Guilty

Photo courtesy Audrey Mitchell

In honor of our infamous Illinois ex-governor, the topic for my memoir-writing students last Wednesday was “guilty.” Hanna, the matriarch of our class, came back with an essay that was, in a word, stunning.

You might remember Hanna from a previous blog post. Hanna grew up in Germany. Her family was Jewish, and Hanna escaped on her own before World War II. Others in her family didn’t make it out in time.

Hanna was only 20 years old when she arrived, alone, in the United States. The essay she brought to class Wednesday was about her first visit back to Europe in 1965, thirty years after she left.

This is our first trip back to the places where we had the first part of our lives, I to Germany, Eugene to visit his brother in Slovakia. I simply had to confront my past and verify that it really happened to me.

Before World War II, Hanna’s parents owned a butcher shop in Mannheim. After Hanna’s father died, her mother ran the shop. Then Adolf Hitler won the election, and things began to change.

Our delivery van was parked on the street and Heini was responsible for its upkeep. He had been with us for at least 25 to 30 years had started as a butcher apprentice and sausage maker. His wife Rosa had been with us for about 15 years, she arrived from the countryside the day I was born and worked as a sales lady.Rosa and Heini had met and got married in our house.

Hanna’s essay goes on to describe one memorable day at the butcher shop.

The atmosphere is tense. The problem is that Heini is sitting in our van every afternoon making a show of reading the Sturmer, the most anti-Semitic newspaper published in Germany. My mother and brother are very upset about this and my brother tries to talk about it and suggests that if he wants to read the paper in our van, he should read the local paper not the Sturmer. Heini is responding that the paper is an official publication and he can read it where ever. “It is not against you. It is about the other Jews. He keeps on reading it in front of our shop.

During their 1965 trip to Germany, Hanna discovers that Heini and Rosa survived the war and were running a Bierstube and restaurant.

I had to now confront them.

Eugene and I are sitting in a booth by a window .We are the only customers and we had ordered. Heini is waiting on us. He brings the beer.”Heini don’t you remember me? I am the Hannelore. Long silence. He calls Rosa to announce that I am there. He does not quite believe that it is the girl that he remembers. Rosa is crying.

They sit together to talk about their lives, then Rosa scurries out to prepare a special meal.

Rosa had made my favorite meal. Fresh asparagus and Schnitzel, a plum cake for dessert. I feel good, she remembered. We are talking and Heini tells me that he had been in the German army and how much they all suffered during the war. He tells that they had sent him to the Russian front which was brutal the worst. I am looking at him and heard him say. “The reason why I was sent to the Russian front is because I had worked for a Jew for 30 years. It was all your mother’s fault.”

Rosa started to cry again. Hanna remembers finishing the meal in silence.

All I could think of. It was your mother’s fault.

Hanna turned 90 this year. She lives alone, takes Para-transit or public transportation to get to class each week, and she affectionately refers to her walker as “Speedo.” I’ve had the privilege of meeting Hanna’s children, and they are smart, spunky and witty – just like their mom. The Chicago CBS station interviewed Hanna on her birthday this year, describing how she has embraced technology to write her memoirs. Hanna has macular degeneration – she makes regular treks over to the Chicago Lighthouse to use special software that enlarges the words on the screen.

This year marks the 70th anniversary of Hanna’s escape from Germany to America. “I’ll tell you this, Beth,” she says. “I’ve always been very, very lucky.” Hanna makes the rest of us feel lucky, too. Especially on Wednesdays, when Speedo escorts her into our classroom so she can share stories with us.

Or maybe they’ll name the pup Mr. October

Hanni and I have a soft spot for those Yankees. Starting after this weekend.

The Yankees come to Chicago this weekend, and like always, I’m rooting for my White Sox to sweep ‘em. I must admit, though, that a story on espn.com this week has left me with a soft spot for those Damn Yankees.

Last Tuesday Manager Joe Girardi and pitchers David Robertson, Chad Gaudin and Joba Chamberlain surprised my fellow Seeing Eye graduate and baseball fan Jane Lang as she left her house with her dog Clipper on the way to that night’s Yankees game. From the ESPN story:

They didn’t have a limo. They didn’t have a fleet of Suburbans. They had only sneakers. They were going to make the journey with her.

“Oh my God!” Jane said.

