The political scene around these parts continues to depress. Particularly gruesome is the latest news about the head of the Chicago Public Schools being under Federal investigation. But that’s only a part of the ugliness—the conflicts of interest and big-money corruption is rife in a place that has profound ramifications for kids in the system, and for those who work for CPS.

But. But! I did run across one thing that buoyed my spirits last week. In my last post, I wrote about the masters of the universe who lose touch with the world inhabited by those who aren’t as fortunate as they are, and who never seem to have enough of everything.

Well.

Back in 2004, while still in college, a 19-year-old named Dan Price founded a Seattle-based credit card payments processing company called Gravity Payments that now employs 120 people. Price happened onto a study that Beth read about some time ago that looked at the relationship between emotional well-being and wealth. The short version of the results: As you might expect, being poor causes stress and unhappiness. As incomes rise, so does emotional well-being. But that well-being plateaus at around $75,000 annual income. In other words, people don’t get happier if they make $175,000. They can do more and buy more stuff, but their fundamental emotional state does not improve.

Price also looked into what living on less than 70k in Seattle was like–and it was harder than he’d imagined.

And so Price did something kind of remarkable: He raised the minimum salary of his employees to $70,000. (Not sure why not all the way to $75,000, but who’s going to complain?) To cover the cost, he’s reducing his own salary from $1 million to … $70,000, and putting a greater share of  annual profits toward salaries.

Here’s a quote from Price in the NY Times article about him and his company:

“The market rate for me as a C.E.O. compared to a regular person is ridiculous, it’s absurd,” said Mr. Price, who said his main extravagances were snowboarding and picking up the bar bill. He drives a 12-year-old Audi, which he received in a barter for service from the local dealer.

I’m sure some people think he’s crazy—but I hope you’ll read the whole article. Price doesn’t seem particularly political, he just seems to me to be a capitalist who practices it against the backdrop of a larger set of values. Thanks, Dan Price, for reminding us that’s possible. And for brightening my week.

Hello from Alexandria, Va., on the last day of our mini-vacation. It’s been, as always, a blast. And as always, it’s ending too soon but it was long enough to stir a big, bubbling pot of nostalgia.

In the fall of 1977, my junior year at the University of Illinois, I enrolled in a political science course on the history of party politics. I ate it up, and the professor was engaging and demanding in a way intended to build into our 20-year-old gelatinous brains a sense of responsibility as U.S. citizens. One day he announced the availability of internships in Washington, D.C. One semester working on Capitol Hill or at a government agency or other Washingtonian kind of place would earn a semester’s worth of credits.

Dianne and Hank

I filled out the application, sheepishly asked for recommendation letters from past professors, and the next thing I knew, I was living at 1430 Rhode Island Avenue, NW, in Washington, D.C. In minutes I could be walking by the Washington Post Building, the one where Woodward and Bernstein worked, and in another block or so I had a nice view of The White House. Then there were all the Smithsonian Museums, the monuments, all just a stroll away. As Gomer Pyle would say, “Shazam!”

Then again, making a wrong turn (or right turn, depending on your point of view) landed me on a patch of strip clubs and seedy bars. Fourteenth was notorious. Heading north was treacherous; the neighborhoods that had burned in the wake of Martin Luther King’s assassination hadn’t recovered. (That all has changed, but that’s another post.)

I was as green as green got. But I landed in the right place, Consumers’ Checkbook magazine. My supervisor Dianne took me and a fellow intern, who hailed from South Carolina, under her wing. Next thing you know Dianne introduced us to Pick, and Venita and he (fellow southerners) talked trash over games of backgammon.

Before the feast.

I went back to complete my senior year and met a girl named Beth in my basic reporting class. I told her about my internship, and she eventually did the same program in D.C.

A couple years later, I’d graduated and taken a real job at the magazine and moved to Northern Virgina. At some point Pick needed a roommate and so did I, so we got a place together. Pick introduced me to his North Carolinian friends, a married couple named Michael and Susi, who ended up living upstairs. Pick and I and Mike and Susi all became fast friends, making camping trips along Skyline drive, and one to the Outer Banks of North Carolina—my introduction to saltwater.

