Flashback 2009: Showing the world: Blind people shop

     
     Ali Krage, who we met briefly yesterday while reading "Romeo and Juliet" in Braille, stuck in my mind at age 16, navigating the halls of Willowbrook High School with astounding dexterity or, below, plunging into a Best Buy to pick up a DVD for her sister.   
     Plus she wanted to be a writer—that's a memorable ambition in any teen.  I couldn't post this without finding out where she is now, a decade later. 
     I'm happy to say she followed through on her writerly ambitions.
     "I write guest posts for the Easterseals blog," said Krage, now 26. "It's fun. I like it."

Ali Krage

      She's a student at Northern Illinois University, living on campus in DeKalb, studying human development and family science.  
     "I only have one semester left," she said, adding that she's hoping to become a mental health counselor. 
    She still likes to read, but more audio books than Braille, which tend to be big, thick, heavy multi-volume sets. 
    "No way I'd be able to lug those around," Krage said. "The only Braille I typically read now are exams."
     She started school studying criminal justice at College of DuPage, where she was the only blind student, then transferred to NIU, where she lives on campus. "They have a pretty large disability community here," she said. "That's one of the reasons I chose the campus." 
     Here are a couple of deft essays by Ali, this one on dating blind people, and "7 Advantages of Being Blind."

     "Nice to see you again," I say, shaking hands with Ali Krage, a sophomore at Willowbrook High School.
     Though I had met her before, writing a story about the classroom of visually impaired students she attends, I immediately do sort of a mental backflip, thinking, Whoops! "Nice to see you again." Good work, Mr. Sensitive. Maybe not the best thing to say to a person who is completely blind.
     Apologize or blunder forward? I blunder forward, musing that one advantage of a physical disability is you at least know what your challenges are, while the rest of us have to confront our limitations anew at random times during the day.
     That kind of interaction is actually the reason I'm here. As a blind child, Ali needs to practice going out into the everyday world, and the visual world needs practice—as my trouble even saying hello amply demonstrates—adjusting itself to the people with visual disabilities.
     It's an open question who has more trouble.
     "You still get the stares, the stigma," says Christopher Weinman, an orientation and mobility specialist with SASED, a DuPage County service cooperative.
     Brittany Koresch, a teacher at Willowbrook, marvels at the overreactions her blind students can evoke from the public.
     "They jump out of your way and go against the wall," she says. "We've been to restaurants where people pay for our food."
     "And that's bad?" asks the media sponge, long accustomed to dining out on somebody else's dime.
     "You don't want the pity, though," Koresch explains.
     "There's something called 'learned helplessness,' " says Weinman. "The majority of our kids are helped so much, by family and friends, that they're getting older, and they lack skills they should have already."
      Such as the ability to go to a big store to make small purchases. So Ali and Weinman pile in a van and drive to the Best Buy in Lombard.
     "Do you know how much you were given?" he asks.
     "Sixty dollars," she says. Three twenties. "I'm buying the movie 'Quarantine,' and I have to find a data card for my sister."
     Ali phoned Best Buy the day before to tell them she was coming. Sometimes that helps; sometimes it doesn't. She once had a store—a Border's—say they couldn't help her, and Weinman called back to read them the riot act—or, more precisely, the Americans with Disabilities Act, which requires that stores take reasonable steps to assist customers such as Ali.
     "Ordinarily, they're pretty good about it," says Weinman. "We tend to choose stores like Wal-Mart or Best Buy, where there are greeters, so the minute she walks in, she can say, 'Can you help me locate these items?' "
     In front of the Best Buy, Weinman gives Ali a small walkie-talkie—she can communicate with him if she gets in trouble—and leaves her at the door.
     "I don't get out of the car," he says. "I like the lesson to be as if a taxicab dropped them off."
      "What's the most important thing?" he asks Ali.
     "To go with them," she says.
     Weinman explains she shouldn't just stand there while the clerks go fetch her purchases, but accompany them through the aisles.
     "It forces Ali to grab the arm of a stranger—[blind kids] can be nervous about taking the arm of someone they don't know—and makes the public more aware of working with a blind person," says Weinman, who is always telling his students: "We have to show the world that blind people do shop."
     Ali unfolds her white cane and walks briskly inside. A man in a yellow shirt and a headset is stationed at the door, and beckons a manager.
     "How you doing, miss, how can we help you?" the manager says. "Do you need someone to help you around the store?"
     After a brief wait, a pert salesclerk, Gisell DaSilva, 21, appears. Ali takes her arm, and they stride into the vast store.
     "Is there anything specific you're looking for?" DaSilva asks.
     First on the list is "Quarantine"—like many teens, Ali is a big fan of horror movies; her mother or sister describe the action to her.
     "Very, very scary," DaSilva says.
     Then to the memory chip aisle, where, after some deliberation, they find the right one.
     DaSilva rings up the sale. "Do you want the receipt in the bag?" she asks, then leads Ali to the door.
     Back in the van, Weinman goes through the post-mortem. It turns out that Ali just took her change but didn't have DaSilva count out and identify the bills—three fives and a one.
     "Being a blind person, it's always important to ask what bills you get," Weinman says. "You've gotta be a self-advocate and say, 'What bills are these?' "
     "I tried my best," says Ali, who shows off the DVD of "Quarantine."
     "I want to watch this movie so badly," says Ali, and I smile—"watch," that probably means I was OK with "nice to see you."
                               —Originally published in the Sun-Times, April 19, 2009

