A good friend of my sister Cheryl in Anacortes, Washington is in a book club, and on Monday afternoon I attended as a guest author. When one of the members said she loved how much Writing Out Loud taught her about Chicago, her fellow members swelled up in a chorus of uh-huhs and yeses. The reaction surprise me.

My sister Cheryl and her friend Laura organized my appearance at the afternoon book club and here, that evening at the Anacortes Library, where Laura introduced me.

But come to think of it, I guess the City of Chicago is a character in Writing Out Loud, too. Between Wanda’s stories of the segregated high school she and Minerva attended before Brown V. Board of Education, excerpts of Hannelore and Myrna’s personal essays of how they ended up in Chicago and their links to the Holocaust, Bob’s “Prankster” gang on Chicago’s West Side during the 1940s, and accounts of my own life here with Mike and my Seeing Eye dog Whitney now, well…readers do get a picture of Chicago’s culture, what drew people to Chicago and what It’s like to live here now.
How I’d love to hear 500-word essays written by the women in Monday’s book club. Imagine all I’d learn about the history of Fidalgo Island and what it’s like to live there — Anacortes, population 15,000 is the largest city on the island.

The book club in Anacortes was the first guest author presentation I’ve done outside of the Midwest, the first time I’ve visited a book club with members who had never set foot in Chicago. What fun it was to hear their impressions of Chicago before — and after — reading Writing Out Loud.

“And your descriptions of walking to class,” one said. “I could just picture it.” Now that statement really surprised me.

My descriptions are limited to sounds, textures, smells and tastes. “There’s only a few photos in Writing Out Loud,” I pointed out to them. They all sat silent for a moment. I could hear them thinking. “That’s right,” one finally said. “But I really do have a picture in my mind.”

That evening I was the guest author at an event open to the public at the Anacortes Public Library. After introducing himself and letting me know he’d just finished readingWriting Out Loud, a guy in the audience said he had a question. “What did you study in college?”

Did he know I don’t have a Master of Fine Arts in creative writing? Did he not like the book? Did he wonder what sort of schooling would lead to a book like this? I answered with a question of my own: “Why do you ask?”

That’s me and my sister Cheryl outside their home in Anacortes. Burrows Bay–which Cheryl and her husband wake up to every morning–is behind us. It’s also where Mike Kayaked on Monday.

The man’s answer made me beam. “Well, there’s so much history in this book,” he reasoned. “I just figured you must have been a history major.” I hadn’t intended on making Writing Out Loud serve as a history book, but the excerpted essays by writers in my classes (and the little background information I provide to set the scene) do leave readers with history lessons from the experts: the people who lived through it.

Thank you, Cheryl and Rich for hosting us in beautiful Anacortes, thank you Laura for hosting the book club, and thank you Anacortes Public Library for reminding me how fortunate I am to be leading these classes in Chicago. I learn far more about culture and history by hearing the unique first-hand accounts the writers read out loud every week than I ever did in school. Every week is a history lesson.

Greetings from Anacortes, Washington, where Beth’s doing some book-related promotion, we’re visiting with Beth’s sister Cheryl and her husband Rich, we’re breathing pristine air, we’re eating fresh seafood, and I’m consuming some beautiful views. There’s a ton to say about the San Juan Islands and Anacortes, Skagit County…but I’m too tired.

I paddled a three-hour kayak tour around a couple islands this morning, and boy are my arms tired. And about everything else—I forgot you use all kinds of muscles when you kayak. And I’d only ever kayaked in the still waters of Pamlico Sound at North Carolina’s Outer Banks, so this ocean thing was a little more of everything.

Today was windy and choppy and a test but thanks to a great guide, I and everyone else in the group had a ball and lived to tell about it.

But I’ll do that on another day, except for one tale that maybe the guide would rather I not. At the end of the the tour as we docked our kayaks, our leader was emphatic: “Please, this is the only part of the trip I’ve ever seen anyone fall in the water, so be careful getting out of the boat.”

A worthwhile warning. After stretching out straight in a skinny little boat in front of me for two hours, my legs didn’t want to do much of anything. So I gingerly dragged myself out and onto the dock, where I collected myself for bit before attempting to stand. Once I did, I followed my fellow kayakers, all wobbly-legged, and as we were headed off the dock, our guide caught up to me. I noticed him behind my right shoulder. And then I heard a grunt and big splash. The guide had caught his foot on the dock, and did a hop into the water.

