All five of the weekly memoir-writing classes I lead in Chicago are back in full swing now, and Michael Graff, a writer in one of the Village Chicago classes I lead, generously agreed to let us share a deadpan “Back to School” essay he read out loud Monday for the first meeting of the current six-week session. Enjoy!
by Michael Graff

That’s Michael (left), Nancy and their son Evan, with Michael’s mother (Delores) in the foreground.

When Nancy worked at the First National Bank of Chicago, she planned either to apply to Law School or an MBA program. I was building my business. We decided we’d both take accounting, at night, at DePaul University’s downtown Chicago campus. It was just for fun. Back then free parking could always be found after six on Michigan Avenue or Wabash. Each Monday, after work, we met at class and afterward we’d celebrate with a late dinner at the Chicago Claim Company’s twin restaurant Jasand’s, on Rush.

In high school Nancy was a National Merit Scholar, Phi Beta Kappa in college, and she always graduated with honors. Me, I just graduated. I never worked too hard at school. My grades conveyed that fact. Our DePaul credits weren’t for any degree. I planned to simply coast through it.

At DePaul many of our fellow students, unlike us, couldn’t afford college after high school. They were hard working part time students who juggled careers and family; DePaul was their future.

The mid-term rolled along and Nancy aced it. I got a C+ or B-. I don’t recall, nor care.

But Nancy cared.

“You’re going to study harder,” she said. I was dismissive, but Nancy was serious. The weekend before our final exam I was confined to quarters. Nancy took away every diversion while I stared at debits and credits or solved balance sheet riddles. When I could stand no more, I’d wander towards the TV, but Nancy had thought of that. The remote was gone.

“I need to watch the Bears game,” I told her.

“Back to work, you’re not even a Bears fan”.

I was that weekend!

To my great relief, the final was the next day. Finally I was out of accounting purgatory. About ten days later, I returned to our apartment. On our dining room table sat an unopened envelope addressed to me from DePaul. Next to it, on display, was Nancy’s grade.

She’d gotten an A.

“Why didn’t you open mine,” I asked?

“I thought maybe you’d want to do that in private,” she said.

“Oh, I don’t care,” I said with a shrug, tearing open the envelope. After glancing at my grade, I folded the paper and set it down.

”What did you get?”

“It’s not important.”

“What?”

“I got a C.”

“That’s not fair. You should have gotten a better grade. Complain to our teacher.”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

“But you deserved better.”

“Maybe I don’t.”

Finally, I said, “Okay, it’s a B.” Nancy smiled, “that’s good. You deserve a B.”

And that’s when I unfolded my grade and held it up to her. Her eyes widened, and then she frowned. “Well,” she shrugged. “I guess he’ll hand out an A to anyone.”

We enjoyed accounting class. We signed up for accounting 105, and after that, cost accounting. I continued to do OK.

Today my work day allowed me to get home in time to watch Jeopardy!. I love Jeopardy!. I took the test and was in the pool of contestants years ago but didn’t get selected. You’re in the pool for a year, but I never got the call, and I would’ve gotten killed, but I would’ve been happy to lose.

Anyway, commercial breaks during today’s Jeopardy! were non-stop election ads. And I was horrified to learn that every candidate, from all parties, worships the devil and likes to cook and eat human babies.

Nonetheless, I’m voting tomorrow. Voting, donating blood, baseball, jazz music (I already miss you Roy Hargrove), these things are good.

The candidates are not all the same, despite their best efforts to be stupid and make it seem so. I hope you’ll join me at the polls tomorrow, if you haven’t already voted.

Earlier on in my life as a writer I wrote a newspaper story about two Chicago women who’d won a trip to the Academy Awards. When I interviewed the two of them they described trying on dresses for the occasion at a Chicago studio on N. Elston that names dresses after old movie stars. “I bought the Grace,” one of them laughed, glancing down at her own figure. “But maybe when I wear it, it’s a Liz!

The editor insisted I take that line out. Readers who recognize my byline know I’m blind, she said. How could a blind person know someone was glancing down? They’d question the story.

I had been standing right next to the woman when she said it. I’d heard her voice go down, then up. I’d felt her movement. I knew she’d glanced at herself. Sorry, the editor said. The quote had to go.

Later on I wrote a magazine profile of a female brigadier general. A photo would appear with the story, so I didn’t bother describing what the general looked like. But you need visuals, the magazine editor told me. It’s part of good journalism.

