A full house at Lincoln Elementary.

My Seeing Eye dog Whitney and I started our new year of elementary school visits in a big way: we took a commuter train to Elmhurst (The Chicago suburb where I grew up) and gave a presentation to 250 kindergartners, first-graders, and second-graders. All. At. Once.

Whitney usually leads me to the train station in downtown Chicago on her own, but when my gem of a husband, Mike Knezovich, said he’d accompany us yesterday morning, I had five reasons to swallow my pride and accept his generous offer.

1. Freezing temperatures — if Whitney and I found ourselves lost or turned around for just a few minutes, we might have ended up with frostbite!
2. Snowy slippery sidewalks
3. Salt (Mike can spot it on the roads and help us avoid those areas so it doesn’t end up in Whit’s paws)
4. The train we needed to catch left at 7:40 a.m., which meant we’d be approaching the train station precisely when commuters were getting off trains and rushing to work
5. And oh, yeah. I still have a cast on my broken left hand.

My sister Cheryl lives in Elmhurst. She greeted Whitney and me with hot coffee at the train station there, brought an extra-large-sized pair of mittens in the car to fit over my cast, drove us to Lincoln Elementary School, took pictures at the assembly, and then drove us all the way back to my doorstep in Chicago afterwards. Cheryl has always had a way of boosting my confidence, and we have fun whenever we’re together. I grew up the youngest of seven children. Cheryl is fourth in line, and this explanation of middle child syndrome describes her perfectly:

Many times they go in the opposite direction of their oldest sibling to carve out their own place of achievement and relish in the satisfaction of being capable of doing it on their own. They are sensitive to injustices and much less self-centered than their siblings (first born and last born), which allows them to maintain successful relationships. They are put in the position to learn social skills that are extremely useful, not only within their household, but within their social community.

The kids at Lincoln School were sweet, polite, and very curious. The Q & A part of the presentation was entertaining, as always. A sampling of their questions:

• What does your dog like to chase?
• How can you tie your shoes if you can’t see them?
• How long did it take you to learn to read and write Braille??
• How do you write if you can’t see?
• Do you shop by yourself?
• Can you write cursive?
• Does Whitney ever slip on the ice?
• Does your dog keep you safe from other things?
• Do you always have to say your dogs name before you tell her what to do?

Whitney demonstrating her best Seeing Eye manners.

For that last question, I picked up Whitney’s harness and told the kids that when you’re training at the Seeing Eye school they teach you to always say your dog’s name before giving them a command. “If I just say the word ‘right’ like I just did there, Whitney doesn’t even notice, but if I say, ‘Whitney, right’…”. I had to stop talking right there, mid-sentence. Whitney had immediately flipped right and was guiding us toward the hallway! “I guess the Seeing Eye knows what they’re doing,” I said with a laugh. The kids laughed right along. Whitney was a big hit.

The most thoughtful question yesterday was this one: “What is your biggest challenge of the day?” My days have been particularly challenging lately with this cast on my hand, but Mike and Cheryl made my day yesterday far less challenging than it would have been otherwise. Huge thanks to them both, and also to all my other friends and family who have boosted my spirits, many of them by taking me for walks while the cast was preventing me from grasping Whitney’s harness.

Broken hand update: my friend Colleen drove me to a medical appointment Monday and helped me convince the hand experts to shorten the cast a bit to expose the tips of my fingers. It’s a ton easier to hold the harness now. Whitney and I take a train to another suburban school tomorrow morning, and if the weather warms up enough by then to melt some of the snow and ice, we may be able to get to the train station on our own. I have my Fingers crossed — the ones in my right hand, at least.

Allen Toussaint and the President after Toussaint received the Medal of Honor for the Arts, 2013.

It’s been a blur of a week so today’s post, forgive me, will be short and may be a little splintered.

