Cooking without looking

I can bake a mean loaf of bread. Just don't ask me to make dinner.

I was a bad cook when I could see. That didn’t change when I lost my sight. I still can’t cook, but now, I have an excuse.

Or at least I did have an excuse, until that story about Laura Martinez came out in the Chicago Tribune last month. Martinez is 25 years old and attending the prestigious Le Cordon Bleu culinary program at the Cooking and Hospitality Institute of Chicago. And, oh yeah, she just happens to be blind.

“I’d never worked with a blind student before,” said Karine Bravais-Slyman, who heads the institute’s general education department, “but Laura did incredibly well in the kitchen. She showed many students that even with this type of impairment, she could still do better than students who have their sight.”

Okay. I admit it. It’s not lack of sight that keeps me from being a good cook. It’s lack of talent.

I usually champion blind people who use resourcefulness to do things average people do with their eyes, but I kept this story quiet. I didn’t brag about this chef to my friends, I didn’t blog about her here. I was hoping to keep the “blind people can’t cook” myth alive. But then the talented chef turned up in yet another news story this week, and my “in box” overflowed with messages from friends forwarding it my way. Seems renowned Chicago chef Charlie Trotter heard about Laura Martinez, and he was so intrigued that he visited her at the Chicago Lighthouse for the Blind, where she works in the cafeteria kitchen.

“I was watching her work and saw how she handled things with her hands, touching for temperature and doneness, and I ate her food and it was quite delicious. We got to talking and she told me about her dreams and I said, ‘What would you think about working at Charlie Trotter’s?’”

You read that right. Charlie Trotter asked her to work for him. He’s also offered to help with her tuition. Laura Martinez will go to Charlie Trotter’s soon for a trial date to make sure she’s comfortable in the restaurant’s kitchen.

“He asked if I’d like to come work for him. I said, ‘Yes, that would be an honor for me,’” Martinez said. “I didn’t expect it at all. He’s very nice, he’s very human.

“And,” she said, sheepishly, “he said he liked my cooking.”

I. Am. So. Busted.

Don’t forget your coat

The woman sitting behind me on the train tapped my shoulder. “You dropped your coat,” she said.

Funny. I was pretty sure I had my coat on, but I reached for the big buttons along the front just to make sure. Taking this as a sign we were near our stop, Hanni started shuffling at my feet, trying to stand up. The woman behind me shrieked. The coat on the floor was moving.

Thus began our trip last Friday to Kipling Elementary School in Deerfield, a suburb of Chicago. During my speech to the Kipling kids, I explained the three rules to keep in mind if you happen to see a guide dog with a harness on: don’t pet the dog, don’t feed the dog, and don’t call out the dog’s name. One reason you shouldn’t feed Hanni is that she only eats dog food. Eating snacks from the table or any sort of people food makes her sick. “Do any of you ever go to Taste of Chicago?” I asked, and received a chorus of “Yes!” Our neighborhood in Chicago is very close to that festival, and sometimes people drop their food on their way home and don’t pick up after themselves. Hanni and I will be walking, I feel the harness go down all of a sudden, and before I know it she’s snarfed a fried turkey leg or a slice of pizza. “She always, always gets sick after that,” I told the kids. “She’s such a nice dog, it’s sad if she gets sick. Plus, if she’s sick, I can’t go anywhere. I need her to get me around!”

During the Q&A part of the presentation, students asked if Hanni likes other dogs, does she ever slip on the ice, what does she do if she comes across a whole in the sidewalk. One second-grader must have thought long and hard before raising her hand. “If Hanni can’t work when she gets sick, how do you get her to the vet?” This was a very good question. I can’t ask Hanni to work when she doesn’t feel good, and I wouldn’t expect her to judge traffic or know her rights from her lefts when she’s sick.

I told them that I’d take Hanni’s harness off and find someone to walk her to the vet with me. If I couldn’t find anyone to help me, we could always call a cab. “But that could be a problem, you know, because when Hanni gets sick like that, she usually throws up or poops all over the place, and I don’t think the cab driver would like that!”

Ooooo! Gross! Ewe! Yuck!

I have a feeling the kids at Kipling will remember our visit for quite a while. I’m guessing they’ll pick up after themselves if they drop food on the sidewalk. And I’m pretty sure none of them will ever, ever feed a Seeing Eye dog people food.

