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.

That’s my niece, Kennedy (I call her Toots), with her teacher and Luna.

One week ago today I was at Sterling Park Elementary, a dual-language school in Casselberry, Florida giving a presentation to third graders. My eight-year-old great-niece Toots goes to that school, and my sister Cheryl and I had flown from Chicago to Florida a few days earlier to see Toots in a children’s theater performance of the musical “Annie.”

And then, what great luck: last Tuesday, November 15, was “Teach-In” at Sterling Park Elementary, and if we stayed in Florida for a few more days after the fabulous performance of “Annie” I could come talk with her third-grade class about what it’s like to be blind, write books, and get around with a Seeing Eye dog.

So we stayed.

When it was time for the presentation, my Seeing Eye dog Luna led me to a chair in front of the kids — they were all sitting on the floor, criss-cross applesauce. Except for Toots.

Note: “Toots” is not her real name, but she is, well, such a “Toots” that I can’t help myself. I have to call her Toots! And Toots doesn’t seem to mind. She was standing in front of the class as we walked in, ready to assist Aunt Beth with anything necessary. As we got ourselves ready to do the presentation, she came close enough to whisper and assure me that it was “okay to call me Toots.”

I kept my presentation short, and Toots surprised me by taking over from there, announcing we were going to show our audience a game the two of us play when we’re together. “I put things in Aunt Beth’s hands,” she explained, “and see if she can guess what it is!” From there she ran around the classroom to collect things that might fool me, and she even kept score on the whiteboard behind us. Pretty sure I won, two to one.

And then Toots was right there at the front of the room to call on her school friends who had questions afterwards. A note of thanks to Mrs. Grau (one of the teachers there) and my sister Cheryl for writing these all down for me: There were so many good ones!

• When you became blind, how did it feel?
• Does Luna ever get out of her harness?
• Where do the dogs go in retirement?
• Does Luna know braille, too?
• Do Seeing Eye dogs know they’re in the right place?
• Is it weird to just see black every day?
• Can any dog be a Seeing Eye dog?
• Does it feel weird to be blind?
• If you look at a light do you see a little lighter color black?
• Were you always an author?
• How do you tell the different bills in your wallet?
• How long have you had Luna?
• Does it hurt to be blind?
• Can Luna swim?
• Can a Seeing Eye dog be small?
• Can you send us a letter in Braille?
• How do you make meals?
• I have a Black Lab at home, too — how long did it take to train Luna?
• What are some things you like to do?
• When you dream, do you see things in your mind?
• How do you know what you are eating?
• What other books have you written?
• How many years does Luna have left?
• How does Luna use her sense of smell to help you?
• Who is your favorite service dog?

And with that, I thanked the kids for having us, and once I stood up, the Black Lab at my feet jumped up, shook herself off and stood patiently at my side. I lifted Luna’s harness handle then, commanded, “Luna, outside!” and dozens of eight and nine-year olds, all of them still sitting criss-cross applesauce on the classroom floor, laughed and cheered as Luna threaded me through them and to the door to the hallway.

And for her encore? I took Luna’s harness off so all the kids — and teachers  — who wanted to could pet Luna or rub her belly on their way out. As for that last question? The one about which is my favorite service dog? Adults ask me that question a lot, too, and my answer is always the same: The one I’m working with now!

I was delighted when Tammy Duckworth won last week’s election: it means she’ll  serve as senator here in Illinois for six more years. Senator Duckworth has a long career serving her country, and when it comes to disability access, she is an expert: she served in Iraq and lost both legs when a rocket-propelled grenade struck the helicopter she was co-piloting in 2004. After she won the 2017 election for Senator of the State of Illinois, an article in the Chicago Tribune pointed out that running a Senate campaign involves lots of travel and complicated logistics. From the article:

Duckworth said she and her staff have a pre-event checklist to make sure the site is up to their standards — and that means making sure even the bathrooms are wheelchair accessible.

“I don’t go to any place that isn’t accessible even though I have artificial legs that I can walk in; it’s on principle,” she said. “If someone in a wheelchair can’t get in it, I’m not going to do an event there. Just because I can get in there with my artificial legs doesn’t mean somebody else can.”

The article said that during her campaign Duckworth often heard from voters who question her ability to serve. A question about using a wheelchair in public during the campaign came up when she first ran for Congress. “I’m not ashamed I’m in a wheelchair. I earned this wheelchair,” she said. “I’ve always insisted it’s not something that we hide.”

A seasoned member of Congress now, Senator Duckworth joined Representative Sarbanes of Maryland last month to introduce the Websites and Software Applications Accessibility Act (S. 4998 , H.R. 9021) in both houses of Congress. The bill will require employers, state and local governments, and private businesses to make their websites and applications accessible.

Much has been made about how people with disabilities benefitted from digital access during the COVID pandemic, but casual conversations I’ve had with friends who have visual impairments tell me how frustrated they’ve been with technology, the high number of web sites that are not easy to use if relying on speech software and the hours they’ve wasted trying to make it work.

I am one of those people. During the pandemic my husband Mike has had to take over much of the on-line ordering we do, the forms we are asked to fill out on line, and any online streaming we do. Throughout the pandemic I got a lot of messages in my in box about plays and concerts and lectures available on line free of charge, but when I gave them a try, the links and buttons were not accessible – frustrating!

If passed, this new legislation will make it clear that the Americans with Disabilities Act applies to websites and applications. I already know that my Senator will be voting in favor of the bill — she’s the one who introduced it to the Senate!

An earlier version of this post appeared last week on the Easterseals National blog.

We got the news Monday morning. Our dear friend Wanda Bridgeforth had died. Wanda’s daughter, Wanda Jr., had texted me last week to let me know “Mama is in hospice care at home.” She added, “Don’t be sad about this, Mama l-i-v-e-d long…and much!”

