The kids at St. John's enjoyed our presentation, thanks in large part to Jen and Nicole for getting us there!

Whitney and I were supposed to take a train to visit St. John’s School in Western Springs yesterday morning. Good thing we didn’t!

April 4, 2012 (CHICAGO) (WLS) — Emergency crews responded to a track fire near Chicago’s Union Station Wednesday morning.
According to ABC7’s Roz Varon, traffic was jammed near Canal and Jackson because of the emergency activity in the 300-block of South Riverside.

No one was injured, but I sure wouldn’t have wanted to put Whitney through all that mess. Not to mention…me.

Jennifer Cristina and Nicole Dotto (two lovely young women I met volunteering in a program for kids in the Chicago Public Schools) offered to pick Whitney and me up right in front of our apartment building. The suburban school we were visiting yesterday had nothing to do with the program we volunteer for, but Jennifer and Nicole took time out of their schedules to help us anyway. They drove us all the way to the suburban school, sat patiently through the presentation, took care of Whitney while I signed books, then drove us back home again.

Traffic was bad on the way back to Chicago. I took Whitney’s harness off so she could relax, then started asking Jennifer and Nicole how they’d found out about Sit Stay Read!, the literacy program we all volunteer for. Turns out neither of them are originally from Chicago. Jennifer left her home in Baton Rouge to live in a bigger city. Nicole is from Southern California and knew she could run her online business selling vintage clothing from anywhere. “I love seeing new places,” she said, doting on Whitney from the back seat. “I visited Chicago and liked it, so I decided to move here.” Volunteering was a great way to meet new people, and Sit Stay Read was a good fit: her hours are flexible enough to allow her to visit schools in the daytime.

Jennifer works as a nanny, and her charge is growing up. “I’m free during the day while she’s in school, and I love kids, and I love dogs,” she shrugged. “And you know, if you ever want to feel needed, all you have to do is volunteer. It’s good for you.”

Jennifer was absolutely right. In a story in the Nonprofit News about a study on the health benefits of volunteering, the executive director of the Saguaro Seminar at Harvard University referred to volunteering as the “new hybrid health club for the 21st century that’s free to join.”

The study finds a significant connection between volunteering and good health. The report shows that volunteers have greater longevity, higher functional ability, lower rates of depression and less incidence of heart disease.

And of course the recipients of the good deeds benefit, too. Whitney and I can vouch for that. Avoiding Union Station yesterday morning added dog years to our lives. Spending time with these two thoughtful and caring young women helped us function better during our presentation at St. John’s, and we avoided challenges at Union Station that might have brought us down. Thank you, Jennifer and Nicole. Your ad lib volunteer efforts yesterday warmed our hearts.

Some el stops in Chicago make it easy to cross busy streets. I regularly use the underground blue line stop near our apartment this way — Whitney guides me down the steps on the south side, we walk underneath Congress to get to the exit that feeds out on the north side, and, bingo! We’ve safely crossed a four-lane highway!

Whit and I often use Subway stops to cross under busy streets.

When Seeing Eye trainer Chris Mattoon was here last month helping me with Whitney, I used the underground red line el stop to cross State Street. He found my subway street-crossing idea so slick that he asked if he could videotape us. “I’ve gotta show this to the apprentices!” he laughed, explaining that new trainers might regard my trick as cheating — they might insist the dogs keep their street crossings, ahem, above ground. “But really, an important part of the job is learning to trust the blind person you match with the dog. Each person is different, and you’ve gotta let them do what works best for them,” Chris told me, then started to chuckle again. “And this seems to work for you, Beth!”

The only thing that kinda doesn’t work about my underground crossings is this: the spot where we emerge from the blue line is also the spot where a gaggle of homeless men like to hang out. The men are no trouble, it’s just that Whitney needs to work us around them to get us to the next corner. We make this trip so often that one of the men recognizes us now and has decided to take us under his wing. “Three o’clock!” his baritone sandpaper voice rings out when he sees us come up the stairs. “Twelve o’clock!” he shouts as we head down the sidewalk.

I have never found the face-of-the-clock method very helpful, but I’ve come across a number of sighted people who think it’s pretty clever. Maybe they’ve all seen the movie See No Evil, Hear No Evil? That’s the one where Gene Wilder plays a deaf man who uses clock-face directions to tell his blind buddy (played by Richard Pryor) how to beat up some guy they meet in a bar.

