The Printers Row Wine Shop home page.

In 2002, our son Gus moved away from our home in Urbana to a group home in Wisconsin and Beth and I became empty nesters. In 2003 the weekly paper I edited folded and I was out of a job. That spring, Beth’s book, “Long Time No See,”  would be published. I got a gig up north and Beth thought it’d be easier to promote her book if we lived in Chicago.

We both grew up in the suburbs but had never lived IN the city. And so, we ended up in the Printers Row neighborhood that we’ve grown to love. We were drawn to its central location—multiple expressways, bus lines and L stops converge here. And back then, before Uber and Lyft, you could count on catching a cab within a minute or two.

More than that, the place felt like Bedford Falls nestled in a bustling metropolis. It still lives like a small town. Plus, we’ve always been drawn to places where Beth and her Seeing Eye dog could function and get stuff done independently. And Printers Row fit the bill. A bank was just down the street. Even nearer there was Sandmeyer’s Book Store, Kasey’s Tavern, and a little old-fashioned pharmacy/convenience store. I mean, that’s life right there.

Flavio, the proprietor of the pharmacy, was a keen entrepreneur, and he decided to transform the pharmacy into a wine shop/liquor store. (He came by his entrepreneurial spirit honestly.) We were concerned at first about losing a business we liked, but we weren’t hurting for drug stores, as CVS and Walgreens stores had popped up everywhere.

We needn’t have been worried. Flavio divided the space, leased out half, and turned the other half into a warm, intimate, friendly space. He stocked wines at multiple price points and he had a knack for finding delicious bottles at very approachable prices. And if you needed a recommendation, you need only tell him the occasion and the menu and you’d walk out with a winner.

On Friday evenings Printers Row Wine Shop hosted wine tastings. They became a regular destination for lots of folks in the neighborhood. That popularity sparked Flavio to convert the tasting bar into a bar-bar, and hence a business within a business was born.

It’s still a retail store. While people sit and sip and converse in an extremely civilized environment—wood floors, tin ceiling, and conversation-level background music—others stroll in and out, picking up a bottle of wine for a dinner party, or beer for the weekend.

Beth and I thank our lucky stars for the people and places that make Printers Row Printers Row. Ellen Sandmeyer and her late and one-of-a-kind husband Ulrich. Totto’s Market. Sofi restaurant and Senoritas Cantina in our building. The folks at Kasey’s Tavern. Jazz Showcase. Half Sour. And Flavio and the great staff at Printers Row Wine.

These places are businesses, yes. But because of the care and attention of their proprietors, and their care and attention to their customers, these businesses become characters in the lives of we who live in Printers Row.

The neighborhood lost Ulrich Sandmeyer a few years back. And, I’m heartbroken to report that we lost Flavio last week. Suddenly, unexpectedly, and given that he was an extremely vital 51, entirely too soon.

He leaves behind his wife and two daughters, the oldest of whom just started high school. A large, tight-knit family and a plethora of good friends—many of whom we met at the shop—are coming together to support Flavio’s family and each other.

Still, our hearts ache for them.

And, of course, we’ll miss him. He reminded me of my grandfather on my mother’s side. Paolo Latini immigrated from Italy and worked in the coal mines of southwestern Pennsylvania. By the time I knew him he was retired, had black lung, and wore straw hats with green visors and sprayed pesticide on his perfect garden just like Marlon Brando did in The Godfather.

He kinda scared me when I was little. And then I got to know him and realized that inside his gruff self was a heart of marshmallow.

I was fortunate enough to see Flavio with his family and to hear him talk about his daughters to know that the perfectionist shopkeeper had my grandfather’s soft and giving heart.

It’s hard for we and our Printers Row neighbors to fathom this loss—there’s been too much loss this year.

When Ulrich Sandmeyer passed away, the neighborhood mourned the loss of a friend and, selfishly, worried that the beloved book store that has anchored the neighborhood for decades would be no more.

We needn’t have fretted. The tiny but mighty Ellen Sandmeyer has it going strong.

The staff at Printers Row Wine is devastated. And committed to maintaining the neighborhood spot just as Flavio would have.  His heart beats there and his blood runs through that place.

And the neighborhood is the better for it. Godspeed, Flavio.