Flashback 2009: Blind kids on the brink of being shown the door

Pair of eyes, bronze and obsidian. Greek, 5th century BCE (Metropolitan Museum of Art)

     I dug up more vintage columns than were needed during my trip to South America, but  didn't want to simply toss this pair of columns back into the vault. 
     So for today, a visit to a class for the profoundly blind; tomorrow, we go shopping with one of the students from the class, Ali Krage, and catch up with her today. The really astounding thing about this column is that the parents of these blind children didn't know they were getting the boot until they read about it in the paper. The Vision Room, to answer the question of several readers, was moved to Addison Trail High School.

     Joe Lamperis reads quite well for a boy with no eyes.
     "I am blind, legally," he explains. "I was born with anophthalmia"—a rare condition where infants develop without eyes.
     "They had to put these in," he adds, casually referring to the handsome blue eyes he seems to have.
     Glass? "Plastic, actually," says Joe, 16.
     He reads by running his fingers over the tiny raised bumps of Braille, sitting at his desk in a small classroom in Willowbrook High School.
     Officially it's "The Program for Students With Visual Impairments," but at Willowbrook they call it "The Vision Room." This room serves the region's most severely visually impaired students -- 92 school districts in DuPage and western Cook County together send just 22 students here.
     The program has been at Willowbrook in Villa Park for 10 years, but with the high school undergoing extensive reconstruction, the blind students will have to find another place to study come autumn.
     "We told them over a year ago that we could no longer house their program due to space constraints," said District 88 Supt. Steve Humphrey.
     Parents of the blind children have not yet been told about the pending move nor the current lack of anywhere for them to move to.
     "We haven't communicated to the parents yet," said Michael Volpe, executive director of the School Association for Special Education in DuPage County, which runs the program. "We wanted, hopefully to get a solution." The Vision Room is not a traditional class where one teacher leads a group of students. Rather it is a home base, where blind students come and go, receiving one-on-one guidance, since their abilities range widely, from Reginald Harris, 20, who is autistic and sits matching toothbrush cases, to Beatriz Chavez, 19, who is attending College of DuPage next year, and has the white hair and pink eyes—and related vision problems—of albinism.
     "Mr. C., I need your eyeballs," she says. "Mine hurt." Mr. C—teacher Mario Cortesi— slides over to look at the economics textbook she's studying.
     Computers and tapes help, but mastering the 180-year-old Braille system is still an essential skill.
     "They have to touch those words and feel them to learn to read," says Nick Hildreth, a teacher.
     Joe learned Braille when he was 4.
     "It was exciting for me and my family," he explains. "I read for pleasure. I read for education. I love reading." As does Ali Krage, also 16, who lightly places her delicate hands on what at first seems like a blank page and draws her left index finger swiftly across the subtle raised dots.
     "Unless thou tell me how I may prevent it," she reads—lines from 'Romeo and Juliet'—"If, in thy wisdom, thou canst give no help, Do thou but call my resolution wise." She is reading the 32nd of 41 volumes of "Elements of Literature, Third Course." Braille texts can run 80 volumes, and storing them is a challenge, as is getting materials that are both current and relevant. A teacher hands Ali a Braille copy of ESPN The Magazine from last November.
     "Oh joy," says Ali, with typical teen sarcasm, handing it back. She too started reading Braille as a toddler—as with any language, those who begin later have a much tougher time.
      Nearby, Mike Wade sits laboriously translating a sentence in Braille—"I enjoy going to Outreach"—using an egg carton and golf balls to help him understand the tiny Braille grids.
     "I?" asks Mike.
     "You got it," says Cortesi, guiding his work. "You missed a letter, though. Can you feel the 'O'?" Ali says she often prefers Braille books to books on tape, because she can proceed at her own pace, though there are drawbacks. "I'm tired of reading," she once told her twin sister, Nicole. "My fingers hurt." Ali heads upstairs to collect some biology notes, which her teacher has transcribed into Braille for her.
     "We just finished evolution and now we're studying bacteria," she says, admitting that biology is not her favorite subject. "It's really visual," she complains. "There are a lot of diagrams." Those who assume the teens' situation is somehow grim haven't met kids such as Ali, or Michael Hansen, 17, in his third year of high school.
     "Most of us blindy types do it in five years," he says breezily. "I consider myself a junior when it's to my benefit, a sophomore when it's to my benefit." Michael plays the cello and the piano and heads off to the music room to perform his "Lamentation in A Minor, Opus 7." He sits at the piano, folds his white cane into four sections and places it on the rack intended for sheet music, and begins his composition's haunting quiet passages and crashing Rachmaninoff-inspired chords.
     Though blinded by glaucoma, his eyes swollen, milky and often painful, Michael is steadily upbeat. Returning to the Vision Room at the same time as Joe, Joe's white cane momentarily tangles in Michael's feet.
     "Sorry, I didn't see you Joe," Michael deadpans. "I must be going blind in my old age."     

