Keep your hopes high

When the packet of thank you notes from the fifth graders at St. Mary of the Lake School arrived in the mail, a light bulb went on over my head: take them along to my presentation at Northern Illinois University!

That's us with 4th, 5th, and 6th graders at St. Mary of the Lake

The undergraduates in the class Whitney and I visited last week at NIU are studying to become elementary school teachers, and their children’s literature class is three hours long. After talking to them for the first hour, I bribed them with the letters: I’d give them a ten-minute break if each of them agreed to select a random letter from the pile and read it out loud when they returned. They jumped out of their seats at the opportunity.

The exercise of reading the letters out loud was educational for all of us. I, for one, learned to bring apples with me to future elementary school visits. Let me explain. During the Q&A at St. Mary’s, one of the fifth graders asked how I can use a knife in the kitchen without cutting myself. I knew the kids understood fractions, so I described holding on to the very edge of an apple with one hand while I cut it in half, then holding on to the very edge of the half to cut that into quarters, then eighths. “When I’m done, the pieces aren’t all the same size, but they still taste good!” I laughed, spreading my thumb and forefinger to show that some pieces might be more like thirds, others like teeny-tiny-tenths. “But at least I can say I sliced that apple all by myself.”

Almost every thank-you letter the undergrads read aloud to me mentioned cutting an apple. The future teachers learned how much elementary school children learn when they are exposed to different sorts of people and different ways of doing things. Each college kid seemed to take a sweet sort of pride in the fifth grader whose letter they read aloud, but none could compete with this one, written by a girl named Cindy (the letter is spelled out for screen readers below, also):

The note from Cindy.

To my blind blog readers, the note scanned above reads: Dear Miss Finke, I really enjoyed having you come to our school. It was amazing how you said you would cut the apple. I was also amazed when you said you would go grocery shopping with your husband. Also how you could figure out what things were missing. I was shocked at how you type really fast without making a mistake. This may not be about you, but Whitney is well-trained Seeing Eye dog. You are also a well-coordinated woman. The doctors might have said that there isn’t any cure, but keep on hoping. I tell you this because I passed through surgery, and I’m hoping to get better sooner. Keep your hopes high.

PS: You can check out the guest blog I wrote for The Bark in April to read about the first and second grade classes Whit and I visited at St. Mary’s, too.

Perfection

My niece Jen and her husband Brian are flying in from Orlando later this morning to stay with us over the weekend. You might remember these two from a post I wrote last year when my previous Seeing Eye dog, the heroic Harper, helped me officiate Jen and Brian’s wedding.

Jen and Brian will be married in a civil ceremony today, and I’ll officiate the public ceremony tomorrow. I can read Braille, but I’m so slow at it that if I “read” my lines we’d all still be there Sunday waiting for the part where Brian finally gets to kiss the bride. So I’ve recorded all my lines on a cassette. I plan to have an earpiece in one ear and my finger on the “pause” button. The recorder will read a few sentences at a time, and I’ll repeat what I hear. I am so, so flattered to be asked to do this for Jennifer and Brian, and I could go on and on and on and on here about how terrific it makes me feel that they trust me with this honor.

That's Brian, the happy groom, walking me and Harper to the altar just before the ceremony began.

That wedding went on without a hitch. Jen and Brian are a perfect couple, and their happiness was contagious. The crowd at the reception was lighthearted, loving, and lively. Flo did the chicken dance, and the entire day was, well…perfect.

The visit to Chicago this weekend is a gift from Jen to Brian for his birthday –Brian is a Boston Red Sox fan, and she got him tickets to see them play the White Sox with us this Saturday night.

The game tomorrow will mark just one week since White Sox pitcher Philip Humber pitched a perfect game. There’s been a lot in the news about it — he was put on waivers until the White Sox picked him up, he wasn’t a regular major league starter until just last year – but one important fact has been lost in all the celebration.

The perfect game was played away, in Seattle. I was listening on TV, and the Mariner fans were strikingly quiet after the very last pitch. But as the announcers chatted away, describing Humber’s teammates piling up on him in celebration, I listened closely and heard the crowd slowly swell up in applause.

Those Seattle Mariner fans are one classy bunch. They lost the game, but they witnessed perfection, and they appreciated what they saw. They were a perfect audience.