“We think you’re amazing,” Girardi said.

“Follow me,” Clipper seemed to say.

You have to understand what a two-hour, one-way journey to a baseball game takes for somebody like Jane. She’s been blind since birth, and these trips have not always turned out well. Once, some kids decided it would be fun to spin her around a few dozen times. Another time, she fell onto the subway tracks and was nearly killed. But ever since she got a guide dog, she’s been intrepid.

Jane’s special trip to Yankee Stadium Tuesday was part of the Yankees’ “Hope Week.” When the whole thing was over, the Yankees gave $10,000 to The Seeing Eye in Jane’s honor. I’m wondering if they plan on taking advantage of a special deal the Seeing Eye provides to big donors: if you donate $5000 or more to the Seeing Eye, you have the privilege of naming a puppy. Just imagine. When I return to the Seeing Eye after Hanni retires, I might be matched up with Derek Jeter!

Wisconsin Humane Society: It’s all about the dog

The American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA) is challenging 50 shelters across the country to save a minimum of 300 more cats and dogs August 1 through October 31 2010 than they did during the same months in 2009. It’s a contest, and the prize is $125,000. The Wisconsin Humane Society WHS is one of the competing shelters, so if you live near Milwaukee and are thinking of adopting a dog or cat, now’s the time!

Live far away? Don’t worry. You can still help. Sign up to become a member of the Save More Lives Community and comment to a blog post that the Wisconsin Humane Society published about our visit there last Saturday — shelters competing in this ASPCA challenge also get credit for any comments left on their blog posts.

That's Zoe and her mom.

I hope you’ll go through the trouble to sign up and leave a comment there. I can tell you firsthand that the Wisconsin Humane Society does great work. They bid on Hanni and me last April (we had donated an hourlong presentation to the lucky winner of an auction put on by the Association of Professional Humane Educators–the auction helped fund scholarships) and they were sincerely excited when they won us. So were we! Thanks to their terrific organizational and promotional skills, every single thing about the trip Hanni and I made to Milwaukee last Saturday was swell.

• Dezarae Jones-Hartwig from WHS was waiting for us at the Milwaukee train station, and her van had not one but two car seats in the back seat. The kids were home with their dad (thank you, Heath!) but they had left plenty of Cheerios on the floor for Hanni to munch on during our trip to the Humane Society.
• When Dezarae realized we had time to kill before our 1 p.m. presentation, she wondered if I might want to stop somewhere for coffee. Dezarae treated. We love Dezarae.
• The WHS parking lot was full when we arrived, not a single spot where we could park.
• I would love to say all those people were there to see Hanni and me, but the real reason is even better. A small shelter in Kentucky was having a hard time finding homes for all its puppies. WHS had agreed to rescue 55 of them and folks were lining up to adopt these guys.
• Others were there to take advantage of the “Luck of the Irish” promotion. In honor of Irish Fest (going on at the lakefront last weekend), adopters had a chance to win a prize or discounts from 25-100% off their adoption fee.
• With all that going on, many filed in for our event, too!
• A friend from junior high and high school was in the audience — “I live near here and I read in the paper you were coming,” she said. Kudos to WHS for doing such a terrific job promoting this event!
• A teenager who is blind was there for the presentation, too. After I read a bit from Hanni and Beth: Safe & sound out loud, I gave my Braille version to Zoe. She was thrilled. So was I.

Zoe’s mom came to our table afterwards to asked me to sign a print copy of the book for Zoe’s friend Ana, who’d come along to our presentation. “Zoe worked with Ana at the library this summer,” Zoe’s mom explained. “Ana guided Zoe around, they made a great team.”

That's AnnMarie and me. Of course, it's all about Hanni.

I shook Ana’s hand. Zoe’s hand, too. Zoe’s mom was right. They made a great team. Before Hanni and I left to catch our train home, the WHS folks presented us with a thank-you gift. I’m wearing it in this picture. For my blog readers who are blind, here’s a description. In this photo I am back home in Illinois, sitting on a porch stoop with Hanni and my four-year-old great-niece AnnMarie Florence Czerwinski. I’m sure we are beaming in this photo, I often beam when I am with “Baby Flo,” the only offspring in our entire family to be blessed with my mom’s beautiful name. Plus who wouldn’t beam to be wearing this red t-shirt that says, “It’s All About the Dog” across the top?

