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Mary Ann's Story

Mary Ann recounts her childhood growing up in rural Connecticut and goes on to share the powerful act of kindness her paternal grandfather did for her which was teaching her to drive. She expresses how this act impacted her confidence and gave her a new sense of freedom.

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Oh, I've been I've been so fortunate. There have been many people who've been really kind to me, but the one person who comes to mind is my maternal grandfather. He really did give me a really incredible gift, but at the time, neither of us really appreciated it. But his teaching me to drive when I was 15 years old was more than a kindness. It turned out to really sort of shape my life.

So, there are three small towns, including Morris, where I live, that decided to put their resources, together and make a regional high school. Back then, this was quite an innovative idea, and it, really, you know, sort of raised the educational bar for all of us students. But the summers were hard, at least for me, because all of my best friends lived in the other towns, not Morris. And this was a problem because my father was working in Waterbury, Connecticut, and my mother did not drive. She never learned to drive.

My grandfather had been a traditionalist, and he believed that only his sons needed to drive, and his daughters would be married, and they wouldn't need to drive. So, during the school year, my friends and I got to see each other most days, and that was fine. But during summer vacations, my friends and I were separated, and my mother certainly couldn't go, you know, driving me around because she couldn't even go to the grocery store by herself. So, during the summers, which at that point seemed pretty endless, my mother and my younger brother and I would spend time at my grandfather's house in Roxbury, and many days, we'd be fishing off the shore of this new lake that had destroyed his old farm. So, for me, it was quiet and sad, and for a teenager, pretty boring.

For my grandfather, it must have been a kind of misery. So, the summer after my fifteenth birthday, my grandfather noticed that I seemed to be looking pretty bored, and he was feeling pretty bored too. So, one day, he came up with an idea. He said he had a jeep that he wasn't driving every day, so he said, why don't we go back, and I will teach you how to drive? By now, he had sort of progressed a little bit.

He didn't have so many qualms about women driving anymore. So, we drove the Jeep out into the field behind his house, and he taught me how to drive a stick shift. So, after a few days of driving around in big circles through the grass, I actually had made my own little dirt track back there. And that summer, every day, I would go out there and drive around and around on my dirt track, and I got confident and faster, and I'd kick up a lot of dust and picture myself on road trips, going to places I'd never seen. And it turned out to be one of the best summers I'd ever spent.

But I was still only 15, and I couldn't get my driver's license yet for another year. So, it was eight weeks before my sixteenth birthday when my father died suddenly, unexpectedly at the age of 48. So, after the initial shock, the reality of, life in the country without being able to drive sort of hit us all in the face. I did ask high school teachers who are just generous beyond anything I could have imagined. My music teacher, mister Eddie, was also the driver's ed teacher.

He made sure that I got into the driver's ed class as soon as possible. And I already knew how to drive a standard transmission, thanks to my grandfather. So, essentially, all I had to do was do a written test and a road test, and now I was a driver. And as for me, well, this was like autonomy and identity. So now I could drive myself to my cello lessons by myself.

I got to be a cheerleader, and I could get to the basketball games and the after game parties all on my own. I became a majorette in the high school marching band, and I can now drive myself to all the parades wherever the band was performing. And when our senior play was ongoing, I never had to miss a rehearsal. The other thing this did for me, the driving, gave me more self-confidence than I'd ever had before. And this was tremendously important because my future after high school, to me, felt like a big question mark.

I needed to go to college, but it required a full scholarship for four years. After that, when I decided to get a Master of Arts in teaching, that required a fellowship too. And, frankly, I don't know if I would have had the drive and the determination to plow through this stuff and to accomplish this if I hadn't had the self-confidence that my grandfather's driving lessons had given me when I desperately needed it. So, his driving lessons were a gift really that informed so much of the rest of my life, And I really wish he had lived long enough for me to tell him how important he was to me and to thank him for his eternal kindness

University of Massachusetts Amherst

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