One of the first ride-shares I ever used picked me up near the University of Illinois-Chicago Hospital west of the Loop. Destination: 401 N. Michigan. The driver slavishly adhered to the GPS directions. And he took us into hellacious traffic that I calculated to have been pretty easily avoidable, and lacking that, escapable. Finally, he said, “It says we’re here.”

Well, kind of. We were at LowerWacker Drive and Michigan. For non-Chicagoans, that’s a cave-like intersection below anything you see on The Magnificent Mile. He didn’t know the difference. From there I opened the door and got out of the ride from hell, gladly taking the rusty old stairs up to daylight.

I drive pretty infrequently these days, and it seems like it’s getting more randomly dangerous out there on the road virtually each time. I lay part of that on Ubers and Lyfts—when someone does an ill-advised U-turn without realizing I’m driving right behind them, it most often is a ride share car. Ditto vehicles stopped in the worst possible places to stop—their drivers are looking for their next customer, oblivious.

But the robotic adherence to GPS directions is hardly only an Uber/Lyft phenomenon. Everybody’s doing it, doing it. And apart from triggering bad driving behavior, it may be making us stupider.

A little while ago, the Washington Post ran an article headlined “Ditch the GPS. It’s ruining your brain.” The writer does a great job of explaining and summarizing a very sophisticated research paper that was originally published in the journal Nature. (That one is titled Hippocampal and prefrontal processing of network topology to simulate the future. Phew.)

It seems that when we navigate without the aid of GPS, we’re stimulating, exercising, and even growing the vitally important part of our brain called the hippocampus.

From the Post article:

The hippocampus is crucial to many aspects of daily life. It allows us to orient in space and know where we are by creating cognitive maps. It also allows us to recall events from the past, what is known as episodic memory. And, remarkably, it is the part of the brain that neuroscientists believe gives us the ability to imagine ourselves in the future.

Studies have long shown the hippocampus is highly susceptible to experience. (London’s taxi drivers famously have greater gray-matter volume in the hippocampus as a consequence of memorizing the city’s labyrinthine streets.) Meanwhile, atrophy in that part of the brain is linked to devastating conditions, including post-traumatic stress disorder and Alzheimer’s disease. Stress and depression have been shown to dampen neurogenesis — the growth of new neurons — in the hippocampal circuit.

We apparently hit our peak of navigation skills at 19 years old (what’s new!). But wait, there’s good news:

“…neuroscientist Véronique Bohbot has found that using spatial-memory strategies for navigation correlates with increased gray matter in the hippocampus at any age. She thinks that interventions focused on improving spatial memory by exercising the hippocampus — paying attention to the spatial relationships of places in our environment — might help offset age-related cognitive impairments or even neurodegenerative diseases.

At some intuitive level, it seems reasonable that by routinely ceding one of our brain’s activities to our tech gadgets, we could be getting dumber.

Now obviously, GPS can be extremely useful. But maybe after I do my crossword puzzle each day, I’ll start studying maps, too.

Here’s part two of my post encouraging dads to write their memoirs.

The dad I mentioned at the beginning of that post has more than one daughter — he has two. Both live in California, and when one gifted him with my memoir-writing class she made it clear to her father that he would be reading his completed work out loud for the family when he and his wife joined them for Thanksgiving.

Dad approved.

He fulfilled that request last year, and when he rejoined our class this past April he used my “I Knew I was in Trouble When” prompt to let us know how that family reading went.

His essay starts with him describing how he packed a printed set of his essays in a folder, along with pictures and other memorabilia to share. “I read over those essays and practiced on the flight to San Francisco.”

He was feeling confident about his upcoming performance until they landed and settled in for the night. “I knew I was in trouble when I could not find the folder.” Here from his essay:

The next day I get a call from Alaska Airlines, lost and found. A girl there finds the folder of my personal memoirs on the airplane, tracks me down as the possible passenger/owner of that folder based on the information in the folder and calls me! We promptly head on out to claim the folder and I thank her profusely.

Note to self: when flying west, choose Alaska Airlines.

Now back to the story. Our writer describes the cottage the family rents near a couple of vineyards on the outskirts of Sebastopol for their after-Thanksgiving gathering. On their first day there he and his wife enjoy a special private tasting at the Kosta Browne winery. “When we all gather at the cottage she and the girls have a blast playing with the goats and taking selfies.” All the festivities lead up to the grand performance. “I get to share some of the contents of my folder with the family,” he writes. “It is a moving and joyful time. I look forward to more of this experience soon when we get back together.”

I share more stories about the classes I lead — and all I learn from the writers who sign up – in my book Writing Out Loud. Available in print at Sandmeyer’s Bookstore at 714 S. Dearborn in Chicago, and Amazon makes it quick and simple to give a kindle book as a gift with a nice printable card included as well. Here’s to father’s everywhere – we want to hear your stories!

It seems like only yesterday: Beth’s Seeing Eye dog Harper saved them both from being run over at an intersection a couple blocks from home. Harper yanked Beth out of harm’s way—so hard that she fell to the pavement and that the sturdy metal harness snapped. It was a harrowing experience, but afterward Beth and Harper went about their business normally.

