Safe & Sound blog

Last Wednesday Hanni and I took a commuter train to St. Pius X — a Catholic School in the Chicago suburbs. my nephew Ben’s kids go there, their great aunt came to talk and answer questions for Riley, Haley, Colin and their schoolmates. And then yesterday Hanni and I boarded a commuter train again, this time I talked to kids at the West Suburban Montessori School in Oak Park.

The questions kids ask from school to school vary, but whether we’re at a city school, a country school, a public school, whatever, one thing they all want to know is this: how old is Hanni? The answer always gets the same response from the audience– Eight-year-olds squeal with joy to discover Hanni is the same age they are.

Sometimes the kids want to know how old she is in human years, too. Turns out the idea that every dog year equals seven human years is a myth. Hanni is not 56 in human years yet. Not according to a converter on a Flat- Coated Retriever site, at least.

“To work out the human age of a dog or other pets many people will multiply their age by seven years. This is not that accurate, as differing breeds of dogs will age at differing rates. For example, many smaller breeds of dogs such as a west highland terrier will live well into their late teens, whilst larger dogs may only live to about ten years. “

Did you catch that “whilst” word in there? That website is from Britain, and my talking computer reads it using a robotic British accent. It’s like having Michael Caine at my fingertips. Imagine.

But back to dog years. The site points out that dogs mature quickly in their early years – a medium-sized dog (Hanni weighs 63 pounds) will be 14 human years by their first birthday, a two-year-old dog her size is the equivalent of a 21-year-old human. No wonder Hanni was so goofy when I met her. She was about to turn 21!

Thereafter for every actual year, add on…5 years for a medium dog breed or 7 years for a large dog breed.

Big dogs age faster? I’ll stick with calling Hanni a medium-size dog. That means she’s 51 in human years.

Hanni and I don’t have any more school visits scheduled for this academic year — our upcoming events are more for grown-ups. At each of these, I plan to announce this new calculation of Hanni’s age in human years. We’ll see if all the 51-year-olds squeal with the same exuberance those eight-year-olds do.

The guy at Logan Airport security recognized Hanni. “Didn’t you guys come through here this afternoon already?”

We did. But shortly after our 5:15 flight left the jetway, the storms started in Chicago. So we sat on the runway. It wasn’t until I heard the landing gear come out near O’Hare that I found the courage to count the total time Hanni and I had been on board. Nine hours.

The pilot gave us periodic updates on the storm while we waited. He welcomed us to listen to the air traffic controllers on our headsets. As awful as it all was, just sitting there, waiting, I must say: in a very odd way, the ordeal was uplifting, too. The passengers, and the crew, and the pilots, were all good people. No one got belligerent. No one broke into the liquor. No one squatted in the aisle to defecate in protest.

Now, Hanni might have wanted to squat in the aisle, but she held it in. Until 9:15, that is. That’s when the pilot announced that all flights in and out of O’Hare had been grounded. We went back to the jetway.

Our flight still wasn’t cancelled, the pilot told us. “Feel free to get off the plane to stretch your legs,” he announced over the loudspeaker. “But don’t go too far from the gate.”

I ignored that warning. We couldn’t stay close. Hanni had to go outside! My wonderful, loyal, brave and patient Seeing Eye dog held her own while phone calls were made to determine whether the security gate was already closed, could Hanni and I get back to our flight if we left the airport for a bit, what are FAA regulations on this, blah, blah, blah. A very kind Logan employee finally came to our rescue, accompanying Hanni and me outside the security area. Once outside, we took three quick steps to the right, and…relief! Right there on the cement sidewalk.

Hanni was much lighter on her feet when we went through security that second time. She and I were back to the gate in plenty of time to board again, the plane pulled away from the jetway, and there we sat. For two-and-a-half more hours.