     "You ARE blind!" exclaims Joe, whose sense of irony is not as keen.
      The blind students navigate the halls with confidence—even Ali, a freshman, who spent hours of orientation, feels her way around the school. She and her classmates will have to learn a new layout next fall.
     "We're just out of space," says Humphrey. "We're at a point where the program's gotta be moved." As to where they'll go, "we've got a couple of nibbles," says Volpe, adding that District 88 has been "very helpful and positive." 

     "They're trying to work with us," Volpe says. "It's important to the kids—it's tough enough to make a transition from one high school building to another without also having to leave the district." 

Today's chuckle . . .
     "You can't do anything about it, you might as well laugh about it," says Michael Hansen, rattling off the following:
     A blind man with a seeing eye dog walks into a convenience store. He grabs his dog by the tail and starts swinging him in a big circle.
     "What are you doing!?!" asks the horrified clerk.
     "I'm just looking around," says the man.

                                  —Originally published in the Sun-Times, March 18, 2009

Not only the oldest but one of the best: Mike Nussbaum on acting at 95

   “The longer you live,” a gravedigger sings, tossing skulls from an old grave in the new production of “Hamlet” at Chicago Shakespeare Theater, “the sooner you bloody well die.”
     That line is not in Shakespeare’s play, but a winking bit of business added by director Barbara Gaines, apt for the character but also something of an in-joke, since the actor doing the singing is Mike Nussbaum, who is 95 years old.
     “He’s not only the oldest actor working on stage in America, he’s one of the best,” said Gaines.
     The senior member of Actors’ Equity has a resume long enough to make three thespians proud. He’s appeared in productions at Chicago’s top theaters for nearly half a century and had noteworthy small roles in hit movies such as “Field of Dreams,” “Men in Black” and “Fatal Attraction.”
     And oh yes, he made his splash in the premiere of David Mamet’s “American Buffalo” in 1975 and went on to star in “Glengarry Glen Ross” on Broadway.
     “It’s wonderful to work with Mike because, like any artist, like any actor, he’s just unusual,” Mamet told Chicago magazine. “You’re constantly saying, ‘My God, where did that come from?’ It’s not coming out of a bag of ‘acting moments.’ That’s all bullshit. It’s coming out of — who the hell knows where? You either got it or you don’t, and Mike certainly does.”  
     Not only does Nussbaum still have it, but he somehow guards his dramatic gift from the cruel physics of age and mortality. “I’m lucky,” he explained, relaxing backstage before Tuesday’s performance. “Genetic luck. I work out and I try to eat sensibly. I gave up smoking about 50 years ago. It’s just pure luck.”
     Luck, and some help. Nussbaum was married for 54 years, but his first wife died in 2003. He married again, and Julie comes up when I insist there must be something else beyond stretching keeping him going. He admits there is.
     “A great woman,” he said. “Probably one of the main reasons I’m able to do this.”
     Why?