“Nine o’clock! “Twelve o’clock!” The shouts from my Tom-Waits-sound-alike can be disconcerting. And distracting. I do my best to hide my annoyance and just smile his way as we pass. He’s only trying to help.

A few weeks ago Mike walked with Whitney and me to Union Station to catch a train to a suburban grade school. It’s been an unseasonably warm winter in Chicago — the sun was out, sidewalks were clear, and Mike escorted Whitney and me sighted-guide across the four-lane highway. I gotta admit, It was a relief to avoid the shouts from the Tom Waits soundalike at the el stop.

I kissed Mike goodbye at Union Station, assuring him he didn’t have to come and fetch us there later that afternoon — Whitney could guide me home on her own. Only problem: I hadn’t anticipated a blizzard.

The snow started falling when Whitney and I were talking to second-graders in the gymnasium at Kipling Elementary School, and it was still coming down when we got off the commuter train in Chicago. The American Federation of the Blind devotes a section on its web site to traveling in winter weather:

Winter-weather is often more time consuming, more physically and mentally tiring, and possibly more fraught with danger than traveling in good weather. The cold often brings personal discomfort, making it difficult to concentrate and learn during travel or mobility lessons. Your toes, fingers, and ears are particularly at risk. To protect your extremities, it is necessary to plan one’s clothing and equipment well beforehand.

When I was a kid, I thought it was magical, the way snowfall muffled the sound around you. I still do. But on my walk home with Whitney that afternoon, it just wasn’t the magic I was looking for. By the time we left the train station, enough snow had fallen to mask the audible cues I use to navigate the city. Commuters trudging towards the station kept their heads down to avoid the snow pelting their faces. This would have been fine if they all had dogs like mine to guide them, but they didn’t. Whitney was on her own, weaving me around the blinded commuters in our path.

Snow had accumulated between the raised, circular bumps I’ve come to rely on to tell me we’re at the edge of a curb ramp, so I wasn’t always exactly sure where we were. The further we got away from the train station, the fewer pedestrians crossed our path. And then suddenly I realized: we were alone. I stopped. Listened. No footsteps in the snow, no sounds of shovels, nobody there. Panic. Where were we? My iPhone was in my bag, and I knew I could call Mike. But what would I say? How would I tell him where to find us?

And that’s when I heard it. A voice like an angel. “Twelve o’clock!” my subway sentry shouted.

I picked up Whitney’s harness, squared my shoulders towards the foghorn, commanded, “Whitney, forward!” and Wonderdog Whitney pulled me towards the voice in the wilderness. “Twelve o’clock!” he called out. “Twelve o’clock! Twelve o’clock!” When we got close enough, Tom Waits reached out. He put his gloved hand in mine, and led Whitney and me to the subway stairs. Once there, he placed my palm ever so gently onto the banister and walked away. We got home fine from there.

And now, when my pal by the subway entrance croaks out a clock direction, I don’t just smile his way. I thank him.

Check this out: Mrs. Walsh’s first-graders made a book to thank me for visiting their school with Whitney last month.

That

When the book arrived in the mail I knew right away who I’d enlist to read it out loud to me.

A number of the seniors in the Wednesday memoir-writing class I lead are retired Chicago public school teachers; others worked as aides or substitutes. When I pulled the book out of my backpack last Wednesday, these senior writers gathered around as if it were a precious piece of art – which is exactly what it is. They took turns and read every page out loud to me, ooing and ahhing over each drawing and complimenting the kids’ writing skills.

I asked them to choose a favorite page to publish with this blog post, and they were hard-pressed to pick just one. “Oh, I like this one!” one would gush. Others would chime in with their opinions, and when the page was turned to the next masterpiece, the raves would start anew. “Ooo, but I like this one, too!”

During school presentations, I show school kids how Seeing Eye dogs safely lead people like me, who are blind, where we want to go. I talk about Braille, too, and read a bit from the Braille version of my children’s book, Hanni and Beth: Safe & Sound aloud. I tell them how I listen to audio books. I explain how a talking computer works and describe the way I use a screen-reader to read email messages and check out newspaper articles online.

The kids learn I can’t read print. So when teachers ask them to write thank-you notes afterwards, some of them reason they shouldn’t bother – Beth can’t read print, and neither can Whitney!