• I spent most of last week in Washington, D.C., starting with a gargantuan conference and trade show called Greenbuild. The organization I work for —PHIUS—exhibited there, and my colleagues and I staffed the booth. My feet still hurt and my voice is recovering. But it was a good show for us, and I’m especially proud that PHIUS Executive Director Katrin Klingenberg won a Women in Sustainability Leadership award from Green Building & Design magazine. She had some pretty good company, and she belonged.
• Managed to squeeze in a visit to our friends Pick and Hank in Northern Virginia at the end of the week. Beth was supposed to join us, but the snow in Chicago grounded her flight and she didn’t make it for the night. But I still had a swell time.
• Of course, the ISIS story is ongoing and I continue, like pretty much everyone, to follow it. And to look for context and a better understanding. Found lots of good stuff, including this one in the Independent. The article isn’t exactly calming, but is informative in terms of the history of the region, and the history of the borders. Those borders were drawn not by the residents of the region, but by Western powers after World War I. Worth the time.

Finally, something that sort of got lost in the aftermath of the Paris attacks was the death of Allen Toussaint, a one-of-a-kind songwriter and musician. His catalog includes everything from Working in a Coal Mine to What do You Want the Girl (or Boy, when Bonnie Raitt sings it) to Do to Fortune Teller to Southern Nights (yeah, that pop song Glen Campbell sang). Beth and I were fortunate to see Toussaint perform a slew of his songs at the Old Town School of Folk Music a few years back—just a wonderful performance, and he told some lovely stories between numbers.

One of them was about the aforementioned Southern Nights. About why he wrote it, what it reminded him of. And then he performed it—no offense to Glen Campbell, but it’s a completely different song when Toussaint performs it.

He told that same story during an interview with Jim DeRogatis and Greg Kot on their Sound Opinions radio show last year. If you want a treat, download the interview here. You’ll be forced to listen to a public radio supported by message when the program first downloads—but it’s brief. Once it ends, if you want to skip straight to the story about Southern Nights, go to the 47:30 mark and keep listening. It’s a compelling tale of how his childhood memories inspired the song. Followed by a beautiful performance.

If you can find the time, though, listen to the full interview. A whole lot of joy and beauty and essence of New Orleans float in Allen Toussaint’s voice and his music.

Having been able to see him perform live is one of the myriad wonderful things I’ll be thanking my lucky stars for this Thursday.

Have a great Thanksgiving, y’all.

In case you missed it, my friend Nancy Faust was featured in an article in last Sunday’s New York Times. Wow. What a fantastic lead sentence to this blog post. What is astounding about that sentence is not that the retired White Sox organist was featured in The Times, but that I can honestly and sincerely call a famous and talented woman like her my friend.

Nancy graciously took time out on her last day at White Sox Park to talk with me (and Hanni, of course).

Nancy comes to my book events when she can. These days I go to hear her play at venues outside of White Sox Park and spend time between tunes talking politics with her husband Joe. She and I keep in touch via email, and she follows our Safe & Sound blog, too – hi, Nancy!

Nancy Faust retired from the White Sox in 2010, and after 41 years, 13 managers and a World Series title, it’s a well-deserved retirement. Still, I gotta say, visits to the ballpark the past five years just haven’t been as fun as they used to be. It’s not that the team is doing poorly – a baseball fan gets used to that – I just miss the way Nancy played the organ during games.

My relationship with Nancy Faust started on that summer day in 1985 when my eye surgeon told Mike and me that none of the surgeries they tried had worked. The two of us were uncharacteristically silent as we started home, until we got to Comiskey Park and Mike noticed the White Sox were playing. “Wanna go?”

Going to a ballgame after learning I’d be blind for the rest of my life might sound like a strange thing to do, but it beat heading home and sitting on our pitiful second-hand couch and wondering where to turn next. “Between bites and gulps and giving me play by play, Mike bantered with other fans, cursing the underachievers on the team,” I wrote in my memoir, Long Time, No See. “I laughed at the tunes selected by Nancy Faust, the Sox organist-she’s famous for picking songs that play on player’s names.”
I stopped by Nancy Faust’s booth at White Sox Park in 2003 after Long Time, No See was published to sign a copy for her. She was tickled to see her name right there in print in my memoir, and I was tickled to have the opportunity to thank her personally for helping me track what was happening on the field. A friendship was born. Now, a dozen years later, Sunday’s New York Times article credited Nancy Faust for reinventing the role of a ballpark organist by incorporating rock and pop songs into her repertoire:

Faust played songs for the fans, for the moment. She did not think players found her music helpful; they had enough to worry about, she thought.