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South American Diary #13: Blue ice

Asia Glacier, Chile

    Pollution does more than merely spoil the environment. As bad as sooty air, plastic-clogged beaches and poisoned rivers are, there's another insidious element that can get overlooked. Pollution gets into your head, into your mind, twisting your expectations of the natural world, so that when I first saw these stupendous glaciers in Chile I thought, "Tide."
     As in detergent. 
    My frame of reference for things that looked like this was blue tinted plastic wrap and blue laundry soap and blocks of old styrofoam. 

Clear glacial ice

    It was difficult enough for the brain to process these enormous sheets of ice, some 200 feet tall and a half mile across. Their tint being, not just pale blue, but a dozen shades of azure, from powder to royal, made it seem not a thing in nature, even though it was entirely natural. Then add the seams of crushed rock, picked up in their slow journeys across the landscape, and the glaciers at first seemed not the pristine wonders they were, but dirty, littered, polluted themselves.  
     It took time to get used to them, to accept their majesty on its own terms and see them for what they are. 
     And more time still to understand where that blue comes from. 
     Powdery snow looks white because it's fluffy, puffed with air, allowing the multifaceted snow crystals to reflect the entire spectrum of colors which, mixed together, look white. (If you don't believe me, take a peek at the classic science class "Newton's disc" experiment).
     Or, better yet, pour yourself a glass of beer. The liquid is brown, the foamy head is white. Why? The bubbles in the foam, reflecting light.
      Glacial ice is old—the snowfalls from 10,000 years, or 100,000, each season compressed for millennia under the crushing weight of the seasons that followed. Over time, the air is pressed out, making the ice very clear, and thus able to let more light in deeper, where it is trapped instead of being reflected, particularly the reds: glacial ice absorbs red light six times more efficiently than blue light, which bounces back into our awestruck and disbelieving eyes. 

Garibaldi Glacier, Chile

   

RIP Rahm Emanuel: "the most Chicago of Chicago mayors"

 
     After the funeral of a college classmate, her sister asked me how the Catholic ceremony compared to Jewish rites. I thought a moment. There were the bouquets of flowers piled atop the coffin, buried along with it. That was different, and haunting, but not what I mentioned.
     "We tend to say something around the grave," I said.
     "I asked the priest if we could do that," she responded. "But he said 'No.'"
     And you listened to him?! I thought, and almost said aloud, but held back, out of respect.
     We Jews are indeed a chatty, argumentative race, no doubt about that, and we guide our clergy as much as our clergy guides us. Maybe more.
     So even though I am convinced that the ideal way to solemnize Rahm Emanuel's departure from the mayor's office is with stony silence—for the city to cough into our collective fist and fix our gaze on the middle distance until he goes away—I'm not going to do that.
     First, because of the certainty that Rahm will spend the next few weeks in hyperkinetic victory laps, huffing in circles around City Hall, both hands raised for high fives that aren't returned by passerby who twist away in revulsion as he flies past, legs and jaw churning, uttering the same constant stream of self-congratulatory spin he's been coasting along on, like a slug producing its own smooth track of slime, for the past eight years.
     And second, well, can't have a column that's five paragraphs long. My job has forced me to contemplate Rahm and, like any proctologist with a full day's schedule, no point in complaining. Might as well roll up our sleeves and take a look.

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South American Diary #12: Pablo Neruda

     The ship docked at Valparaiso. The shuttle got us to the airport in Santiago by about 11 a.m. My flight boarded at 7 p.m. Before I could even pose the question, Michael had proposed an answer: Pablo Neruda's home, then lunch.
     Worked for me. Actually one of Pablo Neruda's homes, La Chascona, built for his mistress and future third wife, Matilde Urrutia. The tour guide on our bus to the airport sternly warned us against using Uber—it is illegal and we would be arrested and sent to jail—so in the spirt of rebellion, that was the mode of transportation we took.  

