The questions Robin Sitten and I got from our audience at the Perkins School for the Blind Thursday sure were thought-provoking. Here’s a sampling:

Robbin and I during our presentation.

• Did you write your memoir Long Time, No See as therapy, or did you write it to share your journey with others?
• The people who sign up for your memoir classes, do you think they take it just because you’re blind and they want to, like, watch how you do it?
• A lot of times when people lose their sight, their marriages end, too — I know that happened to a lot of people here. I’m so glad Michael is here, I read about him in your books and I just think he is grrrrreat! and I’m wondering, can you tell us more about what Mike is like, and also, what you guys had to do to stay together?
• We hear a lot about how technology is so good for us, you know, text to speech and all that, but do either of you have examples of ways all the apps and stuff are making things more difficult?

Answers to those first three questions require far more words than I can fit into one blog post today – how about I use those questions as topics for future posts? We can tackle the fourth question here, though, thanks to Robin Sitten, the narrator of the audible.com version of Writing Out Loud. Robin was presenting with me on Thursday, and she was kind enough to take that one on for the two of us.

That’s Keller as in Helen, and Sullivan as in Annie…Perkins has quite a history.

Hearing an Audible.com narrator’s perspective on text-to-speech technology was, ahem, eye-opening. Robin explained that advances in text-to-speech technology means computer voices are starting to sound much more human. “Those advances are eventually going to eliminate my job as a narrator,” she said with a shrug. “But that’s not all bad.” She described her love for books, and then told an audience full of Braille and audio-book readers what a privilege it is to read out loud for others. “I mean, I narrated Beth’s book for her, and you can all hear it now, which is great,” she said. “But it’s not available in Spanish, or Chinese, or Japanese or any other language.” From there she described advances in technology that make translations of text to other languages easier than ever before. “That means pretty soon people all over the world who can’t read print can have more books available to them.”

A lot of the people who came up to ask more questions after the presentation complimented us on how comfortable we seemed up there on stage together. “How long have you two known each other?” one asked. Robin told her we’d communicated by email and twitter before now but had just met face-to-face for the first time that afternoon. “Just this afternoon?” the audience member marveled. “It seems like you’ve known each other a long, long time.” You know what? It really did.

Ten years ago my downtown Chicago memoir-writing class got so full that the Department on Aging started a lottery. A retired college professor named Myrna had been attending that class for years, and when her name wasn’t chosen in the lottery, she approached an organization in her own Chicago neighborhood to encourage them to sponsor a writing class there.

Myrna Knepler

Myrna Knepler helped me stretch my wings as a teacher.

Her neighborhood organization said yes, and it’s largely because of Myrna that I found the confidence to lead five memoir-writing classes every week now.

Myrna Knepler died Sunday night, and in her honor, I’m sharing a story about her that dates back to the time I assigned “in-laws” as a writing prompt.

Myrna’s mother-in-law Hedwig is on the left. That’s Henry, Hedwig’s son and Myrna’s husband, on the right. And that’s baby Elizabeth being held by Hedwig. Taken in 1962.

Clever and self-aware, Myrna was one of the very, very, few memoir-writers in my classes who was courageous enough to write about her mother-in law. “Although she had proved both mental and physical sturdiness, she was thin and bent in a way that made her seem fragile and untouchable,” Myrna wrote back in 2012. “Certainly her life experience was beyond anything I knew, in some ways so terrible I was afraid to touch it.”

Myrna’s Husband Henry was only 16 when he said goodbye to his mother and father in Vienna and boarded the Kindertransport (children’s transport), the effort that saved 10,000 Jewish children from the Holocaust. Henry’s father died in the Auschwitz concentration camp. His mother — Hedwig — survived by hiding in an unheated cabin in the Vienna woods, owned by an anti-Nazi family who sheltered her there.

Hedwig would not reunite with Henry, her only child, until he was 24 years old. Myrna would get to know Hedwig Knepler a decade later, after marrying Henry. From her essay:

Moreover, I sensed the tension between her and my husband, her son. I, his new, much younger wife, wanted above all to please him. He loved his mother, but was troubled by what seemed to be her almost obsessive concern for him, a concern more appropriate to the mother of a young boy, than to a balding assistant professor in his late thirties.

Myrna wrote that her conversations with her mother-in-law were awkward until Myrna and Henry had their first daughter, Elizabeth.

Then for the six months between Liz’s birth and Hedwig’s death, talk was easier,  focused on our mutual love for and wonder at this new creature, the grandchild she never expected to have.

