that period in the United States. That history is sometimes inspiring and sometimes dark—punches are not pulled regarding where slavery fit into our history. There was a lot of information about African Americans who fought in the Revolutionary War—including those who fought for the British in exchange for the promise of emancipation.

It was full of reminders that there were plenty of people opposed to breaking up with the Brits and that New York City was a bastion of British Loyalists. And, to the curators’ great credit, the exhibit doesn’t lionize Hamilton. The warts are there, and at the end of the journey, there are quotes from major figures about Hamilton that run the gamut from veneration to vilification.

Should you go? It’s funny; I think I enjoyed it more than Beth but not because of my sight privilege. Beth listened to Ron Chernow’s fantastic and enormous bookthat the musical drew from. So lots of stuff that was news to me was not to her.

I’d say if you haven’t read the book, go, and you like history, go whether or not you care about the play.

Count on spending a couple hours, and act soon: It’s closing ahead of schedule, after August 25, according to this Chris Jones column. Jones also reports that plans for the exhibit to travel have been canceled—partly because it’s just too damn big. It was hard to imagine packing all that up and unpacking it again.

Amid the inflamed political climate that is being deliberately sown, it’s easy to get so distracted that we’re never, ever discussing substantive issues. It’s so easy to get caught up in name-calling and labeling, instead of having respectful back and forth.

And from what I’ve seen, either the Democratic Party and its constituents will do it, or no one will. (I’m happy to consider voting for a Republican—the next time I recognize one that’s actually, well, a Republican.)

On the Democratic side, we have an opportunity to discuss substance with each other, and try to squeeze it out of the candidates. This all came to mind when I witnessed a minor skirmish between some Democrats.

One was chastising Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for off-handedly dismissing Joe Biden’s remark to the effect that a lot of people would be heartbroken to lose their private insurance under a Medicare-for-all scenario. This same person also expressed general angst about AOC and her cohort turning off middle-of-the-road Dems and other voters.

And then the predictable backlash against “moderate” Democrats.

And off we went into nowhere.

To me, Ocasio-Cortez can and should speak up on anything she wants. And by my lights, she’s good at it. I don’t think she and her cohort and the candidates who support Medicare-for-all are naive dreamers. I’m glad they care about the issue.

On the other hand, I don’t support Medicare for All. And I don’t think that those who do support Medicare-for-all should consider those of us who don’t’ support it as sellouts.

If there’s been one issue that I’ve consistently cared about for most of my adult life, it’s been health care. It remains so. As in, everyone should have a humane level of coverage. What’s humane? As an example, I’d suggest the level that the small non-profit I work for could be used a baseline for discussion. That’s for another time.

Beth and I became heavy-duty users of our health care “system” starting in our twenties. Actually, she’s been at it since she was seven, and diagnosed with type 1 diabetes. On our honeymoon, she started seeing spots. Months of treatments and hospital stays ensued. Two days before our first anniversary, we learned she’d never see again.

And then Gus was born with a myriad of health issues that we deal with to this day.

We were lucky. Beth and Gus were covered throughout. If these things had happened at different times in our lives, we were cooked. But even being lucky, we ended up in enough debt to take years (and a lucky break with a startup company) to erase. And even with that lucky break, I can’t tell you how much time I have spent trying to understand bills, coverage, reconciling conflicting info from the provider and the insurance company, etc. And of course, we all live dreading losing the insurance.

Back in our 20s, all our contemporaries knew about health insurance was that they had it. But when I’d tell them what it was like to use it, their eyes would gloss over, and you could see the thought bubble above their heads: “Mike’s going on a health care rant again.”

Back then, to anyone who’d listen, I argued for a single payer system. I completely see the attraction—maybe especially to cut down on the insane billing bureaucracy that private industry has given us.

But I don’t support single payer anymore. Those who do are good by me. I just strongly disagree with the Medicare for All thing for several reasons.

First, from a logistical and economics point of view, shutting down a giant industry while expanding an already enormous bureaucracy is going to be an enormous, disruptive task that I fear would be an enormous mess. (Granted, some displaced workers would be recruited to the expansion of Medicare.) But it’s a gigantic and complex undertaking, and none of the proponents have indicated they fully understand that. Nor have they sketched an outline of how it could be phased in with minimal disruption. I suspect it’s because…it’s difficult to impossible.

Politically, most people simply don’t want to switch their insurance plans involuntarily. You’re asking them to give something up and telling them, “Don’t worry.” And we don’t exactly have a great track record here. Obamacare promised that no one would lose their current plan–and that was untrue. Many people remained insured but with lesser plans. So people are more skeptical than ever about claims about what they’d get. I don’t believe the support will be there when push comes to shove.

The thing is, Europe has had universal coverage for decades. But single-payer is a complete exception when it comes to achieving universal coverage.

Their systems, by my lay study of them, rely on heavily regulated private insurers. They let those with means buy more than minimum coverage.

So, I say beef up Obamacare, ratchet up regulation of existing insurers, a la most of the countries that have universal health care. And by hook, or by crook, shoehorn a public option in, which, if it works, would move us toward single payer, and if it doesn’t, it doesn’t.

All that said, I welcome anyone to address the concerns I’ve raised—to offer how the problems I perceive with Medicare-for-All can be solved. Let’s not forget that we all want everyone to have coverage.

More broadly, the concept of civil political discussion in the commons has disappeared. That means on the blue-state side of things, it’s on us to show, well yes, that concept is alive and well.