A perfect souvenir of a perfect day in Milwaukee. Thanks, Wisconsin Humane Society. I hope you win the challenge!

Thanks for leaving comments to my blog posts

That’s me and the class at Renaissance Court in the Chicago Cultural Center. Photo courtesy Audrey Mitchell.

A loyal blog reader commented to last week’s post suggesting I publish excerpts from student essays. I love it when you blog readers leave comments to my posts, and I want you to know: I take your suggestions seriously! So here goes with excerpts from last week’s memoir-writing class, when I asked each student to pick a coin, check the date, then write a short essay about something that happened to them that year.

Andrea opened her essay with a confession.

I chose my coin at the end of class, which allowed me the opportunity to cheat on this assignment. The first coin I pulled read “1994”. The year of Dave’s cancer and death. I didn’t want to spend time there. I put that coin back. My second coin-“2004”. That year I closed Kids & Clay and had eye surgery. Too heavy for summer writing. Back in the baggie.

Beverly had an easier time. She chose 1958, the year her daughter was born.

I do remember long conversations in the mornings and the evenings over the merits of the names we were considering. Marsh had pretty much settled on Arabella for a girl and was undecided for a boy.

Arabella Bishop was a character in the movie Captain Blood starring Olivia D’Haviland and Errol Flynn. She was the beautiful niece of the governor of the island where Dr. Peter Blood was being held as a slave. He kidnapped her and fled to freedom.

Beverly wrote that she preferred the name Ramona. Or Sabrina, from the movie of the same name. “Our beautiful daughter was born on January 18, 1958, and she was promptly named Arabella Berkenbilt,” she said, a chuckle forming in her voice. “So much for Ramona and Sabrina!”

Sheila did some research before penning her essay about 1996.

To spur my memory, I Googled the year. Up popped DA BULLS! They’d won their second consecutive championship title. Continuing up to page 52 on Google, nothing but the Bulls championship was noted. Certainly more had occurred on this earth.

Rather than write about Michael Jordan, Sheila described a temp job she had taken that year. “Typists were not allowed to converse,” she wrote. “Only sneezes and the click-clack of typewriters broke the silence.”

One of my students was born in Italy, lived there during WWII, then immigrated to Chicago in her early 20s. She agreed to let me excerpt her essay here as long as I used her nom de plume: Monica Salina. “Monica is the name of my paternal grandfather’s orchard of my childhood,” she explained in an email message. “And Salina is a small enchanted island in Italy, the island where the movie ‘Il POSTINO’ was filmed.” Monica Salina’s essay describes a 24-hour period in 1977 when she took care of her three sons and their cousins during a visit to Italy.

The evening turns out to be fun: kids playing games speaking two different languages with a dictionary as referee. I wake up the next morning sweltering and uncomfortable. “The sun must be high in the sky”, is my first thought. “I hope I’m not late”! Only… it’s not morning yet. And it’s not the sun. It’s a fire in the near- by hills. The trees crackle under the flames. People outside look. Point. Talk all together. We are far enough away to feel safe.

As for Andrea, she eventually did find a coin she liked. 1984 was the year she and her husband rented a place in Ypsilanti.

An Ann Arbor attorney owned the old farmhouse we rented. His secretary told us we could paint if we wanted to. Just give their account number at the Sherwin Williams store.
Did I hear her right? She had just given me a gift! A project. A reason to get up in the morning.
My eye condition HAD FORCED ME TO quit teaching in 1982. My job had been my life. Two years with no identity. Two years in limbo. Two years of hours to fill. But this young woman just casually mentioned a project that actually excited me! I loved to paint. And this house needed me!

Andrea’s eye condition is quite rare; it developed when she was a young adult. She gets around fine without a cane or a guide dog, but it’s difficult for her to read standard print. In class, When it’s Andrea’s turn to read, she makes her way to Wanda and hands her essay over. Wanda reads Andrea’s essays out loud to the class, and I always marvel at how well she can sight-read Andrea’s work. Of course it helps that the essays are so well-written, that makes them easier to read!

What a privilege to hear these writers tell their stories to me – and the class – every week. Thank you, blog readers, for asking me to share some excerpts with you. It is truly my pleasure.