Hedwig died in 1962, leaving Myrna and Henry to sort through a box of letters Hedwig and Henry had exchanged before and after the war. The letters were written in German (a language Myrna did not know well) and stored in their attic for years. The only time Myrna and her husband Henry opened the cardboard box together, they closed it up right away and put it back on the shelf. The material inside was too painful for Henry to read.

Henry died in 1999, and before his death, when he was too ill to deal with the letters himself, Myrna realized that they were now her responsibility. She unpacked nearly one thousand pages of letters — all typed single-spaced and to the edge of the page — and started sorting them by date to donate to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. In exchange, the museum would translate and make copies for Myrna and her daughters.

The translated letters trickled back to Myrna over a span of six years, during which time Myrna was busy penning her own stories for the memoir-writing classes she was attending — one at the Chicago Cultural Center, and the other in Lincoln Park, sponsored by The Village Chicago. “It would be an understatement to say that the memoir groups have been an important part of her life for the past several years — she’s always loved stories, and being able to write and share her own stories has been so meaningful to her,” Myrna’s youngest daughter Annie wrote in a note to me yesterday. “We are also so grateful to have all of those stories written down.”

Myrna took years pouring over the translated letters forwarded to her from the Holocaust Museum and was finally able to piece together stories of how her mother-in-law helped a brother immigrate safely to Argentina. She read heartbreaking details of her mother-in-law’s attempts to help her mother and aunt, who were already interned. They did not survive. Myrna’s mother-in-law wrote about her own struggles to support herself. About how she starved. How she helped save others. About how, in the end, some of the people she saved ended up helping her.

Thanks to Myrna, the original letters exchanged between Hedwig and Henry are now preserved in a vault outside of Washington, D.C., where scholars can access them.

Myrna spent the last year of her life gathering personal stories Henry wrote for his children. Working with her daughter Annie, Myrna shaped them into a memoir. Leaving Vienna, edited by Myrna and Annie Knepler, will be published by Golden Alley Press later this year.
So here’s to Myrna, A remarkable woman who taught me — and continues to teach us all — so much.

Last week a friend—commenting on whatever  Trump’s antic of the day was—posted this on social media:

“I’ll never forgive anyone who voted for this guy. Never.”

I know how he feels. Because I feel that way a lot. I’ve walked around for days at a time seething. I try to come to an understanding about it, but in the end it really only feels like I’m suppressing something that ultimately just corks things up. And then I’m like that volcano in Hawaii—it’s bad now but you ain’t seen nothing yet.

I’m maintaining communication with some old friends, dear friends, whom I trust, who are intelligent and reasonable, and who voted differently than I did. And you know what? They don’t want my forgiveness for voting for our current president and I don’t want theirs for voting the way I did.

I do want to keep talking, though, especially about issues and policy. But it’s hard to even agree on basic facts, never mind how we interpret them. The chasm between us seems so wide sometimes that we can’t yell loud enough to be heard by one another. It’s disturbing, and I don’t remember any other time in my life anything like it.

One of my Trump friends included me on one of those group emails that contained a screed by a conservative guy who, essentially, pled a case that, well, I don’t know where to begin. It was dripping with contempt, anger, and resentment toward, oh, Obama, Clinton (both), Saul Alinsky, and all the awful race-baiting, self-righteous liberals.

I considered replying with a review of the factual errors I found, and a critique of some of the logic, while allowing that I understood (I really did) where some of it was coming from.

In the end, I decided against it. Partly because I just didn’t have the time or energy. But mostly because, really, when it comes to friends, I want to have these discussions face to face.

I don’t know what else to do. Because I’m afraid we all, to some degree, live in echo chambers. We have our own screeds. And we have come to use proxies—political figures and pundits—to beat each other up more than make ourselves understood. We use talking points, memes, to say, essentially, you’re all wrong, and I’m all right. And as good as it feels to do that (DAMHIK), the feeling doesn’t last long or accomplish much.

This kind of thing has always been around. Take bumper stickers, the original social media meme. “Here’s what I think, you’re reading it, and you can’t respond. Goodbye.” They’re like rolling middle fingers.

Which can feel good in a nah-nah nah-nah-nah way. But it doesn’t get us anywhere. And in the end, all this “interactive media” is essentially as interactive as bumper stickers.

So, I’ll continue trying—because I know these people well enough to know I can’t just count them as among the basket of deplorables. They aren’t my enemy, and I’m not theirs. If these friends and I can’t have a constructive discussion, we’re really screwed.