It is very cold in Chicago this weekend. Our Florida family members will probably have to borrow winter coats and gloves for tomorrow night’s game, but hey – sitting in the stands, watching baseball with people we love? We’ll be perfectly happy. Go Sox!

Observing much ….

Last fall I started teaching a second weekly memoir-writing class for senior citizens. Anna Perlberg is one of the students in that second class at

Anna Nessy Perlberg with her best friend, Brady (photo by Mark Perlberg).

Lincoln Park Village, and it’s been a treat to hear her unveil her stories out loud to us every Thursday.

Anna’s husband Mark Perlberg co-founded the Poetry Center of Chicago and served as its president for 13 years. Anna has spent a lifetime listening to poetry, and she reads her own essays aloud in class with exquisite rhythm and timing. You don’t need to be able to see to know that everyone in class is at the edge of their seats when Anna reads, riveted by her words.

I assigned “Feeling Homesick” as a topic for the Lincoln Park Village class, and Anna showed up the next week with an excerpt from a piece she’d written for the Prairie Schooner, a journal published in cooperation with the University of Nebraska Press and the Creative Writing Program of the University of Nebraska.

Anna was born in Czechoslovakia. Her mother, Julia Nessy, was a lyric soprano and performed widely throughout Europe during the 1920s. Her father studied law and served under Czechoslovakia’s first president. “The young republic prospered,” Anna’s voice sounds like soft velvet when she reads in class. Regal, yet comforting. “It’s first president, Thomas Masaryk, set a tone of high-minded humanism; the economy grew, the arts flourished, and the mix of cultures–Czech, German, and Jewish–made the capital, Prague, a rich center of European life.” Czechoslovakia’s First Republic lasted only twenty years before Hitler’s army invaded, and World War II began.

“Those twenty years were the high point of both my parents’ lives,” Anna tells us.

I liked the excerpt Anna read so much that she surprised me with a copy of the journal the next week. I dug out my old cassette recorder when I got home from class, and Mike sat with me on the couch to read the complete essay out loud. Anna describes herself as a “shy, precocious nine-year-old girl,” when she left home with her parents and two older brothers as Hitler’s army seized Prague in March of 1939. The family took a circuitous, and often hair raising, route to New York City, and Anna’s story details countless friends and complete strangers who helped along the way. “I observed much, though I understood little, as we left one world for another in America.”

Anna’s beloved husband Mark Perlberg died in 2008 of complications from leukemia, and she has spent the years since then gathering his unpublished poems. Mark Perlberg’s posthumous collection, Theater of Memory, will be published by Louisiana State University Press in the fall of 2012, and three previously unpublished poems from Theater of Memory will appear in the spring issue of Prairie Schooner. While you’re at the Prairie Schooner site to read the current issue with Mark Perlberg’s poems, I suggest you order a copy of the Fall, 2010 journal as well. That’s where you’ll find Anna’s complete essay and learn about her amazing journey to America.

Switching the 5 to a 6

My loyal blog readers will remember the tribute to our dad that my sister Cheryl wrote as a guest post here a few months ago. She’s back today with this sweet essay about Flo on her 96th birthday.

Honey Girls

by Cheryl May

Last year we celebrated Mom’s 95th birthday on the 95th floor of the John Hancock Building in downtown Chicago. It was her first time there, and she still talks about that special celebration. This year she told us she didn’t want to do anything special. “It’s gonna be special already,” she said. “The new baby is due on my birthday!”

Well, Mom’s birthday gift was delivered a little early. Her 20th great-grandchild, Addison Rose, arrived on April 13th….and what a beautiful gift. So when we gathered for Mom’s 96th birthday yesterday we raised a glass or two — in celebration of both Mom’s and Addie’s birthday.

Our sister Bev drove in from Michigan and surprised Flo at the entrance of the restaurant, and our cousin Darrell stopped in, too. Mom marveled that her first birthday phone call that morning came at 7 a.m. “Seven in the morning!” she said, shaking her head in amazement every time she said it. “Can you believe that?”

What she couldn’t know then was that a string of phone calls would be waiting on her answering machine when we brought her back to her condo, culminating with a Liberace-style rendering of “Happy Birthday” from Pick and Hank in D.C. Pick at the grand piano, of course!