Adapting to change

Every Wednesday, the seniors in my memoir-writing class pass a pouch of Scrabble tiles around the table. Whoever picks “A” reads their work aloud first, then “B” and so on. Last week, I threw a wrench into the works. I passed around a Ziploc bag full of loose change instead. “Just pick a coin,” I told them. While the Ziploc bag went around the room, I’d explain next week’s assignment.

That was the plan, at least. One thing I hadn’t anticipated -– but should have–is how averse some older people can be to, ahem, change. One student chose a coin, passed the bag. The next student asked her neighbor why she was passing a bag of coins. “Where are the tiles?” The neighbor didn’t know. The student with the Ziploc shrugged her shoulders, gave in, chose a coin, passed the bag. The next student asked why she was passing a bag of coins. “Where’s the tiles?” “What happened to the tiles?” The neighbor didn’t know. A student across the table tried to explain.

It got worse. Half the students (and not just the ones with diagnosed vision problems like me) couldn’t read the dates on the coins: too small. Wanda to the rescue. “Don’t worry!” she called out, digging in her bag. “I have a magnifying glass!”

Wanda always comes prepared. That’s her, helping me sign books last year at the Chicago Cultural Center.

Once everyone settled down and determined the date on their coin, I said I wanted them to write about something that went on in their lives that year. “I got 1978,” one of them whined. “I can’t remember anything that went on that year!” I suggested that if they got a year that didn’t ring a bell, they could do some research. Find out what happened in the news that year, maybe that would jog their memories.

”Keep in mind, though,” i told them.”I want you to write a memoir, not a report.” I told them that if, let’s say, they chose a coin with the year 2006 on it, I didn’t want them to write something like “The year 2006 was the year a coal mine disaster trapped 13 miners for nearly two days. Only one miner survived” and go on to write how some newspapers got it wrong, announced early that all the miners had been rescued when, really, they hadn’t. That is all very interesting stuff, I told them. But it’s a report, not a memoir. I want a memoir.

“But if you picked a coin with the year 2006 on it, and researching the coal mining disaster jogs your memory, reminds you how sad you were about that tragedy, how it made you think of your grandfather who was a coal miner, or how much the news inspired you to live more fully, then go ahead and mention the coal mine disaster in your essay. Give your readers some background.”

“What if you don’t have any coal miners?” one of them asked. “My people weren’t coal miners.” I told her to see me after class, we needed to get going. Otherwise we’d never have enough time to read this week’s essays, about The Very Best Summer Ever.

At the end of class a gaggle of students gathered with questions about the next assignment. One thought maybe 1986 was the year her husband left her, but she wasn’t absolutely sure. This student had no children, and she never married again. Last Wednesday was the first time she even hinted at writing about how she felt about her husband leaving. “How about you just say 1986 was the year that happened,” I whispered. “Creative non-fiction!” She giggled. Another student never was able to determine if her coin said 1966 or 1968. “how about if I write about 1967?” I said fine.

As Hanni and I got near the door to exit the classroom, a student kindly offered to walk us outside. She’d chosen 1968, the year she’d married her second husband. She and her husband were both very involved in labor unions, and I was thrilled that she, of all the students, had chosen the year 1968. “So much happened that year, I shouted to her above the Michigan Avenue street noise. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated that year. The Tet Offensive. The Democratic Convention here in Chicago. The Riots. “What month did you get married?” I asked. She told me it was May. “Oh,” I said, my voice growing somber.
“The same month Robert Kennedy was killed.”

RFK was killed a few weeks after they got married, she told me. Her husband used to leave the house around 6 in the morning for work each day, and on that morning she got out of bed to come down to kiss him goodbye. “I came down the stairs, and there he was, sitting on the couch, crying,” she’d never seen him cry before. “He’d turned on the morning news, that’s where he heard.”

This student’s husband died a few years ago. I asked if her children (they had a blended family, her husband had children before this second marriage, too) knew their dad cried when he heard about Bobby’s assassination. “No,” she said. “I don’t
think they know that.” I urged her to write about that morning in May, 1968.

I hope she does. I’ll find out tomorrow: We meet at 11:30.

Everything happens for a reason? I don’t think so

After I lost my sight, and before I started writing, I volunteered for hospice.