The Cure & me on public radio

After reading that article about Braille in last week’s New York Times, a senior producer at Chicago Public radio asked if I’d be interested in writing an essay about Braille. I sent one their way, and while I was at it, I sent along another essay as well.

The second one was about that fifth grader I wrote about here, and the producer liked that one better. So did I. I recorded it last week, and it aired yesterday. If you listen to it online you’ll notice it sounds like I’m just talking, rather than reading. That’s because I am. Just talking, I mean.

I can read Braille. I’m just very slow at it. So when it comes time to record my radio essays, Joe DeCeault, one of my favorite producers at WBEZ, puts me in front of a microphone, asks what the first paragraph in my essay is about, then what the second paragraph is about, and I retell the story paragraph by paragraph in my own words.

Joe refers to my printed essay while we record, which was especially helpful for this particular piece. Juxtaposing the notion that blindness is a major drag with the fact that I am a happy, capable person who leads a pretty interesting life is not easy for me to do out loud. In the recording studio I felt like I was using Joe as a therapist, driveling on and on and on about my feelings. With my written piece in hand, though, Joe guided me through, kept the piece moving (rather than maudlin), and interrupted me when he found something I’d forgotten to mention.

Pictures of You, a haunting tune from The Cure’s Disintegration CD, weaves in and out of the finished piece. A perfect choice, if you ask me.

A blind eye to race

Blindness doesn’t bring a whole lot of advantages. So I relish the ones I have. I walk arm in arm with people all the time. My dog goes with me everywhere. And when friends drive me somewhere? we park in handicapped parking!

Best of all, I can’t judge people by the way they look. Fat, skinny, beautiful, homely, young, old, White, Black– it’s all the same to me. I judge people “not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.”

From what I’m told, my friends these days have many different skin colors. I don’t always realize this when I first meet them. And the longer I am blind – nearly half my life now –, the less it matters to me. It’s getting where I don’t bother figuring out what new friends look like. I think of people more as impressionistic paintings, blurs and swatches of colors. And those colors are not always skin tones. Minerva, one of my favorite students in the writing class I teach for senior citizens, was violet. Dignified. Royalty. Billy, our bartender friend, is blue-green: thoughtful and funny, both at the same time.

Here’s the irony, though. While I am unconcerned with what people around me look like, I am paranoid about how I look to others. I was 26 years old when I lost my sight, and a Vietnam Vet who was blinded in a military training accident was assigned to teach me how to cook. A friend who visited me at Braille Jail (that’s what I called the facility I was sent to in order to learn new blind skills) told me what this teacher looked like. “Beth! You wouldn’t believe it! This guy has long sideburns and long hair. Bell bottoms! He looks like a rock and roller from the 70s!”

The year was 1985. I was horrified.

Right away I started fidgeting with the buttons on my denim jumper, wiggling my toes against the flat cotton shoes on my feet. These clothes I’d bought when I could see would wear out sometime. What would I replace them with? Would I forever DRESS as if it were 1985?

We didn’t have much money back then, but Mike saw to it from the start that I shop at the most expensive and exclusive clothing store in town. My first time there, I paraded out of the dressing room in a tight pair of leggings. The store owner gasped. “Oh, honey – you’ve got some big hips!” Now here was a woman I could trust.

I’ve never put on leggings again, but most of the clothing I’ve worn since has come from that store. I especially like buying dresses. No need to memorize which shirt matches which pants, or worry whether my top goes with my skirt.

I don’t want people to feel pity when they stare at Hanni and me. The staring doesn’t bother me that much anymore, I’ve gotten used to it. But as long as they’re watching, I want to look good. Apparently, I do. That’s what people tell me, at least. And Without being able to look in a mirror and judge for myself, I have the luxury of believing them.

Some sighted people work a lifetime to overcome visual prejudices. Blindness has given me an advantage. A handicap. I’m ahead of the race.

Blindness is more than “just a minor impairment”

It'd be great to get Hanni to weigh in on the subject.

The most interesting question asked at one of our school presentations came from a fifth-grader on Long Island. “If you could see for just one day, and you knew that at the end of the day you wouldn’t be able to see anymore, what would you do that day?”