I could have just asked the editor what the photo looked like and written that into the story. But that didn’t seem, well, like good journalism. So I picked up the phone and called the general. Her secretary answered. I told her my predicament and asked if she could tell me what her boss looked like.

The secretary thought about this a long while. Finally she said, “All of us around her, even though we know she’s only five foot one, think she’s seven feet.”

Illinois Attorney General Republican candidate Erika Harold hails from Urbana, Illinois.

What a great quote. I used it in the article. The magazine editor kept it in. She called a few months later and said she couldn’t make it to a pre-arranged interview with the new Miss America, a young woman from Illinois. Could I do the story? I said yes, and suddenly the editor sounded sorry she’d asked. ”Can a blind writer interview a beauty queen?” she wondered out loud. I had to convince her I could. An excerpt from the published story:

Leading me to her hotel suite, Miss America seemed completely unfazed by my Seeing Eye dog or my blindness. “I’m used to diversity,” she said. Describing her looks, she explained that her mother is part African-American and Cherokee Indian; her father Greek, German, and Russian. “I have caramel-colored skin, long brown hair, and very expressive brown eyes,” she told me. “I think it’s very hard for people to tell exactly what I am.”

I wonder. Would Miss America have uttered that last incisive line to a sighted reporter? I think not. The beauty queen I wrote about for that story has been interviewed a lot this year–she used her winnings as the 2003 Miss America to pay her way through Harvard Law School. Now Erika Harold is the Republican candidate running against Democrat Kwame Raoul for Illinois Attorney General. Raoul is the son of Haitian immigrants and has been in the Illinois state senate since 2004, when he was appointed to fill Barack Obama’s seat. I don’t know what either one looks like, but I read the papers. I listen to the radio. I know their views, and as columnist Mary Mitchell put it in the Chicago Sun-Times, “Although both of these candidates are black, they could not be more different and are an example of the ideological diversity that exists among African-Americans.”

Diversity takes many forms. I’m looking forward to heading to the polls Tuesday.

By now you’ve heard that more women are running in local elections in the upcoming 2018 midterms than we’ve seen in generations before. What you may not have heard is that one of those women running this year is a friend of ours: Lynn LaPlante is running for Chairman of the DuPage County Board in Illinois.

I grew up in DuPage County, west of Chicago. I still have friends and relatives who live in DuPage County, and if you are one of them, I hope you’ll vote for Lynn. If you have friends who live in DuPage County, I hope you’ll urge them to vote for Lynn, too. You can find out more about her stand on political issues by linking to her helplynnwin.org web page, and to give you an idea about her character, I’m reblogging something I wrote about her here on our Safe & Sound blog back in 2012. Spread the word: help Lynn win!

Alice Gervace LaPlante (left) and my friend Lynn LaPlante, taken at one of Lynn’s concerts when Alice was still getting out and about.

1987. After a year of weekly visits to read to a newly-blind woman, it was time for University of Illinois senior John Foreman to graduate. John brought his girlfriend, a music performance major, along on his final visit, and when Lynn LaPlante pulled her viola from its case, the blind woman’s crooked old rental house transformed into a resounding recital hall.

That young blind woman was me, of course. I wouldn’t hear from Lynn LaPlante for decades, and I lost track of John Foreman after he graduated. As it turns out, So did Lynn.

When Mike Knezovich and I moved to our Printers Row neighborhood here in 2003, we had no idea that Lynn LaPlante and her marvelous husband Mike Allaway lived here, too. When Lynn saw my memoir, Long Time, No See on display at Sandmeyer’s Bookstore, she scribbled out a note with her phone number and left it with Ellen Sandmeyer. Ellen called me. I called Lynn. A friendship was born.

In the years since then I was fortunate to meet Lynn LaPlante-Allaway’s’s beloved mother, Alice Gervace LaPlante. Anyone who met Lynn’s mother loved her, and I fell right in line. Alice died of complications related to Alzheimer’s disease on May 31, and a Printers Row neighbor generously offered to drive Whitney and me to the wake, where I had the privilege of meeting Lynn’s sister-in-law, her nieces and nephews, her old neighbors and her childhood friends.