A number of writers from Wanda Bridgeforth’s memoir-writing class came to her memorial service last Saturday. Sharon Kramer was one of them, and she graciously agreed to let me publish this essay she wrote about the event. Mike, Seeing Eye dog Luna, and I were there, too. What an honor to meet — and celebrate Wanda’s well-lived life with — some of the family members and friends Wanda has written about in the many, many years she attended our class. Thanks to Sharon for writing all about it here:

A Wanda State of Mind

by Sharon Kramer

That’s Sharon Kramer to my left and three other writers from our downtown class back in 2016: Audrey Mitchell, Wanda Bridgeforth, and Darlene Schweitzer.

Funerals are not to be enjoyed. They are an obligation, something to be endured. Sort of like death itself.

Not only are funerals sad and dark, but they are often insincere, too. Sometimes the minister has never even met the deceased and calls her “Beatrice” when all of her friends knew her as “Bea.” I even witnessed a rabbi who forgot the name of the departed.

Last Saturday, I attended the funeral of Wanda Bridgeforth. It wasn’t dark at all. In fact, if I could choose a color, I would say it was pink. There were old friends to greet — some I hadn’t seen in person for two years — and even though it was one of Chicago’s coldest days, the mood was upbeat.

The three people who spoke at the presentation knew of Wanda’s lust for life and told stories about her joy in being alive. Her Godson, Alex, spoke about Wanda’s love for animals. “When I was a boy, Wanda was the only adult I ever saw kiss a dog,” he said. “And on the lips!” While other adults grimaced at the sight, Alex forever after loved his Godmother for that tender — and possibly sloppy — act. When he graduated from college, Wanda gave him a copy of “Oh the places you’ll go,” by Dr. Seuss, as a gift. Later on, when he graduated from Northwestern law school, people gave him expensive pens, wallets and briefcases. “And Wanda? She wrote me a poem.” He has no idea where those briefcases and other things are now, but he treasures that poem from Wanda and knows exactly where it is.

Wanda’s daughter, Wanda Jr,. told us how fortunate she was to be raised by Wanda. Other kids grew up with parents who scolded them if they did something wrong. But not Wanda. She looked at wrongdoing as an opportunity to give her daughter advice. A story Junior shared about walking home from school when she was ten years old and picking lilacs off a neighbor’s bush along the way tells all. When Junior brought those flowers home to her Mama and gushed about how good they smelled and how beautiful they were, Wanda used a soft voice to ask her daughter a question. “You always like smelling those lilacs when you pass by that bush, don’t you?” Ten-year-old Junior answered enthusiastically. “Oh, yes, Mama, I really do!”

“I imagine other people think they are beautiful too,” her Mama pointed out.

“They sure do, Mama!”Junior replied.

“But they leave them there for all to enjoy,” Wanda concluded.

Lesson learned. Junior went back to apologize to the neighbor who had the lilac bush in her yard, and all was forgiven.

Beth, Wanda’s friend and teacher, spoke directly to Wanda instead of the congregation. I could see Wanda smiling about this: an irreverence Wanda would have loved.

Wanda had been in Beth’s writing class almost from the start — for 15 years — and sat next to Beth at every class. That way Beth could easily hear Wanda, and Wanda, who had a hearing problem, could hear Beth. A wonderful coupling, and as Wanda famously said many times, it was “the deaf leading the blind.”

Leaving the funeral, I felt uplifted instead of sad. How lucky I was to know Wanda and get a glimpse of her amazing life. A pink life. A life full of love, humor and wisdom.

Today as I write this, I am still in a “Wanda” state of mind. Despite my preconceived ideas of funerals, this one was to be enjoyed, just like Wanda.

Luna and I had a great time in Highland Park.

Any time I publish one of these “Questions Kids Ask” posts listing the questions I get at the school presentations I do with my Seeing Eye dogs, our friend and neighbor Mel Theobald hounds, excuse the pun, me to tell him what my answers were. And every time he asks, I come back with the same response: “Wanna hear the answers? You’ll have to come to a school presentation and find out!”

And guess what? Last Thursday he took the bait! He and Jan Devlin, another neighbor and friend, drove Luna and me to Highland Park, Illinois to visit third graders at Sherwood Elementary, a school that participates in an Educating Outside the Lines Disability Awareness Week program. Every day that week someone with a disability came to talk with Sherwood Elementary School students about their disability and the “helper tools” that let us do the things we like — or need — to do.