Truth is, Whitney and I honestly and sincerely do not need to be thanked for visiting classrooms. If anything, we should be thanking the kids — their enthusiasm and curiosity buoys us for days and weeks after each school visit.

But all that said, I gotta admit: I do enjoy hearing what the kids have to say about Whitney and me after we’ve been at their school. Mike has developed a knack for describing crayoned illustrations, and although it is entertaining to hear him read the handmade thank-you notes out loud, I thought I’d give him a break this time. Hearing my senior writers read this book from Warren G. Harding Elementary School in Kenilworth, NJ out loud last week was a special treat.

After much hemming and hawing, the “Me, Myself and I” memoir-writing seniors finally chose, drumroll, please…)

Note to blind blog readers: the picture shows a very long Whitney dog smiling at the camera. She is wearing a harness, and all you see of me is a very, very long arm holding on. The first-grader’s writing reads like this : “I like when the dog was woking the prsin.”

Last Thursday I gave a presentation to a class at Carnegie Mellon University. Harper couldn’t make the trip to Pittsburgh, and I am

A few of the beautiful women in one of my memoir writing classes.

very grateful to my gracious husband Mike for stepping in as Seeing Eye Human and making this visit possible.

The class I spoke to was History 79-311: “Body Politics: Women and Health in America.” To prepare for my talk, I went to the experts. I asked the women in the memoir-writing classes I teach to write about “body image.” Their essays did not disappoint.

Myrna’s essay taught us that anorexia existed long before pop singer Karen Carpenter succumbed to it in the 1980s. Myrna wrote about growing up pudgy in a home where eating was “considered one of the great pleasures in life.” When she was sent away to camp at age 12, she saw it as a chance to lose some of the pudge and look more like the girls in magazines. The magazine girls were not as skinny then as now, Myrna acknowledged, but definitely trimmer than in life. This little 12-year-old girl starved herself at camp, devising ways to pick at her food to make it look like she’d eaten more than she had, always leaving the table early to dump what was left on her plate into the trash. It was weeks before the camp counselors finally noticed. Myrna’s parents were summoned and took her home. From her essay:

A picture of me taken not long after I returned home shows me scrawny, for the first and last time in my life. I stopped menstruating for several months. Perhaps I thought that, too, was an accomplishment.

Myrna’s fellow memoir-writer Kathy had the opposite problem. Her essay described one of the long-lasting effects of growing up a late bloomer.

I waited, waited, waited! Friend and after friend smiled knowingly as she joined the ranks of women, no longer a girl. I was still my mother’s thin child with a chest flatter than flat. (Her body type had been all the rage in the flapper era!) Furtively, I began to stoop to conceal the absence of a Marilyn Monroe bosom. My posture, once erect and confident, became the rounded shoulders I have today…

One of the most intriguing essays came from Sheila. She wrote about life as an identical twin, describing her body as a carbon copy of her sister Clare’s — up to a point. “A slightly distorted mirror image is a better description.” At birth Sheila weighed in at 5 pounds, Clare at four pounds, some-odd ounces.

Weight has been a comparison point for our entire lives. Clare was always a size smaller than me. I resented weighing more than her. No one, even strangers would let me forget the difference. “She’s bigger than the other one. Otherwise, they look exactly alike.”

The twins are in their 60s now, and Clare put on weight after being immobilized by foot surgery.

Finally, she’s as big as me. It doesn’t feel as good as I thought it would. All my life I wanted to be the same size or smaller than Clare. How come I don’t feel like celebrating?

There is not much to celebrate about becoming blind, but one thing I appreciate about not being able to see is that I can no longer judge people by how they look. I am left to judge others on more important things: what they say, and what they do.

In my scholarly research for Thursday’s talk at Carnegie Mellon I came across one study that found that blind women have lower body dissatisfaction scores and more positive eating attitudes than women who can see. From the study:

The high levels of body dissatisfaction and abnormal eating attitudes currently prevalent in Western societies have been attributed by many authors to the promotion of an unrealistically thin ideal for women. We investigated the role of the visual media by examining the relationship between body image dissatisfaction and eating attitudes in visually impaired women.

The results suggest the importance of the visual media in promoting unrealistic images of thinness and beauty.

All pretty interesting stuff, and I thank my friends in Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon University for inviting me to present on the topic – I ended up learning a lot!