I eventually moved back to Illinois and about the time I reconnected with Beth in Urbana, Pick met Hank, and we more or less share anniversaries. Saturday night, Pick and Hank hosted a dinner party for me, Beth, Mike, Susi, and Dianne.

Hank cooked a marvelous meal, Pick made sure everyone had a glass, and a thousand memories were triggered. But it wasn’t maudlin “good old days” stuff. Way back when was fun, but we were all working harder at finding our way in life than we have to now—well, I should say I know I was—and we did plenty of stuff worthy of gut laughs, particularly in hindsight.

There’s a lot good about growing older, at least for us lucky ones. We get more comfortable in our own skins and shed insecurities. Troublesome things that seemed to be really important a long time ago have dissolved, replaced by gratitude and appreciation for a few hours of the company of the people we love. Here’s to all of you.

And to Professor Seligman. I’ll never forget him.

Last week I asked my downtown Chicago group of memoir-writers to come up with 500-word essays titled What Makes Me Happy. “Don’t come back with lists, or with vague things like ‘family and friends’,” I said. I asked them to write about an event from the past couple weeks that left them feeling fresh, energized, rejuvenated. “What was it about that specific experience that made you so happy?” The writers did not disappoint.

Sandy wrote about the teeny-tiny narrow view she has of Lake Michigan from her 7th floor Chicago apartment. “If I stand in the right hand corner of my living room and look to my left with my forehead resting on the window, I can see my small piece of the sky, sand and water.” The sky was a rosy pink the morning she wrote her piece, and the huge blocks of ice at the edge of the lake were starting to melt. “We can see the sand again,” she wrote. “And, instead of non-moving frozen water on the lake, the small waves are showing their white caps as they roll in at the shoreline.”

Nancy shares lunch and laughter with two longtime friends every Sunday, and her essay described them playing a card game after a recent lunch. “I seem to lose more often than I win, but IF Jo and Elaine were here, they’d tell you I was exaggerating.” She said every week each of them thinks they are the loser. “By the following Sunday, nobody remembers who won the week before anyway.”

Thumbing through a photo album she started in 1960 reminded Sheila that the photography hobby she enjoys to this day started with a memorable gift. “Aunt Anona gave me my best 8th grade graduation present,” she wrote. “It was a Kodak Hawkeye camera.”

Tycelia had just returned from a trip to Mexico City where she visited the Temple of the Moon at Teotihuacan. “When my husband passed this summer, I felt that all of my happiness had died with him,” she wrote. “But I felt happy to have succeeded in my attempt to climb that magnificent temple — for the first time in months, my heart had a break from sorrow.”

Yesterday was the last meeting for this eight-week session with that group of memoir-writers, and it was energizing to end on such a happy note. The seniors in all four memoir-writing classes I lead here in Chicago are all on spring break now, and so am I.

On the left that’s Pick (a.k.a. Keith Pickerel) and on the right Hank (a.k.a. Henry Londner). We’re lucky to count them as friends.

No doubt I’ll be publishing a post soon on a happy event: Whitney, Mike and I are taking off tonight for a four-day visit in Washington, D.C. We’ll be staying with our dear friends Pick and Hank, and being with those two, enjoying Hank’s fine cooking, singing along to Pick’s sensational piano playing, sharing stories and jokes and laughs, well, that always makes us happy.

Four different editors at University of Illinois Press went over the rough draft of my memoir before they published it. All of them suggested changes.

One of the most common request? Stronger verbs. They also wanted descriptions that were more precise, more colorful, more heartfelt. Now, 12 years after my memoir, Long Time, No See was published, I am leading four memoir-writing classes every week and urging writers to , you guessed it: use stronger verbs and include precise, colorful, and heartfelt descriptions in their writing.