Mike, Whitney the Seeing Eye dog and I are heading to New England this week to meet the narrator who read the audible.com version of Writing Out Loud. Robin Sitten and I have corresponded via email, we follow each other on twitter, and of course I know her voice — I’ve listened to her sensational reading of my book! The two of us have never spoken to each other, though. Not on the phone, and never in-person.

Robin Sitten sittin’ at the microphone.

I don’t know much about Robin personally, she learned a lot about me when she was reading Writing Out Loud, but she’s recorded a number of books since then. It’s high time we met in person!

Our first face-to-face meeting will occur in front of an audience Thursday when we interview each other about the narrator-and-author relationship and how it works. Here from the Perkins School for the Blind web site:

Perkins Library Author and Narrator Reception with author Beth Finke and narrator Robin Sitten
May 24, 2018 – 4:30pm to 6:30pm
Howe Building
175 North Beacon Street
Dwight Hall
Watertown, MA 02472
Join us to meet and hear two accomplished women – author Beth Finke and narrator
Robin Sitten

There’s a reception with light hors-d’oeuvres from 4:30 to 5:30 PM. Admission is free, but a $5.00 donation is suggested. The web page includes bios and photos of both of us, but since you already know me, I’ll leave you with Robin’s bio and a hope that if you live anywhere near Watertown, Massachusetts, you’ll come on over live and in-person to witness our first meeting. Now about Robin:

Robin Sitten is the narrator for the Audible.com version of Beth’s most recent book Writing Out Loud. Prior to narrating for Audible, Robin Sitten was a volunteer reader and director for Recording for the Blind & Dyslexic (now, Learning Ally) and the host of Armchair Traveler on Audio Journal, the Radio Reading Service of Central Massachusetts. She has been an audio describer for television, film, and live theatre since 1996. Robin serves the Perkins professional development community as the Program Manager for Perkins eLearning.

RSVP online or call 617-972-7247, 1-800-852-3133, or email library@perkins.org to reserve your spot.

Among inglorious maladies, allergies and sinus problems have to be near the top. I’ve had my share of both, allergies often leading to sinusitis, leaving me to exhibit many of Felix Unger’s most annoying tendencies, not to mention making some of his most annoying noises.

Which leaves me questioning why the hell we have sinuses in the first place.

Evil resides just below and above my eyeballs.

The old explanation we were supposed believe was that they help equalize pressure in the skull, and that they somehow help nostrils do their job.

Not everybody’s so sure about that these days. Sinuses may be a useless evolutionary leftover, like the coccyx or appendix, as this Discover Magazine article called “Useless Body Parts” suggests:

The nasal sinuses of our early ancestors may have been lined with odor receptors that gave a heightened sense of smell, which aided survival. No one knows why we retain these perhaps troublesome mucus-lined cavities, except to make the head lighter and to warm and moisten the air we breathe.

Apparently, one line of evolution left the lesser apes with only two sinuses, while the greater have four, according to this Smithsonian Magazine piece:

The African apes, gorillas and chimpanzees, have all four of these sinuses. The Asian apes, orangutans and gibbons (the so-called lesser apes because of their smaller size), have just two, lacking the ethmoid and frontal sinuses.

Oh, that I’d evolved from the lesser apes. But I didn’t, and today all four of my sinuses seem to hate me. Most of all the one just under my left eye, where a creature lives, pushing as if trying to get out, and occasionally shoving a skewer up and behind my left eye.

More of the time, it’s just a dull sense of inflammation and pressure in what I would call the raccoon face area—above, below and around my eyes. It leaves me lethargic and more dull-minded than usual. Enough coffee will usually push me through it. And steroid sprays and nasty neti pots and other Felix Ungery stuff.

Antibiotics can help, too, until they don’t. I reached that point 21 years ago and had sinus surgery, a very inglorious, unglamorous, and painful procedure that I swore I’d never, ever have again. I had it during a sub-zero temperature streak, and every time I went outside to leave for a follow-up appointment, it felt like my face and forehead were going to shatter. Looking at the airbag label in the car on the way to the doc right in front of me didn’t soothe.

But the surgery helped a great deal for years. Until the last couple years, that is. The little guy with the skewer has me dancing with the ENT again, and we’ve tried a lot of stuff that hasn’t worked. He has told me that if we need the last resort, the procedure is a lot better than it used to be.

Well, if it comes to that, I won’t do it in winter.