A neighbor at mom’s condo had decorated her door a la college dorm room days. “The sign said 95,” Mom said. “She got it wrong. I changed the five to a six.” Neighbors couldn’t help but notice the sign, and birthday cards started piling up under her door. “So many cards!” she beamed. She didn’t take a nap yesterday, so much going on and all. I don’t feel tired,” she assured us. “But I know I will once I sit down and put my feet up.”

Some of us can never remember the name of the “new” small restaurant we meet at across from the Elmhurst train station, so we just say, “you know, Honey Girl.” Heads nod, all of us remembering the clothes store that used to occupy that space when we were growing up. And today, it was the perfect name for the place we celebrated Florence Maria Martea Frederika and her new great-granddaughter Addie Rose: Honey Girl!

Monkey business

Here’s my husband Mike Knezovich with a book review.

Sometimes when I’m at an airport, a hotel lobby, walking down a city street, in an elevator, I watch the humans and think: Really, we’re all monkeys.

I learned there is some truth to that glib observation a few years ago when I wrote a freelance article on the work of Dario Maestripieri, professor of

Dario Maestripieri will talk about his book and his work on Thursday, April 19, 6:00 p.m. at Sandmeyer's Bookstore, 714 S. Dearborn in Chicago.

comparative human development, evolutionary biology, neurobiology, and psychiatry at the University of Chicago. Maestripieri has been watching human behavior a long while and sees lots of our behavior as evolutionary strategies and traits – many we still share with other primates.

When I interviewed Dr. Maestripieri, I found out he actually used to live in our building here in the Printers Row neighborhood of Chicago. He rode our elevator every day and watched people give awkward acknowledgements to one another when boarding, then immediately look down, up, at their phone (anything but maintain eye contact); he recognized this behavior as very similar to that of rhesus macaque monkeys when they are in tight quarters.

For a rhesus, baring the teeth and staring are signs of aggression. It’s a leftover in us, too.

That’s one really simple example of a fascinating thesis that’s really well-described in Maestripieri’s new book, Games Primates Play. Those of you who remember the bestseller of yesteryear called Games People Play will understand that Maestripieiri is making a very deliberate play off that title. Where the older book looked at everything from a social point of view, Maestripieiri’s work looks a layer deeper.

Example? Generally, a person walking into a crowded theater will look for a spot that has seats open on both sides. Only if none are available will the person finally plop down arm-to-arm with someone else. A sociologist might say that’s because humans need personal space. In Maestripieri’s research and new book, he asks, “Where does that need come from?”

I’m not doing it justice – I hope you’ll give his book a read and, come down to our favorite neighborhood bookstore, Sandmeyer’s, on Thursday night, April 19. Maestripieri will be giving a short presentation and signing books there at 6 pm. I’m going to do my best to be there with Beth – so come on, join us. After all, monkey see, monkey do.

Settling in

White Sox home opener, 2012. Hot dogs, fireworks, Jack Ingram singing the national anthem, cheering, a fly-over. Both pitchers settled in right from the start, but it took Whitney a little longer — it was the fifth inning before she could sit down!

The White Sox put on a great show – Mike and I had a ball. It was one heck of a well-played, entertaining baseball game. If you appreciate the game, you appreciate great defense, and there was a lot of it: a diving catch in left field by Dayan Viciedo, and shortstop Alexei Ramirez started a double play with a terrific play behind second. Jake Peavy, who suffered a horrendous injury (a muscle literally tore off the bone) two years ago pitched great. The Detroit starter, Max Scherzer, was almost as good for most of the game, so the game went quickly.

Whitney doesn’t yet appreciate the game, so I’m afraid her favorite part of the day was trotting down the ramp to leave the park and go home!

Opening Day started a week of firsts for Whitney. It’s Spa Week in Chicago, so I’ll be celebrating Monday, getting my first massage since coming home with Whitney in December. Will she sit quietly for the entire hour? We’ll see.

And then, this Wednesday Whitney takes a train with me to Champaign where she’ll be asked to sit through her first university lecture: I’m giving a talk to an animal sciences class at the University of Illinois. I plan on telling the students what it’s been like transitioning to a new Seeing Eye dog, then going over some of the qualifications necessary to become a guide dog instructor. Most guide dog schools require instructors to have a college degree and then do an apprenticeship, and some apprenticeships last as long as four years.