“I didn’t do it for the player; I was there for the enjoyment of the fans,” Faust said.

And boy oh boy, did I enjoy it. When Nancy Faust was at the organ and played Johnny Cash’s “I Walk the Line,” I knew it was ball four. When she played Michael Jackson’s “Somebody’s Watching me,” I knew there’d been a pickoff throw. If she played The Kinks “You Really Got me,” I knew the pick-off play was a success.

Nancy helped me identify who was batting by teasing the player’s name with a tune. Mike’s all-time favorite was the one for Gary Disarcina. No, it wasn’t “Gary, Indiana” from the Music Man. That is wayyyy too obvious. It was “Have you Seen Her?” by the Chi-Lites. As for me, I always loved it when Travis Hafner was in town. At the last Cleveland Indians game I went to, she played “Bunny Hop” for his first at bat, and then J. Geils “Centerfold” “his next time up.

Now this Sunday New York Times story tells me we have Hafner’s Cleveland Indians to blame for the obnoxious loud rock music we hear over the speakers during ballgames – Cleveland was the first MLB team to let their players choose their own walk-up songs. Nancy Faust was still playing for the White Sox when that started happening, and from that point on they had her play walk-up music on the organ only for opposing players. A stadium D.J. controlled the songs for White Sox players from then on. The Sunday New York Times article was about the “surprisingly long, intricate history of walk-up music,” and I absolutely loved this part where Nancy Faust likens the DJ recorded versions as Musical Selfies:

This new approach, she said, eliminated spontaneity, and maybe enthusiasm. “If you have momentum going, and you’ve got three guys on base and the next guy comes up to bat, and you’ve got the fans going crazy — and it all stops to listen to what I might liken to a musical selfie?” Faust said. “It just stops the momentum. And then you’ve got to hope you can get it going again.”

I know what she means. I sure have had trouble getting my Major League Baseball momentum going again since Nancy Faust left in 2010. The article reports on how she retired to fanfare — the White Sox unveiled a plaque for her at a ceremony before one of her final games, and Nancy Faust bobbleheads were handed out the same day. The New York Times said, “Faust, who grew up in Chicago and still lives there, had become a White Sox icon.”

I’m glad the New York Times had the wisdom to interview her for Sunday’s story, and I can only imagine the tune she is playing in her head as she reads this blog post of mine. Rolling Stones “Miss you,” perhaps?

Here in Chicago, the past week started with elation over the Blackhawks winning their third Stanley Cup in six years. But the elation was later  tempered by the news out of South Carolina.

There are lot of people doing good work, including Bryan Stevenson and EJI.

I have lots to say about it, too much really, and I’ve found over the past few days that others have said these things better than I can. Charlie Pierce hit several nails on the head with this piece for Esquire. And this post called, “Yes, you’re a racist, and a traitor,” hit several more (thanks to the Beachwood Reporter for the link). Give them a read–they were cathartic for me.

But, what to do? Some of the things I’d like to do, out of anger, I’d best keep to myself. And I think, in the end, if I did them, however righteous it’d feel at the moment, I’d only feel regret afterward.

Instead, I’ve resolved to:

Increase my support for the Equal Justice Initiative.

This group, founded and led by a brilliant attorney named Bryan Stevenson takes on the cases of people who are wrongly convicted or charged with crimes, and of people who can’t otherwise afford effective representation. EJI has been effective at winning cases, but also at shedding light on how racism persists, and how our past plays an insidious role in our present.

EJI also does research, and recently released a report on the history of lynching in the United States, and it’s effectiveness as a tool of terror. While I’m at it, I think I’ll renew my support of the Southern Poverty Law Center, which has been doing important and difficult work since 1971.