The first thing he did was hand me his phone. Then we helped him out of the water. “I’ve always thought about how embarrassing that would be,” he said. “Now I’ve got it over with.”

The phone worked, and he laughed it off.

And boy am I tired. With that I’ll leave you with a video I took at a scenic lookout in a park named Cap Sante last night. This place is beautiful.

Radio host Justin Kaufmann came well-prepared for our short interview on WGN Radio yesterday morning — we even got a couple of call-ins! If you missed hearing us live, you can hear The Air Carrier Act: How new procedures are impacting those visually impaired online now.

Whitney knows what to do on an airplane.

During the interview yesterday I told my story about the small dog wearing a “service dog” vest who barked and lunged at Whitney at Midway Airport, how the dog’s owner told me the dog keeps her calm and prevents her from getting panic attacks on the plane, and how when Southwest announced that people with disabilities could pre-board, the woman and her dog rushed to the front of the line to nab a bulkhead seat.

The sports reporter sitting in the studio weighed in then with a question about what Whitney does for me inside an airport, and I answered in detail — everything from getting me into the taxi, leading me to curbside check-in, following the red cap to elevators, through security, to the gate, down the jetway and finally, to our seat. On the flight with the yippy service dog, we sat in the 8th row window seat, Whitney, a 60 pound Yellow Lab/Golden Retriever cross, sat with her bottom under the seat in front of us, her head on my feet, and didn’t make a peep during the flight.

She didn’t make a peep while underfoot in the radio studio, either, and I was proud to point that out as the interview came to a close.

In light of the challenges people working with service animals are facing during air travel, The U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT) is making plans to amend and clarify its regulations implementing the Air Carrier Access Act. DOT has issued an Advanced Notice of Proposed Rule Making (ANPRM) and is seeking comments from the public. I think clearer rules about traveling with service animals could help eliminate some problems, and if you think so, too, I hope you’ll comment there, too. Just make sure you submit comments by this Monday, July 9, 2018. Thanks for listening!

In honor of Independence Day, I asked writers in my memoir classes to come up with 500-word essays about a time in their lives when they felt particularly independent. ”What circumstances left you feeling that way?”

Writers came back with stories about riding a bike without training wheels, camping with friends during high school, their first car, heading to college, getting divorced.

One writer, Carol Abrioux, took the assignment in a different direction, and her piece got such a positive response when she read it out loud in class that she readily agreed to let me share it with you Safe & Sound blog readers here, too. Happy Independence Day!

A loss of dependence

By Carol Abrioux

Smoking cigarettes had me by the throat since I was seventeen and wouldn’t let go. By the time I was in my thirties, two packs a day just about satisfied my really bad habit. I spent a lot of time on the phone working for the French Government, so I may not have really smoked all of the 40 cigarettes right down to the butt: I’d be talking, waving my cigarette around, putting it down in the ashtray as I spoke. Probably half of each cigarette burned away.

Today’s writer.

But I wasn’t on the phone all the time, and I smoked at lunch and at home — except when I was cooking. No ashes fell in my good food.

Fact is, whether just one-half, or the whole damn thing, I smoked forty of them each and every day. My office smelled of cigarette smoke — ditto my apartment. My clothes reeked. Even my two Siamese cats seemed to smell of smoke, but I didn’t really realize it at the time. Most smokers don’t.

Dire warnings began to appear in cigarette ads in magazines and television in the 1960s. In 1966, they leapt to the packages and cartons themselves :

• OMG Cancer!
• OMG Emphysema!

Everyone I knew who didn’t smoke became a tenacious nagger. But did I give up my filthy habit? No, no, no…a thousand times no.

I was so protective of my habit that I chose my Chicago doctors by finding out first if they smoked. That effort really backfired. Soon they all quit and became far worse anti-smoking proponents than doctors who had never smoked.

I tried everything to cut down. No packs were kept in my office — I had to walk to the reception area to get one. That lasted three days.