The requests from my editors forced me to return to certain settings in Long Time, No See and focus on how events at hand made me feel at the time. Not always easy. Some of the most life-altering events in our lives are ones we’d rather forget.

An example: Surgeons operated on my left eye first. That surgery was unsuccessful. The first Try with my right eye didn’t work, either. They operated on it a second time. Each surgery was painful. Each required month-long stays at the hospital to recover, and I had to keep my face down every minute of every day of those long months away from home. My head was down when I “watched” television, when I listened to books, when I walked to the bathroom. I slept with my face in the center of a donut “hemorrhoid” pillow – eye surgeons didn’t want to risk me turning my head in the night.

In Long Time, No See I write about the retina surgeon examining my eyes after the third surgery and breaking the news to Mike and me that I’ll never see again. In the rough draft I told readers that after hearing this, Mike and I walked out of the office and headed to White Sox Park for a baseball game. Whoa! Whoa! Whoa! University of Illinois Press editors read that and said I absolutely must tell my readers what was going through my head when we found out my blindness was permanent.

Not exactly a moment I wanted to relive – who wants to re-enter that room and hear that bad news all over again? In the end, though, rewriting that scene turned out to be GREAT therapy. I had to think. When I was told I’d never see again, was I disappointed? Angry? Sad? Scared? The answer is here, in an excerpt from the published version of Long Time, No See (University of Illinois Press, 2003):

“I’m afraid there’s nothing else we can do,” he said in a tone I recognized from his final report on my left eye.

All I could think to ask was, “Can I lift my head up now?”

He said I could. Thankful for at least that, I raised my head for the first time in over a month. I was struck by a sudden feeling of freedom and relief. No more lasers, no more operations, no more weekly visits to Chicago, no more worrying whether or not this all was going to work. We’d been at this for nearly a year; now it was finally over.

I swiveled my head as if to look around. I saw nothing. Mike talked to the doctor, asking sensible questions, I suppose. Turning toward their voices, I asked if this was really it, if we’d really exhausted the possibilities.

“I’m a religious man,” the doctor answered, “and in the religion I follow we believe in miracles. I believe God has cured all sorts of ailments. This could happen with you, but there’s nothing else I can do for you medically.”

We stood up to leave. I reached out for the doctor’s hand. He clasped mine with both of his, and I thanked him for all he’d done. He was shaking. I felt sorry for him; I would’ve liked to tell him we were going to be all right.

The White Sox were in town that day. Going to a ballgame after learning I’d be blind for the rest of my life was probably a strange thing to do, but it beat heading home and sitting on our pitiful second-hand couch and wondering where to turn next. From the book:

The White Sox were having a rotten year. There were maybe 8,000 people in the stands; Floyd Banister pitched, the Sox lost. But it was strangely pleasant, sitting next to Mike with my head up, not giving a thought to eyes or surgery. We each had a bratwurst and a beer. Between bites and gulps and giving me play by play, Mike bantered with other fans, cursing the underachievers on the team. I laughed at Nancy Faust, the Sox organist—she’s famous for picking songs that play on player’s names. Mike marveled at the endurance of Carlton Fisk, and we both wondered out loud why every time we went to a game, that bum Banister was pitching.

The three-hour ride home was quiet, and once we got there, we found ourselves sitting on our miserable couch, just as we’d feared, holding hands and trying to imagine how we’d cope. Our only decision that night was to go to sleep, and today being Valentine’s Day, I’ll end the post with that steamy scene — editors agreed with me that it didn’t need more description than I had in the rough draft!

Our bed felt wonderful. I was home for good. Despite everything, a powerful relief came over me, a sense of security, such a change from how I’d felt during those months in my hospital bed. And I realized right away that sight isn’t needed under the covers.

So, it’s already been a week since my last post? Yikes. A lot’s happened, and not all of it uplifting (though we had a swell Thanksgiving, and hope you did, too). So, bereft of inspiration, I’m repurposing a little something I wrote around 10 years back when Beth visited our friend Sheelagh in Northern Ireland and left Hanni home with me. I hope you enjoy it.