By this time, the passengers were all getting to know each other. Prohibited from talking endlessly into handheld phones, or pounding away on laptop keyboards, or engaging our thumbs in text messaging, well, we entertained ourselves the old-fashioned way. Talking. To each other. Imagine. Conversations. With real people. Like I say, it was downright uplifting.

Many commented on Hanni’s stellar behavior. Eventually I had Hanni lead me to the back of the plane. I took off her harness then and encouraged anyone who wanted to pet her to come on back. I think it helped all concerned. Maybe after Hanni retires from her current job she can volunteer as an airplane therapy dog.

Kids – and adults –often ask if Hanni goes right on the plane with me when we travel. She does.

On board, she sits with her butt under the seat in front of me, her head cradled between my feet. She’ll be doing exactly that on Sunday, when we fly home from Louisville. Before that, though, she will have been on four long car rides (she sits at my feet at the front passenger seat), two train rides and one bus ride. Planes, trains, and automobiles. Buses, too. All in one week! Hanni’s a trooper.

Our big travel week started with a speech to honor volunteers at the Mid-Illinois Talking Book Center in East Peoria on Monday. When I couldn’t find convenient transportation to and from that event, my niece Janet offered to drive. Baby Flo – Janet’s youngest daughter — came along, so we made sure to find a hotel with an indoor pool. Hanni and Baby Flo are just about the same height, so they had lots to talk about. We had fun!

On Tuesday Hanni and I boarded a train from Chicago to East Lansing, Michigan. This morning I gave a motivational speech to diabetes and kidney advocates before they took off to talk to state legislators. Along with blindness and leg amputation, kidney failure is another major complication of long term – or poorly controlled – diabetes. After the speech and a very lively book signing, Hanni and I got on a bus headed to Battle Creek. We caught a train there, and now, here I am, typing away from my seat on the train. Hanni is sleeping at my feet — she’s wise to get a few winks in, because tomorrow we leave again. My sister Cheryl is picking us up for this leg of our weeklong trip, and Flo and another sister – Bobbie –will come along.

They’ll be with us when Hanni and I give a talk at my great-nephew Grant’s school in Indianapolis on Friday morning. From there, we all take off to meet our other two sisters Marilee and Bev in Louisville, and Sister’s Weekend begins!

Every year my four sisters and I (and Flo, our honored guest) get together somewhere or another to celebrate our sisterhood,and we choose a book to read that has something to do with our locale. You know, Sister’s Book Club. This year’s book is a bit of a stretch. After visiting Long Island last month I found myself wanting to read The Great Gatsby again. When I went to order it, the notes said Jay Gatsby courted Daisy Buchanan in…Louisville. So that’s the book.

My brother Doug will provide appropriate Gatsby-esque music for the weekend. Doug lives in Louisville, and he’s a sought-after jazz trombonist. we’ll hear his band the West Market Street Stompers play on Friday night, and then on Saturday night Doug performs in a big band. On a riverboat!

The riverboat we’ll be cruising on is 92 years old — the exact age Flo will be this Sunday, April 20. If you know my family you know we’ll start celebrating a day early. Dancing. To a big band. On a riverboat!
So yikes! I guess you can add “boat” to the list of transportation Hanni – and I – will ride this week

The Sweet Potato Queen was one of the top speakers at the Arkansas Literary Festival last weekend. The Sweet Potato Queen’s’ Book of Love came out in 1999, and two subsequent titles (The Sweet Potato Queens’ Field Guide to Men: Every Man I Love is Either Married, Gay, or Dead and The Sweet Potato Queens’ Big-Ass Cookbook) were New York Times® #1 bestsellers.

And so, you may have heard of the Sweet Potato Queen, aka, Jill Connor Brown. Chances are you have never heard of Kyle Jennings, though. Kyle is married to the Sweet Potato Queen and is known to her readers as simply the “Cutest Boy in the World.”

I may not be able to vouch for his good looks, but I can say this: that Kyle guy sure is nice.