Support one or more gun control organizations.

There’s been a piece of information about the Charleston horror that I haven’t been able to track down. Some accounts say that the coward’s father bought him the gun. Others say that the coward’s parents gave him the money, and that the coward bought the gun himself. Still other reports indicated that the coward had an arrest record. Which leads me to think that if he did purchase the gun, and we had background checks, he would’ve been stopped. We’ll never stop this stuff entirely, but we can certainly reduce the number of incidents with some common sense measures.

There are lots of worthy organizations out there, local, state and national. Here’s an easy way to find them: Go to the NRA Institute for Legislative Action’s Web site, and you’ll find a list of anti-gun organizations that they’ve assembled. It’s kind of chilling, because they include organizations like AARP and the MacArthur Foundation. Such is the NRA paranoia. But on the other hand, you realize there are a lot of people and organizations that have some sense on this issue. I’m going to pick one or two of them.

Oh, and this idea certainly has merit.

It’s not a lot. But it’s a start. And only a start. We have a lot of work to do.

When my talking computer read today’s Writer’s Almanac out loud to me this morning, I discovered that the Lincoln Memorial was dedicated on this day in 1922. My mother, Flo, was born before the Lincoln Memorial? Whoa. I thought the Lincoln Memorial had been around since, well, since the Emancipation Proclamation or something. The Writer’s Almanac says that the monument was first proposed in 1867, but construction didn’t begin until 1914. Lincoln is known as the Great Emancipator, but the almanac reports that the audience at the 1922 dedication — more than 50,000 people — was segregated. From the almanac:

Keynote speaker Robert Moton, president of the Tuskegee Institute and an African-American, was not permitted to sit on the speakers’ platform. just over 40 years later, on the 100th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, Martin Luther King Jr. would give his “I have a dream” speech from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, in front of an audience of 200,000.

It’s nearly a year since Flo died, but I still find myself forgetting and picking up the phone to call her to tell her something. More often, to ask her a question. She was born in 1916, which makes her six years old when the Lincoln Memorial was dedicated. On today’s phone call –or during a visit — I’d tell her all I’d learned from the Writer’s Almanac about the Lincoln Memorial, and then start in with my questions:

• Do you remember them dedicating the Lincoln memorial?
• When you were in school, did they teach you about the memorials in Washington, D.C.?
• I guess there really weren’t a whole lot of memorials on the mall back then, did they talk much about them at all in school?
• If the Lincoln Memorial wasn’t built yet, what was on the back of the five dollar bill when you were born?

I’ll never know the answers. For one, Flo would have just laughed at that last question, and if you wanna know the truth, I probably wouldn’t know the answers to the other questions even if she was still here to pick up the phone. Flo was never one to talk about her own experiences much. I’d ask a question, she’d shrug (and yes, you can hear a shrug over the telephone) and say no, she really doesn’t remember much about that historical event. From there, she’d veer off on a related story, nearly always about someone other than herself. Today’s call might have evolved into a recollection of a trip Mike and I took with her once to see Pick and Hank in Washington, D.C. “ohhhh, their place is so beautiful,” she’d exclaim. “That kitchen — it was like Hollywood!” She’d wax poetic over the magnificent dinner Hank put together for us and the piano tunes Pick played afterward. “That was really something.” Calls with Flo were like that. She appreciated her childhood and her upbringing, but rather than dwell on details of the past, she focused on other people, what was going on now, in the present. Are pick and Hank still in that place? Are they coming out for a visit? Have you seen them lately? How are they doing? She’d want us to say hello to them, of course, and she always phoned when a holiday card came in the mail from them, or from anyone else I knew, for that matter. Cards in the mail were truly red-letter days for Flo. Hearing her gush about those cards? I may not have realized it then, but now I know. Those were red-letter days for me. And that’s what I Miss about our visits and the random phone calls with Flo. They were simple reminders to enjoy the people around us, appreciate the time we have with them, and let them know they’re loved. Most important: share great meals with friends when you can, and never miss an opportunity to gather around a piano to belt out an old tune.