Strike that. I should say, I trained to volunteer for hospice. After I completed the training, the agency was reluctant to assign me a patient. My Seeing Eye dog might scare a patient, they said. I might inadvertently knock over bedside medications. “We have a patient now who we thought about assigning to you, Beth, but he sleeps on an air mattress,” they said. How would you be able to tell when the mattress needed more air?” I calmly reminded them I still had my sense of touch. “I don’t know, Beth,” the hospice administrator continued. “We’re just afraid the families might see you as needier than they are.”

That's Gladys with her Husband John.

Later, I trained as a bereavement counselor and was assigned a woman in a nursing home. The other hospice volunteers had signed up for hospice because they wanted to visit patients in their homes. None of them wanted to work with Gladys.

My first Seeing Eye dog Dora learned quickly which room Gladys was in, and Gladys quickly became the most popular patient on her wing: she was the only one who had a dog visiting her once a week. Gladys loved a good joke, and she enjoyed talking about the past, particularly her childhood. Her husband had just died, and when I asked her questions about him she’d answer politely, change the subject, talk about her three children (and her beloved grandson Ben) instead. Gladys loved a good audience, and she had one in me.

On my visits to Gladys I’d often run into her youngest daughter Nancy, who was a nurse at a local hospital. Nancy took to walking Dora and me out of the nursing home, sometimes lingering with me on a corner just to talk. We became friends, and when Gladys died Nancy asked me to speak at the funeral.

Nancy and her partner Steven are coming to visit us in Chicago this weekend. They visit often, and we always, always have a terrific time together. When Hanni and I take the train down to Urbana, we stay at Steven and Nancy’s. To be specific, we stay in Gladys’ room. It’s a totally handicapped accessible room with it’s own bathroom — Steven and Nancy provided it for Gladys so she could move out of the Urbana nursing home before she died.

When I tell people how I met my friend Nancy, some react with an old cliché. Everything happens for a reason, they say. Really? The hospice agency was ignorant about my abilities, and then Nancy’s father died, and Gladys’ MS got bad enough to land her in a nursing home just so I’d meet Nancy? I don’t buy it. An omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent force would find some other way. I find it more comforting to think there is not some God-like force making bad things happen to us.

My friendship with Nancy is precious, but it cannot possibly make sense of the suffering her mom went through. Or the suffering her family went through as Gladys’ MS progressed. The reasons Nancy and I are friends? Because Nancy was good to her mom, because I didn’t let ignorance keep me from volunteering, because Gladys loved her family and because we all were open to letting strangers into our lives.

This weekend, when Nancy and I lift a glass (or too) at the local tavern, we’ll toast to Gladys. We miss her, and we celebrate that her spirit lives on through our friendship. Gladys: Here’s to you.

Where I must go

The panels I sit on at writing festivals connect me with some pretty cool authors. At the Words & Music Festival in New Orleans I appeared on a panel about memoir writing with Rick Bragg. I had the privilege of sitting on a panel called Dogs and Their People with Sonny Brewer (we’ve both had books published about our beloved dogs) at the Arkansas Literary Festival in Little Rock. The theme for the panel I sat on last Friday at the Northwestern Summer Writers Conference was Writer’s Point of View: How I Got Published, and one of my co-presenters was Angela Jackson. Her first novel, Where I Must Go, was published last year by Northwestern University Press.

 

Where I Must Go is the story of Magdalena Grace, a young black woman from an urban working-class neighborhood who attends an elite predominantly white university in the late ’60s. Angela herself entered Northwestern University in 1968 and began making notes for her book when she was still a student. She teaches African-American literature at Kennedy-King College in Chicago now, and her “How I got Published” story Friday taught our audience the value of perseverance. It took Angela forty years to finish all the rewrites of her novel while she was working to put herself through school, then teaching at various places and writing poetry and plays. “I’m not a natural storyteller,” she told them. “I am a poet. That’s different.” From a review in the New York Times:

Ms. Jackson, 58, a poet and playwright here whose collection “Dark Legs and Silk Kisses: The Beatitudes of the Spinners” won the 1994 Carl Sandburg Award for poetry, said {that with the novel} she sought to breathe life into the experiences of the first wave of black students into mostly white universities, a story that she said had not been told nearly enough.