Then I found a cigarette case that locked. You could set it to open in 30 minutes, or an hour. Days I set it for an hour led to me banging my fist on the thing when it refused to open. That, or simply going out and buying another pack.

None of these efforts worked, mostly because I wasn’t really ready to quit.

Finally one morning after waking up and reaching for my first cigarette of the day, I said to myself and the cats, “This is the last cigarette I will ever smoke.” And it was.

I left the pack and the rest of the carton on a shelf in my closet in case my withdrawal symptoms included hallucinations. I didn’t think I could go through having hallucinations, and fortunately I never had to face that.

I never, ever smoked another cigarette.

For those next few months after I quit, I wouldn’t want to be working for me. But the employees were so happy that I quit that they cheerfully put up with my insanities and bad behavior.

My cats took to hiding under the bed.

It all got easier and better. Clothes were washed and sent to the cleaners. Apartment and office were aired, and, unfortunately, food tasted much better than before.

I was walking with a friend one day and he asked me to hold his cigarette while he tied his shoe. Without thinking I raised it to my lips and took a drag. Nothing before had ever tasted that awful. I knew at that moment I had truly gained my independence.

This ball was on Challenger that fateful day. Flown by Ellison Onizuka for his daughter, a soccer player @Clear_LakeHS. #NASARemembers pic.twitter.com/grShwq372X

— Shane Kimbrough (@astro_kimbrough) February 3, 2017

Astronaut Kimbrough tweeted a photo of the soccer ball that made it into space.

On the morning of Tuesday, January 28, 1986, I headed to my barber in downtown Champaign, Illinois. It was the day after the day after the Chicago Bears had won their first and only Super Bowl. I knew that in Chicago there would be a parade in freezing temperatures, but other than that, I hadn’t turned on the radio or the TV and was oblivious to other news.

When I got to the shop, my barber was standing, looking up to a wall-mounted television, glued to the screen.

“What’s going on?” I asked. The space shuttle blew up, he explained. “It’s terrible.”

I settled into the barber’s chair, and he started his work. “Can you imagine being a family member watching that?” he said. “And they keep showing it and showing it. Why do they do that?”

Right about that moment, he spun my chair around and pointed up–it was being played again. “See, watch it, it’s terrible.”

Indeed it was. I recalled my days living in the Washington, D.C. area and my chance meeting with a journalist named Gregg Easterbrook. He was at a dinner party at a mutual friend’s place. We got to talking and he mentioned that he’d written a piece about what a bad idea the space shuttle program was. The guy clearly knew his stuff, but I admit I sort of pooh-poohed him, thinking he was just a space travel killjoy.

I was wrong. You can still read it here—it’s called “Beam me out of this death trap, Scotty,” and although it didn’t directly  call out the O-ring problem that caused the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster, it’s full of red flags that did play out for the worst.

I hadn’t thought much about any of this until last night when I was watching E60, an ESPN television news magazine. It’s sort of like 60 Minutes, but with a sports angle. It’s almost always a pleasant surprise, and last night was no exception.

One piece chronicled the highly unlikely journey of…a soccer ball. One of the astronauts on the ill-fated Discovery mission was named Ellison Onizuka. He was an assistant coach of his daughter’s high school soccer team. When he boarded the ill-fated Challenge, he brought along a team soccer ball that was inscribed with a good luck message from the team.

Miraculously, the ball was recovered intact. Eventually, it found its way into a trophy case at the high school Onikuza’s daughter attended. Clear Lake high school, owing to its proximity to Cape Canaveral, has graduated lots of astronauts’ kids. In 2016, an astronaut named Col. Shane Kimbrough, a Clear Lake parent, was scheduled for a stay on the International Space Station. He asked the high school principal if there was anything from the school she’d like him to take with him.

And so, on October 26, 2016, the ball finally made it into space, where it spent 173 days. It came back safely, and it’s back in its case at the high school.

You can read the online story here. ESPN regularly re-airs the E60 segments—it’s a gripping piece of work. I can’t help but think that Ellison Onikuza and his crewmates would’ve been happy to know that the ball made it to space—and in particular that their work and dedication was being carried on.

Often, I find these stories a little too sentimental, and even manipulative. But somehow, the picture of that ball floating weightlessly against the backdrop of space floated my boat and my spirits.