First there was Dora (she’s the one with the antlers). Photo by Lois Haubold.

Until.

One day Harper stopped cold on the sidewalk in the middle of Chicago’s Loop. Beth cajoled him into getting her home. But things only got worse. Harper would cower and shake, and more than once I had to drive the car to pick them up because he wouldn’t move. After The Seeing Eye had sent four different trainers out to try to remedy the situation, a representative told Beth, “He took a bullet for you, and he’s earned an early retirement.”

Indeed he had. And he’s been living happily ever after with our friends Chris and Larry.

Then there was Hanni.

And we’ve been living happily with Whitney, an intrepid traveler who’s behaved impeccably on planes, trains, and automobiles, sat quietly during plays and concerts, and kept herself and Beth safe in the midst of the chaos of Chicago’s downtown traffic.

These days she walks slower when leading Beth. She sleeps more than she used to. Sometimes she balks at commands and Beth has to out-stubborn her. And, instead of unfailingly and relentlessly retrieving her yellow lacrosse ball for me to throw it again (and again), she retrieves it, lays down on the rug, and shows it to me.

Whitney’s been at it for over seven years, and it’s time. She’s earned her retirement. Beth’s other dogs have worked longer. Dora worked until she was 12. Hanni worked until she was 11. But both of them spent all or part of there tenure in quieter, saner, Champaign-Urbana. Urban life is harder on dogs.

Then the heroic Harper, here hangin’ in his new civilian harness.

Whitney will turn 10 this December, and it’s likely she’ll celebrate it at Beth’s great niece’s house in Minneapolis—Shelley Rae has generously offered to adopt her when she retires.  Beth’s other two retired dogs both lived until 17, so we’re hoping Whitney gets a lot of time just hanging out in the Twin Cities. She’s earned it.

For Beth and me, it’s a very hard conclusion to come to. I fall hopelessly in love with every damned dog Beth brings home from The Seeing Eye, and I miss them when they retire and move away. For Beth, though, it’s a real hardship. She travels to The Seeing Eye in New Jersey sans her longtime companion, and spends three weeks in a dorm after being matched with her new partner.

Besides all the schedule juggling to accommodate the training, it’s just hard work. Beth’s up at 5:00 a.m. every day, and every day is full of training on the streets of Morristown, New Jersey, with side trips to New York City, plus lectures about what’s new since students were there last.

That’s just the start. Once at home, the new dog has to learn the minutiae of Beth’s life. Like finding Beth’s locker at the pool where she swims laps. Getting her to ticket counters and moving up in the line. In and out of cabs, buses, and trains. Turnstiles at the L.

Whitney’s graduation picture. (Courtesy The Seeing Eye.) I wonder who’s next?

For months after coming home, the dog has to be with Beth constantly—that means we go nowhere without the dog. I know some of you envy the ability to bring your dog everywhere. Trust me. You don’t want to trade places with Beth.

Here’s the thing: The person and the dog really do bond as a team. They have to get to know one another. They have to come to implicitly trust one another. Sure, it’s obvious how reliant Beth is on the dog—but the dog trusts the human to get directions correct, to make good decisions.

That trust takes time. Really, the two are in training for months after leaving The Seeing Eye.

And then they settle in. That’s when we find out what each dog is really good at, and what they’re not so good at, over time. Whitney is really good at:

• Finding elevator buttons not just at our building, but everywhere there are elevators.
• Not having to pee or poop for inordinately long periods of time. I’m envious.
• Having an uncanny ability to slow down at just the right time to clue Beth in that there is an irregularity in the pavement that could be trouble. Beth knows to walk accordingly.
• Going down the stairs at the subway. You’d be surprised how hard that is for the dog; ordinarily they’d bound down multiple steps but they have to creep one at a time on their four legs.
• Weaving through crowds without bumping Beth into anyone.
• Being calm in the face of everything that’s been thrown at her.
• Entertaining me with the lacrosse ball.

On the other hand:

• She’s never met a pole she didn’t want to sniff.
• She rarely sees another dog she doesn’t want to meet.

On balance, she has been—like Beth’s other companions—nothing short of wondrous.

But it’s not magic. Breeding, training, hard work (under half the candidate dogs make the cut)—all that before being matched with a person and headed to a new home.

OK, one more. Beth’s great niece Kennedy (aka “Toots”) and Whitney took to one another right away.

Having seen this process up close, I must confess to utter disappointment when people who don’t really need a dog to do basic activities bring their untrained dogs into public spaces. But that’s for another day.

Beth has put in her application at The Seeing Eye. Between now and the end of this year, we expect she’ll be shipping out again, and I’ll be bacheloring it for a few weeks, waiting for Beth to come home with my new favorite.

The email came just before Father’s Day last year. A young woman wanted to know how to sign her dad up for my memoir-writing class. The request made me a little nervous. What if her dad didn’t like to write? Didn’t want to write? Couldn’t write?

Dad approved.

It’d be a gift, she said.

A gift for him, or a gift for her?

So many of the people who find out I lead memoir-writing classes tell me how much they wish their parents had written their family stories down. Come to think of it, I am one of those people.