     My experience with Neruda had been limited. I read and enjoyed his "Ode to Common Things," 25 poems on spoons and pliers and such, and used it in 2017 as a guide to the Home + Housewares Show, which pleased me immensely, if no one else.
     I read his "The Poet's Task" in Robert Pinsky's splendid collection, "The Handbook of Heartbreak," and fell in love with it, so much that I used the poem as a spiritual guide to my memoir about my father, "Don't Give Up the Ship." The poem was originally the epigram of the book, but two weeks before publication some lawyer at Ballantine figured out that while I had gotten permission from, and paid, the translator, Alfred Corn, I had not also secured permission from the Neruda estate. Faxes to Chile ensued (this was 1999) and the estate said, eventually, No. Because Corn had never received permission, and thus they would not grant it now. Instead they wanted me to use some vastly inferior translation, which I declined to do. It's irrational, but I often felt that the book's complete failure was the result of "The Poet's Task" not being at the front.
     I tried not to blame Neruda, who died in 1973, personally for this, and largely succeeded. It helped to learn at La Chascona about the Nobel laureate's vigorous life and travels, and about his political heroism, pushing for democracy in Chile, and how after the military coup, junta goons sacked his house, which his widow lovingly restored. It's well-worth seeing, not at all regal, but whimsical and rambling and homey and inviting, like the poet's work itself.
     This is the logical place to end my South American reminiscences. A dozen is enough. Though I'm still planning to do two more, something about climate change for the paper, and that should be ready soon. And something about glaciers and the color blue. Otherwise, thank you for enduring old columns while I was getting my sea legs, then going along with me on this South American Diary. I'm going to end with "The Poet's Task," which I feel comfortable reprinting here, since I did pay Alfred Corn, and if the Neruda Estate wants to complain, well, they know where to find me.

The Poet's Task

Whoever isn't listening to the sea this Friday
morning, whoever is trapped inside some
house, office, factory—or mistress
or street corner or coal mine or solitary confinement:
to that person I make my way and without speaking or nodding
come up and spring open the cage; and something begins to hum, faint but insistent;
a great snapped-off clap of thunder harnesses itself
to the weight of the planet and the foam;
the hoarse rivers of the ocean rise up,
a star shimmers and trills in its rose window,
and the sea stumbles, falls, and continues on its way.

Then, with destiny as my pilot,
I will listen and listen harder to keep alive
in my memory the sea's outcry.
I must feel the impact of solid water
and save it in a cup outside of time
so that wherever anyone may be imprisoned,
wherever anyone is made to suffer in the dying year,
I will be there, whispering in the ceaseless tides.
I will drift through open windows,
and, hearing me, eyes will glance upward
saying, How can we get to the ocean?
And, without answering, I will pass on
the collapse of foam and liquid sand,
the salty kiss of withdrawal,
the gray keening of birds on the shore.
And so, through me, freedom and the sea
will bring solace to the downcast heart.
                 —Pablo Neruda, translated by Alfred Corn

Are you being tracked? Burned by lasers? Maybe you are a ‘Targeted Individual’

     Strangers are following you. Teams of them, coordinating their surveillance. Recording you. Attacking you with sonic devices. Maybe burning you with lasers. Maybe implanting grain-sized trackers inside your body. You can feel the hard bumps under your skin.
     You are alarmed, naturally, and turn for help to those you trust: your family and friends. Maybe law enforcement. Only they don’t believe, you. They might even act like you’re the problem. Like you’re crazy.
     Welcome to the world of Targeted Individuals, a loose confederation of those, in their words, subject to the “growing crimes of organized stalking, surveillance, abuse and electronic harassment.”
     I first met Targeted Individuals last August, passing a protest in the Loop marking “International Targeted Individual Day.” I took a flyer, showing the fearful blue eyes of a weeping woman.
     "INFORM YOURSELF," it declares. "SHARE. DEMAND CHANGE."
     Calling spokeswoman, “Ella Free,” started with a surprise.
     “A good portion of people who claim to be Targeted Individuals are actually mentally ill,” she said. Straight to the elephant in the room. “So many of them, people have the same story: it’s interesting that a person isolated is having a very similar scenario.”
     She meant “interesting” as in “persuasive” — these people are describing the same thing, therefore it must have basis in reality. That logic doesn’t hold up.
     “People who are paranoid start to latch onto the same kind of delusion,” said David LaPorte, a professor of psychology at Indiana University of Pennsylvania. “This is not uncommon. When airplanes first started, people started having delusions they were being followed by airplanes. The computer has been a huge issue that leaked into paranoid delusions. Every technological advance becomes fodder for paranoid individuals.”

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