I was Hanni’s favorite…until Beth got home.

For years after my wife lost her eyesight, I dreaded when she went away without me. Not trusting a world of redcaps, connecting flights, and shuttle buses, I worried about her travels more than she did. I always imagined the worst, fretting until she returned home, safe.

Now she travels alone regularly. I’m still unhappy, but for less admirable reasons. A couple days before she goes out of town there’s a mix of sadness and tension. For her, it’s all anticipation and packing and every once in awhile an “I’m going to miss you.” For me it’s “I’m going to miss you, have a good time, but how come I’m stuck at home taking care of things while you’re having a good time?”

On her last trip she went to Northern Ireland, which meant she couldn’t take Hanni, her Seeing Eye guide dog. I’ll save the explanation, but it has to do with rabies quarantines and such. For a week, while Beth yucked it up and drank Guinness in a nice little pub with our friends, Hanni and I would be stuck with each other.

Still, on the day she left, I got a jolt of that thing that made Tom Cruise dance in his underwear in Risky Business when his parents left him home alone. No rules!

Except I’m not a teen-age Tom Cruise. I’m not an anything Tom Cruise. And there’s nothing I want to do that I haven’t done or don’t do regularly while my wife’s around. After 20 years of marriage, she’s seen it all; it’s not like I have to wait until she’s gone. If I had friends she despises I would make a point of seeing them. Except all my friends are her friends, too.

So my guilty pleasures amounted to eating food she’d never eat—barbecued ribs that night—and incessant channel surfing, watching sports, staying up into the wee hours catching fragments of action movies she’d never watch on cable TV. All because I could. The next morning I was groggy and heart-burned, wondering why I did this to myself.

With no payoff for her absence, I brooded. I was joined this time by Hanni, who acted like a child who’d been left with a mean relative. She went into a deep mope, curling up to sleep near the door to our apartment—she never, ever sleeps there otherwise.

And so for the first couple evenings, there we lay, me on the couch with remote in hand, she on the floormat by the door.

But after a couple of days, I started getting used to not having to consult with anyone on what to eat, what to do, where to go, or when to go there. To walking down the block to our local, just because I felt like it, to read the paper at the bar while sipping a beer. The good parts of being single that single people take for granted.

And there were good reports on the notes left by the dog-walker we hired for the week. “We had a great time at the park. Hanni was perfect, stopping at every curb. #1: Check. #2: Check. Gave her a treat.”

Hanni didn’t mind the new life, either. She wasn’t threading a blind woman through chaotic Chicago traffic anymore, but she still got fed and petted lavishly. I took her for long walks, she played with other dogs, and their companions struck up dog conversations with me.

Hanni and I bonded. I became certain we shared an ambivalence about my wife’s return. Who does she think she is, anyway? She goes away, we have to adjust. She wants to come back, we have to adjust. It’s all about her.

When a week passed, I left the office to pick up my wife at the airport. My cell phone rang, I answered, and a British woman introduced herself. She told me she sat next to my wife on the plane, that they had a great time talking, and that she’d help her to the curb with her luggage. I pulled up to find my wife and her British flying chum.

After I grabbed her bag, my wife said a hasty goodbye to her helper and we were off.

Like always, we started in as if resuming an interrupted conversation, each pouring out stories of the past few days as I drove downtown from O’Hare.

My stories stunk by comparison, of course. Between lists of who called, what teams won what games, and other droll details, I strategically mentioned the hardships I—and this time, the dog—suffered in my wife’s absence.

And like always, she ignored this accounting.

I made do with having made my comments for an imaginary record. We moved on to dinner plans for the night, the wheres, whats and whens, and charted out the rest of our week.

At home, whatever special bond the dog and I had forged evaporated before my eyes as Hanni, completely forgetful, forgiving, or both, threw herself at her partner without giving me a second look.

And it was like my wife never left.