My friend Nancy led Hanni and me to our panel Saturday morning. A festival volunteer guided us to our noontime presentation at the Arkansas Historical Museum. Nancy wasn’t all that interested in the Sweet Potato Queen, so she took off after helping me to a seat at Jill Connor Brown’s presentation later that afternoon.

When Kyle Jennings saw Hanni and me sitting alone, he stopped to ask if we needed anything. I knew he and the Sweet Potato Queen were staying in the same hotel we were, so I made a confession: I had no idea what the route back to our hotel was.
Kyle said he’d be glad to walk Hanni and me there after the presentation. “But we’ll have to wait until Jill is done signing books.”

The Sweet Potato Queen is popular. VERY popular. Women stood in line for, hmm, at least an hour to get Jill to sign copies of various Sweet Potato Queen titles.

So while Jill signed away, Hanni and I waited outside on a bench. Sunshine, birds singing…it couldn’t get better than this.

But then, it did.

Kyle Jennings saw us outside and approached our bench. “Mind if I sit with you?” he asked. I scooted over, and, of course, we got to talking. He spoke lovingly about their own dogs. One is a rescue dog who had been hit by a car and left to die. A leg had to be amputated as a result of the accident. They named the dog Sosti, Kyle said. “Sost means ‘three’ in Ethiopian.”
We traded all sorts of stories after that. Eventually I unbuckled Hanni’s harness. She needed a break.
“Can I pet her now?” Kyle asked. I thought he would jump out of his shoes when I said yes. He ended up taking Hanni for a walk, picking up after her when she emptied, finding a bottle of water and cutting off the top so she could get a drink. How they bonded.

The Sweet Potato Queen sounded exhausted when she finally came out to join us. We all took off for the hotel, but after one block Jill asked if Kyle and I wouldn’t mind going on without her. “I’m going to duck in this gallery and rest,” she said. “I can’t walk that far in these heels!” She asked Kyle to pick some things up for her from their hotel room – he’d come back with the car.

And so, Hanni and I proceeded on, our heads held high. After all, we were being escorted to our fancy-schmancey Little Rock hotel by the cutest boy in the world.

Hanni and I head to the Arkansas Literary Festival this weekend – we’re doing one session for children, then sitting on a panel called Dogs and Their People.

With us on the panel? None other than Sonny Brewer.

I first met Sonny Brewer at an Arkansas Literary Festival years ago. I was in Little Rock with Mike and Hanni for the 2004 festival to promote Long Time, No See.
. The Saturday night gala that year was at the William J. Clinton Presidential Library, and festival organizers were kind enough to arrange for a volunteer to drive Mike, Hanni and me to the event. An author named Sonny Brewer was supposed to come with us, too. But he was late getting to the car. It was hot in Little Rock, and Hanni, Mike and I were squished in the back seat. I was very eager to get to the Clinton Library – it was relatively new at the time. I wanted to spend as much time there as possible. But we had to wait. For some guy named Sonny Brewer. We waited. I was wearing pantyhose. It was hot. Nuff said? I was ready to blow my stack when Sonny finally showed up. The minute he opened his mouth, all was forgiven.

“Sorry, y’all,” he said with a whimsical southern drawl. “I lost track of the time.  My name is Sonny, glad to meet you.” He shook our hands. Hanni even gave him her paw.
We got stuck in traffic – of course – but I didn’t mind. It gave Sonny time to tell us his story.
Sonny had opened an independent bookstore in his hometown of Fairhope, Alabama, in 1997. “I was nearing 50 back then,” he said. “Owning a bookstore had been a lifelong dream of mine.”
After seven years in business, Over the Transom Books was still in the red.

Enter Jill Connor Brown with some queenly advice. The author of The Sweet Potato Queens Book of Love met her husband Kyle Jennings in Sonny Brewer’s bookstore, and she and Sonny have been friends ever since.

“Jill told me I oughta try selling my book,” Sonny told us, explaining he had already started writing a novel back then, pounding the keyboard late at night when his wife and two young boys were asleep. “She said I had nothing to lose by sending it out, and who knows, if I got a book deal, the money might help prop up the bookstore.”