”I try not to think about how life would be if I could see,” I said, explaining that one coping skill that has helped me since losing my sight is to focus on the things I can do. “Thinking too much about the things I can’t do anymore would make me feel sad all the time.”

I tell kids I’ll answer anything they ask, though, so I gave them the first three things that sprang into my head. I’d Look at photos, try to memorize what everyone looks like. I’d go to our local coffee shop, sneak looks at the other people there and make up stories about them in-between reading the newspaper and sipping on an espresso. I’d drive over to Flo’s, take her out for lunch, maybe pick up some groceries on the way home.

An article about Braille in last week’s New York Times quoted a woman named Laura Sloate, who lost her sight when she was six. Sloate never learned Braille in school, and she uses a talking computer and other audio devices to manage a Wall Street investment firm.

“When Braille was invented, in the 19th century, we had nothing else. We didn’t even have radio. At that time, blindness was a disability. Now it’s just a minor, minor impairment.”

Just a minor impairment? Really?

Technology has made it easier for those of us who are blind to read without using Braille, but technology can’t make up for other things we miss out on. My answer to that fifth-grader was not only a quick study of the things I miss most about not being able to see, but a quick study in things technology cannot yet do for those of us who are blind.

Blindness is one of the most feared and misunderstood disabilities, so I can understand why the woman quoted in that New York Times felt compelled to downplay it, tell the reporter that her blindness is just a minor impairment. We blind people are always walking a fine line. We don’t want others to make assumptions about what we can and cannot do. And it can feel like we always have to prove ourselves.

But I, for one, would never characterize blindness a minor impairment.

Stevie Wonder rocks, or…isn’t he lovely?!

Hanni rested patiently while I took my poll.

I took an extremely unscientific poll at Hackney’s, our favorite local, Friday afternoon.

Question: What do you think of when I say the name “Stevie Wonder?”

Answers:

• My Cherie Amour
• Music
• Gangsta’s Paradise
• Signed, Sealed, Delivered

“I think he wrote a symphony, too!” our friend Larry said. It’s true. Stevie Wonder debuted “Sketches of a Life” in Washington, DC this year (Accompanied by a 21-piece chamber ensemble) when he received the Library of Congress’s Gershwin Prize for Popular Song.

That’s a remarkable array of music. And Stevie Wonder has had a remarkable career. What is truly remarkable, though, is that not one single person I polled mentioned that Stevie Wonder is blind.

Only 2% of Americans are totally blind. No Wonder, ahem, people sometimes stare at us. Our blindness makes us unique. So unique, that sometimes blindness is the first – or the only – characteristic people remember about us.

Unless you’re Stevie Wonder, that is. The fact that he can’t see is an afterthought. Stevie Wonder is in an enviable position. He could dismiss his disability if he wanted to. But Stevie Wonder is cooler than that. He uses his fame, and his blindness, to encourage technology companies to get together and do some good. Thanks to Stevie Wonder’s leadership (and his House Full of Toys benefit concert last month), 12 manufacturers — normally fierce competitors — have banded together to donate a bunch of expensive adaptive equipment — cool stuff like color identifiers, accessible GPS products, or speech software that transforms average laptops into talking computers. The equipment will be distributed to students around the country who couldn’t otherwise afford it. From an NPR story called Some Technology Leaves the Blind Behind

Unfortunately, the price of many of the devices or software applications created specifically for the blind is anything but accessible and would give most general consumers sticker shock. A case in point is the KNFB Mobile Reader, software that enables a cell phone to read printed text aloud to a blind person through synthesized speech. It sells for close to $1,000 not including the cell phone.

Stevie Wonder was interviewed for the NPR story:

“Hundreds of thousands of people on this planet are blind or with low vision,” says recording superstar Stevie Wonder, who has been blind since infancy. He spoke with NPR at the International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas earlier this month.

“So to me, that’s enough to say, ‘Let’s do something about it.’ And when you think about how by making things more accessible for those who are blind, how it would then make them more independent, then for the taxpayer that means less money.”

The equipment will be distributed at the end of January, so if you want to nominate a student to receive the free goods, or if you want to submit an application for yourself, fill out the online form asap. I know how much adaptive technology has helped me stay independent since losing my sight. Thinking of how this effort could change the lives of others who are blind makes me feel, well…”Overjoyed.”