Luna guided me to two presentations for third graders Thursday morning. At each one I talked with the kids about being blind, what service dogs do, and how I use a talking computer to write books. As my Black Lab and I were readying ourselves for the question-and-answer part at one of the presentations , the teacher there gushed over Luna. “She’s sooooo pretty!” I took my cue, turned to the third-graders and told them I hear that a lot. “I just pretend they’re talking about me!” I laughed, then the questions started pouring in:

• Do you cook your own food?
• How do you, like make your breakfast and your cereal and stuff?
• How can you eat, then?
• How do you know where someone is if you can’t see them?
• Did you ever get robbed because you are blind?
• How do you know what earrings or necklace to wear when you’re getting dressed?
• Have you ever lost your dog when you were walking?
• Can you see in your dreams?
• Can you swim?
• What was the last thing you ever saw?
• How does your dog know where you are when you go on a walk?
• This is not a question, it’s a comment. You’re very pretty. And I mean you, not the dog.
• How old is your dog in people years?
• How can you ride a bike?
• Did your dog ever run away and you didn’t know where it went?
• Is it hard to know which way to go when your dog goes around a tree?
• How do you swim?
• How do you drive?
• When you call someone, are the numbers in Braille?
• Have you ever lost your dog when you were walking?
• How do you get on your bed?
• How does your dog know where you are when you go on a walk?

And with that, I picked up Luna’s harness, commanded, “Luna, Outside!” and the children cheered as my Seeing Eye dog guided me out of the classroom. “Good dog, Luna!”

Special thanks to Mel Theobald for acting as scribe and writing down all the questions the kids asked last Thursday. Dying to know me answers? Just ask Mel. Or Jan!

When the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA) selected Hanni and Beth: Safe & Sound as the winner of its Henry Bergh Children’s Book Award back in 2008, my sisters accompanied my second Seeing Eye dog Hanni and me to the American Library Association convention in Anaheim to receive the award. Stephanie Burke, the director at the library in Cliffside Park, New Jersey was in the audience along with her aunt, who teaches at an elementary school in Fairview, New Jersey. They introduced themselves to us, we hit it off right away, and before we all left the convention hall I thrust promotional postcards and flyers into their hands. “Hanni and I would love to come visit!”

Next thing you knew, we were off to New Jersey. Stephanie’s mom worked at a school in Fairview, too, so Hanni and I had not just one, not two, but three different gigs while we were there: one at Stephanie’s library, one at her aunt’s school, and one at her mom’s school.

After I’d booked my flight with Hanni to Newark, Stephanie generously offered to pick Hanni and me up there, drive us to our hotel, and chauffeur us to our library and school visits the next couple days.

Stephanie offered to take Hanni for walks when necessary, too. She even picked up afterwards when Hanni “emptied.” Now that’s a friend one never forgets!

Stephanie has kept up with our Safe & Sound blog ever since that visit (hi, Stephanie!) and wrote me directly last month to catch me up on things going on in her life. For one, she is married! Now her name is Stephanie Burke Bellucci, and their son Declan is in First Grade. “He attends the Academy of Our Lady of Grace, which you visited all those many years ago,” she wrote. “Time sure does fly!”

The day she wrote, Declan’s homework had included reading about a person and their Seeing Eye dog. “A very nice story in his school reading book,” Stephanie said, adding that she’d lent her copy of Hanni and Beth: Safe & Sound to Declan’s teacher, who read it out loud to the class the next day.

“I was wondering if there’s a way we could arrange a quick visit with you and the students in Declan’s class and the other First Grade class,” she wrote, commenting on how, thanks to the pandemic, Declan’s classroom is pretty high-tech now. “So you could join with a simple Zoom login and be projected on the white board,” she said. “Let me know if this is something we can coordinate.”

Of course I said yes. I mean, c’mon! Compared to all the things Stephanie had done for Hanni and me (see above, about picking up) during our in-person visit to New Jersey all those years ago, Zooming in with her son’s first grade classroom would be a breeze.

And it was.

What fun to hear questions from first-graders, so different from the questions I’ve been getting during visits to third-grade classrooms the past couple years. Some examples:

• • How do you make your books?
  • Who was your first guide dog?
  • What is your favorite book that you wrote?
  • How do you drive?
  • When did you start to be blind?
  • How can you draw the pictures for the books?
  • What ages were you when you went to the school when you were blind?
  • How did you know how to cook food and to pour water and to write the book if you were blind?
  • How do you go shopping?
  • Did you ever have a second guide dog?
  • How do you clean your house?

Pretty sure my answer to that last question was, “Not very well.” Or maybe I said, “Just ask Mike.”