After mailing 20 pages of his manuscript to a New York agent, Sonny set up an appointment with a bankruptcy lawyer for the next Thursday. “The agent called on Wednesday,” he said with that lovely southern drawl of his. Ballantine Books, an imprint of Random House, wanted his book. They were offering an advance. “I cancelled the appointment with the bankruptcy lawyer.”

Poet of Tolstoy Park came out in 2006. And Over the Transom Books? It’s still up and running. In order to have more time to devote to writing, though, Sunny turned over most of the day-to-day bookstore operations to an employee.

“It has just been a magical, kind of crazy, enchanted trajectory,” Sonny told me a year later, when he picked Hanni and me up at the airport for a trip to Alabama. His second novel, also based in Fairhope, had been published by Ballantine already. He’d just returned from LA. Talking with Billy Bob Thornton. About the screenplay for Poet of Tolstoy Park. “I’m black and blue all over from pinching myself so much!” he laughed.
The book he’ll be touting on our dogs and Their People panel is his latest: Cormac, the Tale of a Dog Gone Missing. Like his first two novels, this book is also set in Fairhope, Alabama. But this one is inspired by Sonny’s dog – the book is based on a true story of how Cormac went missing for almost a month, and was found more than a thousand miles away.

I’m looking forward to sitting on a panel with Sonny this Saturday–I just hope he shows up on time!

Before I get started on this post, let me apologize to the people of Long Island. In my previous blogs (and in email messages) I’ve been saying that I’m doing book events IN Long Island. The schoolkids I visited today set me straight.

I’m ON Long Island, not IN Long Island.

In addition to discussing prepositions, we discussed politics.
Elliott Spitzer stepped down as New York governor today. Lieutenant Governor David Paterson was named his successor. The kids today wanted to know what it meant to be “legally blind.”

Here’s the deal. David Paterson lost sight in his left eye and much of the sight in his right eye after an infection when he was a baby.

When Paterson takes office on Monday, he will become only the third African-American governor in the nation since Reconstruction. He will not be the first New York governor with a disability, though — Franklin Delano Roosevelt governed from 1928 to 1932.

Paterson will, however, be the first blind governor — at least as far as the National Federation of the Blind is aware.

From an AP story today:

“Refusal to bow to his handicap came early.
When New York City schools refused to let him attend mainstream classes, his parents established residency on Long Island, where they found a school that
would let him go to regular classes.”

The kids on Long Island feel proud. Or let me put it this way: they feel proud ON Long Island.

Hanni and I are off to Long Island tomorrow – we’re visiting schools and doing book events in towns with exotic names like Patchogue, Wantagh and…Bohemia!

More details on our Long Island stops are available at the “upcoming events” link on my website. I’ll be bringing my talking laptop on the trip. In order to blog, though, I’ll have to figure out how to hook up to the wireless connection in our room at the Holiday Inn.
Confession: I’ve never used a wireless connection on my own before, someone else has always helped me connect that way.

In other words, if I were you I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting for a blog from Bohemia.

Paul Kirk, the principal at Roslyn Road elementary School, was the lucky man who got to introduce us to the student audience at our visit yesterday. During my speech to the 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.

“Those things can distract a Seeing Eye dog,” I told them. “It’d be like if someone nudged you or kept calling your name wile you were working on your spelling words at school. You wouldn’t be able to concentrate on your work.”

I suggested we come up with a fake name for Hanni. “If you use her fake name to say hi to her, she wont’ notice,” I said. “She’ll think you’re talking to someone else!”

I asked the kids what their principal’s name was. They chorused an answer. “But what’s his first name?” I asked.

Hmmm. Paul wouldn’t work for Hanni. “How about we call her Pauline?”