Considering that guide dog schools are non-profit organizations, I would guess the pay for apprentices and instructors is far below what a lot of today’s college educated people expect to earn. If you’re looking for job satisfaction, though, this kind of work must be pretty dang rewarding – I’m hoping my talk might motivate some of these University of Illinois students to consider it as a career. I’m also hoping Whitney will settle in to her first university lecture a whole lot faster than she did for her first baseball game – there won’t be any fireworks or hot dogs, and everything I’ll be talking about will be old news to her!

Another great-grandchild for Flo: Addie Rose.

We’ll cap off our week of firsts on Friday when Whitney will attend her first birthday party for Flo, who will be 96 years old on April 20. We’ll ride a commuter train to Elmhurst and meet Flo and other family members to celebrate at the wine bar across from the train station. No need to bring presents; Flo says she already got the gift she wanted. Her 20th great-grandchild, a healthy little girl named Addie Rose, was born on Friday. We’ve got a lot to celebrate, and It’s going to be one joyful celebration. Cheers!

A ray of hope

You might remember my friend Lauren Bishop-Weidner from a post I wrote two years ago. That post linked to a thoughtful and honest essay Lauren wrote for Two Hawks Quarterly about what it’s like to be able to see and love and live with someone who can’t. That piece was called On His Blindness; the “his” refers to Lauren’s husband Tom, who is Professor of Athletic Training and chair of the School of Physical Education, Sport, and Exercise Science at Ball State University. Whitney and I had the privilege of sharing the stage virtually with Dr. Weidner and Carlos Taylor, Adaptive Computer Technology Specialist at Ball State, along with their guide dogs Cate and Dutch, for a very special program in Muncie last Monday. Lauren agreed to write a guest post about that visit.

Motivate our Minds

by Lauren Bishop-weidner

Muncie, Ind., known primarily for canning jars and David Letterman, is also home to Motivate Our Minds (MOM), an after-school educational enrichment program that serves up a regular smorgasbord of learning opportunities for about 300 smart, curious, active kids in grades 1-8.

Tom and Carlos with Mary Dollison, the petite dynamo who started it all.

Thanks to the innovative spirits and creative minds of teachers and volunteers who love learning and kids, MOM is fun. Really fun. The kids get a healthy snack and individual help with homework. They go places, do things. They till, plant, tend, and harvest a garden, then sell the produce at a local farmer’s market. They grow to embrace learning, even if it means enduring school.

I got involved with MOM when I gave my freshman composition class an assignment to spend at least 8 hours volunteering locally in some capacity, then write about the experience. It was sort of a rough introduction to the idea of primary research, field work, that sort of thing. I asked MOM founder Mary Dollison to guest lecture in my class as a pathway to my students’ assignment, and the rest is history: I volunteer to tutor at MOM from time to time, and I look forward to reading to the 2nd and 3rd graders every Wednesday.

Motivate Our Minds has a long and proud history in Muncie. The brainchild of Mary Dollison and Raushanah Shabazz, the program began in 1987 as a summer reading program in the Dollison living room. The two women, both with full time jobs and families, were concerned about the children in Muncie’s low-income neighborhoods. The kids didn’t read, and too many didn’t finish high school. Armed with enthusiasm and determination to share their love of learning, they rounded up 16 neighborhood kids, including their own, and their home-based summer program outgrew its space within weeks.

Through tireless grant-writing, fundraising, and grassroots activism, MOM found a permanent home by 1993. Now serving nearly 300 students, MOM is a model of community advocacy, well known throughout east central Indiana for its effectiveness.

Tom's Braille watch -- with a pop-up top -- was a big hit.

The kids in the program learn to value learning, and they learn to value themselves. The results are life-changing. And hey, who knows how many of their lives might be changed after the special day they had last Monday?! Beth graciously agreed to participate with my husband Tom Weidner and our friend Carlos Taylor in a special program for the kids of Motivate Our Minds. We had Beth and Whitney via Skype; Tom and Carlos with their dogs (Cate and Dutch); 32 kids; and several gawking adults.