Lynn’s mother Alice had been the music director of St. Edna Catholic Church in Arlington Heights for nearly 40 years, and a writer for the Chicago Tribune was so taken after reading Alice’s obituary that she contacted Lynn after the funeral. “They said they like to showcase people who have touched a lot of lives,” Lynn told me. That describes my Mom perfectly!” From that Chicago Tribune article:

Mrs. LaPlante, the mother of eight, enjoyed music from Bach to Benny Goodman. She taught piano out of her home and a local studio for many years and instilled a love of music in all her children, each of whom learned to play at least one instrument.

“I wouldn’t be doing what I’m doing today had it not been for my mother,” said LaPlante-Allaway, the principal violist with the Chicago Jazz Philharmonic. “She guided me every step of the way.”

I haven’t seen a whole lot of Lynn the past couple of years – she devoted the majority of that time to her mother, who had always been so devoted to Lynn and her music career.

Lynn played a viola solo at Alice’s funeral Tuesday, and she had always brought her viola with her on visits to her mom. The beloved Alice Gervase La Plante spent her final years surrounded by the same breathtaking sound her young daughter brought to me in Urbana all those years ago, and thanks to her mother’s guidance early on, Lynn pleases all sorts of audiences with her music now. When I emailed Lynn to ask for a photo to publish with this blog, she said she’d send it asap. And then in that uncanny way of hers she ended her message by showing pride, humility and appreciation for her career all at the same time. “I leave in an hour to go play with Earth, Wind and Fire at Ravinia. If that isn’t the most surreal sentence I’ve ever typed, I don’t know what is.”

Thank you, John Foreman, wherever you are. You could never have known how your decision to volunteer as a 20-year-old young man would not only help me through those first unsettling months of blindness, but live on to sustain me decades later through my friendship with Lynn and her mother Alice. What a gift.

Last night when the L.A. Dodgers’ Manny Machado swung and missed so awkwardly at a wicked Chris Sale pitch that he fell down, the Major League Baseball season came to a close. The Red Sox won, which at this point is getting kind of old (my Cardinals fan friend calls Red Sox fans “professional Irishmen”). Nonetheless, I generally root for the American League, and seeing Sale—who labored with mostly bad teams for years with my White Sox—close out the championship was pretty cool.

Unless the White Sox are in the playoffs (an infrequent occurrence), around this time of the year I pick an alternate horse. Sometimes it’s a team/fan base that I least dislike. This year it was fun: I took the Brewers and Astros. The Brewers had a really entertaining team, a smart young manager, and the best radio announcer—Bob Uecker—in the business. He’s funny, yes, but he calls a damn good game, too. And thanks to a little App on our phones (MLB AtBat) Beth and I could listen to him call all the Brewers games.

As far as the Astros, well I can’t help it—we’ve written before about our friend Kevin who works in their front office. I just love seeing him in selfies with players like Alex Bregman after a clinching game. I also wanted the Astros to be the first team to repeat in forever.

Alas.

If you grew up in Chicago on either side of town, you have to learn to savor the World Series regardless of whether your team is in it or not. (In some ways, it’s a lot more pleasant; it’s certainly less stressful.) There’s always some regular guy that plays out of his mind. And games that are incredible for one reason or another. This year, that guy was a journeyman player named Steve Pearce and that game was the insane two-games-in-one 18-inning marathon.

Our pal Nancy Faust will be back behind the organ for a spring training game in 2019.

I also like this time of year because of the anniversaries of the 2005 World Series—the four games my White Sox took from the Astros when Houston was still in the National League. That 18-inning Red Sox-Dodgers game brought to mind a gut-wrenching, 14-inning game the White Sox won. There was much shouting at the TV, and ultimately, screams of joy in the wee hours. (I did not make it to the end of the 18-inning affair this year.)

Speaking of the White Sox, Beth and I saw our friends Nancy Faust, her husband Joe, their son Eric and his girlfriend last week. We caught up, got some great stories about Old Comiskey, past players, Haray Caray—and we had a lot of laughs. They are all delightful people and I thank my lucky stars that, thanks to Beth and her writing, they are our friends.

Still, I always get a little melancholy when that last out of the World Series is made. It’s probably silly to care so much about a game, but hey, it’s my silly. And there’s this: Nancy told us that she’ll be playing the organ for the Cubs-Sox spring training matchup at the Sox spring ballpark.

You know, I went to spring training once when the Sox were in Florida. But I haven’t been to Arizona yet….