The kids loved the idea. During the Q & A part of the session, a student asked if Pauline sleeps with me. It was a good question – it gave me a chance to explain that Seeing Eye dogs are not allowed on furniture. “But she sleeps as close as she can to me,” I said. “She lies right next to my bed. If I get up for a glass of water in the night I have to be careful so I don’t step on her.”

Students asked whether or not Pauline likes other dogs, does Pauline ever slip on the ice, what does Pauline do if she comes across a whole in the sidewalk. But then came a question I hadn’t heard before. “Have you ever fallen out of bed?”

“Yes!” I said. It took a second for me to figure out where this question had come from, but suddenly the light bulb went on over my head. “But I fell off the other side – not on Pauline!”

This Saturday Hanni will be honored at a Champaign Public Library program called “Get Inspired! Meet a Hero at Your Library.” The Champaign library will be recommending favorite books about heroes for the next couple months, and “Hanni and Beth: Safe & sound” is one of their three picks for march:
1. Officer Buckle & Gloria
Recommended for preschoolers
by Peggy Rathman

The funny on-stage performances of a police dog, teamed with her new partner, teach kids how to be safe at home, in school, and around town.

2. Hanni and Beth: Safe & Sound,
Recommended for grades K to 2
by Beth Finke

How will Beth, who is blind, travel safely to work, to the park, or to a concert? Her good friend and guide dog, Hanni, helps her every day!

3. Charlotte’s Web
Recommended for grades 3 to 5
by E.B. White

A clever spider named Charlotte hatches a plan to save her dearest friend, Wilbur the pig

Hanni has been recognized for her heroism before, but being listed right up there with Charlotte the spider? Now, that’s an honor.

The Champaign Public Library’s calendar is full of hero-themed events for the next couple of months – Hanni is looking forward to her time in the spotlight this Saturday at 2 pm.

You might remember my “Papa & Me” blog about a presentation I gave at the Oak Park Public Library? A small independent children’s bookstore in Oak Park called Magic Tree was kind enough to bring books to the library for me to sign after my presentation. Unfortunately, we didn’t have a whole lot of takers.

As I put on my coat to leave the library, I could hear Rose, one of the Magic Tree owners, shoving unsold books back into a box. “Sorry we didn’t sell more books!” I called out in her direction. The temperature was one degree – yes, you read that right, one – outside. I hated to have dragged her out on such a cold night for such little reward.

Rose was unfazed. “No problem!” she exclaimed. “Now you can come to our store and do a presentation –we already have a stack of books!”

And so, this afternoon Hanni and I did a presentation at Magic Tree. Rose read “Safe & Sound” aloud, and I explained 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. “Those things can distract a Seeing Eye dog,” I told them. “It’d be like if someone nudged you or kept calling your name wile you were working on your spelling words at school. You wouldn’t be able to concentrate on your work.”

I suggested we come up with a fake name for Hanni. “If you use her fake name to say hi to her, she wont’ notice,” I said. “She’ll think you’re talking to someone else!”

“For today, let’s call the dog ‘Rose,’” I said. “You know, after the lady who invited Hanni and me to Magic Tree.

The kids liked the idea. The bookstore owner liked it, too. Until it came around to question and answer time, that is. There were some of the usual questions – how do you know where your food is on the plate, do you have to pay for a seat when the dog goes on an airplane with you, things like that. But then came the zinger. “How do you pick up Rose’s poop?”

I looked in Rose-the-human’s direction. She was quiet for a second. Then she burst out in laughter. I answered the question, but decided to refer to Hanni as “the dog” rather than “Rose” for this explanation.

It was a great event. When it was over, Rose didn’t pack any leftover books away in boxes. Instead, she asked me to sign them so she could bring them to a presentation she’d be giving to West Forty next month. “It’s an organization of 40 different public school districts in western Cook County,” she explained. “A lot of reading specialists are involved, I give presentations to them about books they might be interested in using with their kids.” She said she is especially pleased when she brings good books to their attention that they might not have heard of otherwise. “Yours is one of them.”