Carlos read a Braille version of Safe & Sound to the kids, and they marveled when Tom showed them how he pops open the lid on his watch to find

Carlos had the kids' full attention.

out what time it is: he feels the hour and minute hands. “Cool!”

Beth could only be there via Skype, but I was impressed with how well she managed to connect through the impersonal computer not even video –  just her happy voice through speakers. While the other kids took turns petting Kate and Dutch (their harnesses had been taken off, of course) one inquisitive boy walked up to the blank computer screen to ask Beth a question. “Where you at?” he wondered. For all we hear about how kids have to be entertained by saturating all their senses and keeping them in constant motion, these three professionals and their dogs connected with a lively roomful of active young minds in a low-tech (sort of) way.

The three of them gave a face to “disability” that these particular children, most of them from low-income homes and many from deep poverty, don’t get to see very often. A disability to them usually means perpetuating the poverty. Tom and Cate, Carlos and Dutch, and Beth and Whitney shined a ray of hope, infused with humor and fun. Watching the six of them interact with 32 excited children is an experience that I cherish.

The teachers at this school are saints

My great-nephew Raymond does not attend St. Raymond Preschool, but when Whitney and I visited there, and I let the teachers know what a saint this loveable three-year-old is, they gave me a t-shirt to present to Raymond as a gift. Thank you, St. Raymond!Note to my blog followers who are blind: the photo shows my saintly blue-eyed towheaded great nephew Raymond in a red t-shirt with “St. Raymond City of Little Saints Preschool” emblazoned on the front.

 

A different sort of Easter Bonnet

I interviewed Betsy Folwell for a story in Bark Magazine five years ago, and we’ve kept up with each other via email ever since. We have a lot to talk about, I guess: Both of us lost our sight as adults, and both of us are published authors. I was delighted when Betsy agreed to write a guest post for my Safe & Sound blog today, and once you read this entry, I think you’ll see, ahem, why.

Into the Eye’s Mind

by Elizabeth Folwell

Morning announces itself to me not with roosters crowing but squiggles of yellow, blue, white and red on a black background. Like a drawing by Keith Haring. Or an aboriginal sand painting.

Betsy Folwell on Chimney Mountain, near Indian Lake, NY, with her dogs Kesey
(left), Tinkerbelle (right) and guide dog Oakley (foreground). Photograph by
Nancie Battaglia.

Ever since I lost my sight 10 years ago these moving pictures have been part of my routine. In fact, if I wake up without the show I feel cheated.

There’s a scientific name for this phenomenon, of course, and a scholarly explanation. Swiss naturalist and philosopher Charles Bonnet commented on the intense hallucinations his 87-year-old grandfather witnessed. The old man, blind from cataracts, told Charles about the faces, buildings and activities that appeared before him, as real as anything he had seen with young eyes. Bonnet was formulating complex theories about how the nervous system works as a series of vibrations, and the happy village scenes of his grandfather were evidence of energetic pathways between the optic nerve and brain.

We can thank Bonnet, who trained as an attorney but never practiced law, for several modern scientific observations: how butterflies breathe, how primitive animals regenerate limbs, how plants communicate. The last item continues to dazzle researchers today. Bonnet passionately pursued botany and biology until his own failing sight turned his mind inward, to philosophical explanations of nature’s progression toward perfection. To Bonnet, everything was evolving, climbing higher and higher, until insects attained angelhood.

Only some of Bonnet’s work has been translated into English, and he’s remembered more as a religious thinker than scientific innovator. In our times his name is attached to Bonnet syndrome, a handy phrase that family practice doctors and ophthalmologists can tell their patients who ask querulously, “Am I going crazy?” when they describe seeing little green men bouncing purple basketballs down Main Street. I am not making this up; when I described my own psychedelic worm farm to my family doc, he shared that story — without violating any HIPPA rules since he did not say who had aliens on the brain.

When Beth’s blog Imagine described how different parts of the brain respond to words(how, for example, the word “lavender” can make the scent-sensitive territory light up as if a bundle of flowers were right there) I thought of my own suggestible head. The visual cortex, even without accurate input, wants to stay in touch.

Elizabeth Folwell is the author of Short Carries: Essays from Adirondack Life as well as articles and blogs at Adirondack Life.

This new hybrid health club doesn’t cost a penny

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.