For the first time ever, you can find out for yourself how I answered that (and all the other questions the first graders asked). How, you ask? Super-Stephanie saw to it that the Zoom event would be recorded, she sent it my way, my friend Sharon Kramer had it transcribed in to words, and my husband Mike Knezovich created a YouTube you can link to here or watch it below.

You know what they say: it takes a village. A big thank you to Sharon and Mike here in Chicago, and to Stephanie Burke Bellucci and the teachers and first graders at the Academy of Our Lady of Grace in New Jersey for helping make this all happen. You’re the greatest!

The photo above on the right is one of then-new Seeing Eye dog Luna’s first and last in-person school visits in early March, 2020–before you-know-what happened. And now…we’re back!

Well, sort of.

Black Lab Luna and I made four school visits this past month and will be doing more in April — all of them via Zoom. So now, rather than getting dressed up and packing a backpack with dog bowl, Braille book, white cane, talking clocks and other cool blind stuff and then heading outside where my fabulous friend Jamie Ceaser picks me up at the break of dawn to drive me an hour to the suburban schools we visit, I just brush my teeth and hair, put a nice sweater on, sit on the floor in my office, call Luna to sit at my side, have Mike arrange my laptop on a footstool to aim it so the kids see both Luna and me in our little Zoom square, and… abracadabra! We are live on screen in the bedrooms of third-graders learning from home during COVID.

These Zoom classes exist thanks to Patty O’Machel. A special needs advocate and the mother of a teenager who has cerebral palsy, Patty launched her business Educating Outside the Lines in 2018 to encourage other schools to use the disability awareness curriculum she developed years ago for her daughter’s elementary school.

Many Chicago suburban school districts added the program to their curriculum, and for a few years now I’ve participated in person as one of the people children meet who use “helping tools” to get things done. During disability week, children at participating schools get to experience prosthetic legs, wheelchairs, sign language, Braille, talking iPhones, Seeing Eye dogs and white canes hands-on.

But there’s the rub: after March of last year, “hands-on” was no longer allowed.

So Patty went to work, developed an online alternative, met with the schools to talk about how online visits could work, and we’re giving it a go. Our visits are only 30 minutes long, Patty introduces Luna and me to the kids, the teacher askes them to “mute themselves” while I give a short talk, then the kids either use chat to send their questions to Patty to read out loud, or they “unmute themselves” when they’re called on.

I far prefer them unmuting themselves to ask. Without being able to see their tiny faces on screen, I rely on the enthusiasm in their voices to assure me my words are connecting with these very bright eight- and nine-year-olds.

So many of you Safe & Sound blog readers have told me you’re sorry all my school visits were cancelled this past year, how much you’ve missed hearing questions kids ask. So here we go with a sampling from the Braeside Elementary third-graders Luna and I met virtually this past Monday morning:

• How do you get into a car?
• Do you remember what things looked like when you were a little kid and could still see?
• So after you get in the car, how do you drive, I mean, like, there are all those buttons so how can you tell those buttons and how can you know which one to push?
• So if a friend comes to pick you up, how do you know if they’re there and it’s the right car?
• Before COVID, did you feel people’s faces to see what they looked like?
• Did you have to learn a lot of new things after you were blind?
• I hope you don’t mind me asking, but how old were you went you got blind?
• How does your dog know what your destination is? (And yes, the kid really did use the word “destination.”)
• How long did it take you to learn Braille?
• Do you ever go anywhere by yourself, or is your dog always with you?
• When you used to use a white cane, did you prefer using one with a ball at the end of it? (And yes, the kid really did use the word “prefer.”)
• I know what you mean about that Braille thing, I read a book about Helen Keller and it had a chart of all the Braille letters and it looked like it would be very difficult (okay, not a question, but I appreciated his empathy and his use of the word “difficult” there).
• Do you ever make mistakes? Like, you said you have Milk in a carton in your refrigerator but you have juice in cans, Did you ever pour a glass of juice and it ended up being milk instead?
• How many years have you been blind?
• What if you use your phone to call someone and you don’t have the number right?
• How do you know the clothes you’re wearing?
• How does it make you feel when you make a mistake?

Make no mistake here: I was wrong to doubt whether Zoom could work for these school visits. Zoom is not the same as a real visit (the kids can’t line up after I take Luna’s harness off at the end to pet her) but I feel like the kids and I do connect in some ways. At the very least it gives those hard-working teachers doing this all from home a well- deserved 30-minute break!