“They transformed the nature of American universities because of their activism,” she said of the black students, “which gave us black studies, women’s studies, Asian studies. Not only did we benefit from an elite education, but universities benefited from our being there.”

I had a chance to talk with Angela for just a short bit after our panel was over. Like me, she comes from a big family — five surviving sisters and two brothers. Asked if she’d be able to stay and enjoy the rest of the day at the conference, she said she needed to get home to check on her mother. Angela is single, has never been married, and lives with her mother in the house she grew up in on Chicago’s south side.

She said she wrote her novel using pen and paper, then transferred it all to a computer. She doesn’t use Facebook or Twitter to promote her writing, and said Northwestern University Press has done an excellent job in distributing and promoting her book. And, of course, a favorable review in the New York Times never hurts! Where I Must Go will eventually be part of a trilogy that follows some of the same characters in this, Angela Jackson’s first novel. As soon as I hit the “publish” button on this post I’m going to check if this debut novel is available in audio format yet — I’m eager to read it!

Sandra the survivor

My young friend Sandra Murillo was in a terrible car crash last November. Her father was critically injured in the accident, and her beloved brother and only sibling Chris died at the scene. Sandra walked away with minor injuries. Well, minor physical injuries. The emotional injuries were more serious.

That

Sandra has been blind since she was three. A junior in college now, she publishes a blog called Sandra The Future Journalist that tracks her progress as a journalism student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her posts are helpful to other young people who are blind and considering going to college, and they are entertaining to people (like me) who are curious to know how Sandra manages on a campus overflowing with 43,246 students.

Last November Sandra was managing very well during her first semester at U of I. She’d successfully completed her midterms, and her father and brother came down to Champaign to pick her up for Thanksgiving break. The accident that changed their lives happened on the way home.

Until now Sandra has been understandably reluctant to talk about the accident with outsiders. She published one blog post in January to let people know her father was recovering well and to thank those who had helped her family through the previous two months, then put the blog on hiatus for a while. She returned to campus in January to complete her Fall classes along with her regular Spring course load. Back home for the summer, she’s started blogging again.

Working through grief is unbelievably difficult. Sandra is doing remarkably well, and some people have told her mom that since Sandra is blind she must not have experienced severe trauma from the accident. “After all, Sandra couldn’t see what was going on.”

This attitude bothered me. It bothers Sandra, too. So much, in fact, that she agreed to share some details here on my blog. Sandra told me she was so happy to be with her dad and her brother on the drive home that evening that even getting stuck in traffic didn’t bother them. “My brother and I were in the front seat, we were both talking, you know, chatting, laughing,” she told me. “And all of a sudden there was a huge crash, I felt this huge bang behind me and I heard glass shattering all over.” After that, she says, everything went completely silent. ”I knew right away that my dad was unconscious, and my brother…and all this blood…immediately I knew that they were at least in critical condition, “She said. “They weren’t making any sound, and I might be a little graphic here, but, I felt something warm on my pant leg, on my thigh, it was warm and sticky, and I could smell it. It was blood.” From a CBS2 news story:

A total of eight vehicles, including a semi truck, were involved in the crash, Illinois State Police Joliet District Trooper Jeff Liskh said. Preliminary reports that the semi failed to observe a traffic stop could not be confirmed.

A couple of college kids from another car involved in the crash pulled Sandra out through the windshield and guided her away from the scene. “I was freaking out, not being able to see, I was focusing so much on getting out,” she said. “And I was thinking, what if it explodes, my dad and my brother are trapped in there.”

By the time her mother arrived at the scene, Sandra was in an ambulance on her way to one hospital, and her father was being airlifted to another.

“I just want your readers to know that traumatic incidents like this one affect you the same whether you are blind or sighted,” she told me. “Or if anything, the trauma was worse for me because I’m blind.”

Disabilities can make some people nervous. They feel bad for those of us who have disabilities, and sometimes they do unnecessary cartwheels to make themselves feel better. I suppose that some might get comfort in the belief that Sandra’s blindness spared her from some part of the pain of that November evening. But they shouldn’t. Because she wasn’t spared anything. And what she’s gone through since has been what anyone — sighted, blind, or otherwise — would have gone through. The painful period of bereavement and recovery.

Sandra is doing remarkably well, all things considered. Not because she’s blind, but because she’s a marvelous young woman.