Two weeks after my third birthday, my father suffered a fatal heart attack at home. I don’t remember much about Ed Finke, but from stories Flo and my six older siblings shared I know he grew up in small-town southern Illinois. In exchange for a scholarship to a teacher’s college near Chicago, he was required to teach at a Lutheran elementary school after graduation. He taught one year, quit, and never looked back.

Why did my dad quit teaching? What happened that first year to change his mind? Maybe Eddie Finke never intended on a career in education. Did he accept the scholarship to escape rural life? Or his overbearing mother? Or to leave grief behind after his 7-year-old sister Wilma died of diphtheria?

I never got to ask him. When a friend from my dad’s college days told me decades later that Eddie was a good writer, I was fascinated — and disappointed. If he had put some of his own life stories on paper, I might know him better.

Considering all that, I had to commend the young woman who’d emailed me. She didn’t even ask her father if he wanted to take a memoir-writing class. She just signed him up. And guess what? Her father enjoyed the class so much that he signed himself up for a second session.

And then this year it happened again. A totally unrelated young woman emailed me with the same idea. “I was hoping to sign my father up for one of your classes,” she wrote. “He has just started writing his memoirs and I was looking for something that could help support his process.” Bill finished his first six-week session in May and emailed me a thank-you last week. “It was just what I needed,” he wrote.

Out of ideas for Father’s Day? Live in the Chicago area? Consider giving him a gift for both him and you: sign him up for a memoir-writing class. No memoir-writing classes available near where he lives? No problem. Gift dad with a copy of my latest book Writing Out Loud — available in paperback, on kindle, and at audible.com. Writing Out Loud is a whimsical look at how I manage, thanks in large part to my husband Mike Knezovich and Wonder dog Whitney, to live a creative and fulfilling life here in Chicago. I describe the classes I lead and all I learn from the writers who sign up, too, and that part might encourage your dad to start writing as well.

Oh, and the dad I mentioned at the start of this post? Tune in to my next post to find out what happened while preparing to read his essays out loud to the family — he has a good story to tell!

There’s a lot of construction going on around our neighborhood, and most of it I’d be happy to do without. Apart from the noise (pile driving, anyone?), the end products are indistinct glassy vertical slab apartment buildings. But, our little stretch of Dearborn remains unchanged, Sandmeyer’s Book Store is still here, we can still walk to the lake, to museums, the Art Institute, and I can still get to White Sox Park in about 15 minutes on the Red Line.

Which Beth and I did twice last week. I still pinch myself; from Champaign-Urbana, and even when we were in suburban Geneva, going to the ball game was a trek that required a lot of time and advance planning.

If safety netting is extended, we won’t be seeing stuff like Jeter’s catch anymore.

Now, I can get home from work, check the schedule, and then decide to have my dinner at the ballpark. Sometimes I go alone, affording Beth some alone time, and I just roam the park and try out seats and listen the chatter.

The White Sox play second fiddle in Chicago, and really, that’s mostly OK. There are always tickets available, and they’re affordable. Yesterday, we had nice seats in the right field corner–$15 each.

Of course, some of the ticket availability has been due to the White Sox being bad at baseball the last few years. Being bad intentionally—long enough to pile up high draft picks and trading decent players for more young prospects—has become a thing in Major League Baseball. It’s called tanking. The Houston Astros and Chicago Cubs have done it and found ultimate success, but there is absolutely no guarantee that it works. The White Sox traded off their best players three years ago, and we fans are just now seeing at least some progress.

I’m grinning and bearing it, but I don’t much like it. Tanking is an economic/management trend that to some extent is encouraged by the current labor agreement between the players and the owners. One that fans hope is remedied during the next bargaining round.

Baseball is also making changes to make the games shorter. To that end, last year MLB limited the number of times a manager or catcher could walk to the pitcher’s mound to confer. Yesterday our friends who attended the game with us asked what the letters MVR meant on the scoreboard. Well, having had to ask that myself earlier this year, I knew that it stands for Mound Visits Remaining.

There are other changes related to game pace and length that are percolating. One proposal unrelated to the time of game is the prospect of extending the protective netting that has always wrapped around home plate all the way down each line to the right- and left-field foul poles. The issue became hot this past week because a Cubs player, Albert Almora, Jr., hit a line drive foul ball, which in turn hit a little girl.

It was a scary incident that shook Almora so much that he ended up leaving the game. There is now a growing consensus that the netting should be extended. That’s how it is in Japan, and having taken in a couple games there, I can say that though I got used to it, it was a little distracting.

Now, I’m not against protecting fans, but I do think there hasn’t been any mention of the trade-off for the added safety. Remember Derek Jeter’s insane dive into the stands to catch a foul ball? Juan Uribe’s catch in game 4 of the 2005 World Series? Or the countless acrobatic snatches the Cubs’ Anthony Rizzo has made—standing on the tarp in some cases?

Those will be gone. And sitting there in harm’s way yesterday, I personally wouldn’t make that trade off.

But, no one is probably going to ask me.

And I’ll still head to the ballpark on a whim, and maybe in a year or two, the tickets will be harder to get.