I was grateful to Junior for that message — her letting me know about hospice made the news about Wanda’s death easier to swallow. Wanda was 101 years old. She’d been in my “Me, Myself & I” memoir-writing class 15 years, sharing her life stories there with us every week. What joy and wonderment I feel now, having had the honor to know Wanda , meet her family, laugh with her…it’s all pretty miraculous.

Thinking about Wanda so much this past week got me reminiscing about meeting her for the first time: it all happened when she was in the audience at Printers Row Book Fair in 2007 to see her friend Minerva (another writer in the memoir class I led back then) appear with me at a presentation there. Here’s the story.>

That’s Wanda earlier this year, modeling her 1960 Easter bonnet for her home health care worker.

“Minerva told me she was going to be in the book fair with her teacher, and I should come and meet Beth Finke,” Wanda told me, explaining that Minerva and Wanda had been friends since DuSable High School opened in 1935. Minerva hadn’t mentioned that I was blind, and Wanda was sitting so far back that she didn’t see my Seeing Eye dog Hanni at my feet until she walked up to say hello. “I said ‘Holy Toledo! A blind lady teaching a writing class? This I gotta see!’”

I invited her to sit in on a class, and she signed right up.
Minerva and Wanda brought a slice of Chicago history with them to class every week. Tens of thousands of Southern blacks flooded into Chicago during the Great Migration of the early 20th century. Minerva’s parents came from Georgia, Wanda’s came from Mississippi, and the stories these two read in class describe Bronzeville, the segregated neighborhood they grew up in, as a “city within a city.”

Overcrowding, joblessness, and poverty was a fact of life, but so was literature, jazz, blues, and gospel music.

DuSable High School, the first Chicago high school built exclusively for African-American students, opened in the Bronzeville neighborhood in 1935. Minerva transferred in as a sophomore, and Wanda was a freshman. “I was in the birthday class,” Wanda would remind us any time her beloved high school was mentioned. DuSable was built on Chicago’s South Side 15 years before the Brown v. Board of Education decision. Wanda says it was built to keep schools segregated. “We were blocked in,” she’d write. “We knew not to cross Cottage Grove, 51st Street or the train tracks.” Everyone inside those boundaries was Black. “That was our neighborhood, and DuSable was our neighborhood high school.”

When DuSable first opened, some neighborhood parents applied for permits to get their children into nearby White high schools. “Their parents didn’t think a Black school could be any good,” Wanda wrote, adding that she felt sorry for those kids. True, DuSable classes could be very crowded; she remembers 50 or so students squeezing into classrooms. “But at those other schools, if you were Black and you wanted to be in a play, you had to be a maid or a butler,” she wrote. “At DuSable, we did everything, we were in all the plays, we wrote the school newspaper. We were having such a good time at DuSable.”

Between the two of them, Minerva and Wanda were at the high school between 1935 and 1939. During those years they walked the hallways with some pretty impressive classmates, including Nat King Cole; John H. Johnson, publisher of Ebony and Jet magazines; Harold Washington, first African-American mayor of Chicago; comedian Redd Foxx; and singer Dinah Washington.

“Nat Cole added King to his name later,” Wanda would tell me with a laugh. “You know, like Old King Cole!” They remembered Dinah Washington when she was Ruth Jones, and they knew Redd Foxx as Jon Sanford. “His brother was Fred, that’s who Sanford and Son is named for,” Wanda told us, reminiscing about the old television series. . “They changed their names once they were stars.”

DuSable’s initial fame was in its music program, and Wanda and Minerva both sang during “Hi-Jinks” student talent shows there. “We were in the background, but we put on shows that were better than what was going on in Chicago professional theatres,” Wanda wrote. “With musicians like Ruthie Jones and Nat Cole and all of those guys, we couldn’t miss!”

And with writers like Minerva and Wanda in the memoir-writing classes I’ve led over the years, I couldn’t miss, either. Their stories live on through the essays they wrote — I am so, so grateful. As Wanda always liked to say…”Hugs all around!”

I love voting, and look forward to doing so tomorrow at Jones College Prep high school. Democracy is a luxury and one that’s at risk, so voting is more important than ever.

(For the record, I’d rate the 2020 elections as the straightest, truest, cleanest presidential election of my lifetime. It was closely scrutinized in real time and tested again and again after the fact. I mean, remember 2000? The difference: The character, or lack thereof, of the lead actors and their followers.)

The Democrats, in my view, are missing an opportunity to trumpet real benefits that the nation will reap as a result of the Inflation Reduction Act, the infrastructure legislation, a legislative step toward gun sanity, and other accomplishments. But it’s kind of a Democrat thing to miss opportunities.

Apart from that, we are polarized in a way that surpasses any period of my life, including the 1960s and early 1970s. Back then we either did or didn’t support the war, but we agreed there was a war. We believed or didn’t believe in the domino theory but we knew what it was. Today, not so much.

Perhaps one thing we all can agree on—or at least all of us who watch any TV or listen to any radio: After tomorrow, the political ads will cease.

I can’t believe that any of them persuade anyone. I can only imagine that they’re made to remind the respective bases to get out there otherwise, the opposing candidate will indeed bake your children in a pie and make you eat it (cue the dark mood music).

It’s always bad but I feel like it’s worse than ever this year. For example, I was watching the Illinois Michigan State game on the Big Ten Network when political ads for Michigan races came on.

Even my beloved Jeopardy!, which usually is filled with ads for Cricket phones, calcium supplements, and all stuff for people of a certain age, has been filled with rapid fire doomsday ads.

Of course it is worse because there’s more money in politics than ever.

Maybe we can agree that’s a bad thing? Or at least, let’s all celebrate a political ad moratorium…until the next election.