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Norma talks about how she found herself in the later stages of life identifying with something new- being an athlete. She talks about the skills she has acquired through this sport apply on the water and in her personal life as well. Listen to Norma’s journey to discovering one of her new passions of whitewater kayaking. Norma's Story Norma talks about how she found herself in the later stages of life identifying with something new- being an athlete. She talks about the skills she has acquired through this sport apply on the water and in her personal life as well. Listen to Norma’s journey to discovering one of her new passions of whitewater kayaking. Norma's Story 00:00 / 03:39 Interviewer: Norma, I was wondering if you could tell me a little bit of how you first got interested in the sport of whitewater kayak. Norma: Well, I loved water since I was a little kid, I was the one that was not afraid to just jump right in there, but um, I grew up with EDD so my parents were not real happy about letting me go near water. So it may have been making up for lost time but I actually started canoe camping with some friends after my divorce, and that was wonderful. But then, one of those friends and we decided to take on a whitewater workshop just let us to be able to let us tackle a few more rivers that had some little rapids on them, and I just got hooked on that. So I took some lessons, started going out with Appalachian Mountain clubs and other groups like that. I do that all spring, summer and fall pretty much. I feel like I have not come as far as I might have because I just don’t get out enough. But it’s really about practice and not being scared, not giving up, you know there is a lot of discouragement, but you got to push through that. Sometimes you just feel like ‘I’ll never get through this’ but gradually, you do, getting a feel of balancing in the little boat and maneuvering what sometimes are quite subtle shifts of your weight and leans, it was not an automatic process getting used to that but I finally have it, more or less. So that’s, you know, every little step is empowering, it’s really special because when I was a child I was not athletic at all, I was more like the kid that got picked last for the volleyball team, or got sent out into the out field, so I never identified as an athlete at all. But now I have discovered what that feels like, to be active, and enjoy it and think about skills, and pick up skills. It's a whole different outlook. It’s a rapid on a particular river that they say its a mile of continuous rapids and of course when I first ran into it, I was just like “Let’s just get through this” boom, right along, and then people said, try some turns, try to stop and rest and look at what is ahead of you, and see what’s coming, and I mean, that kind of applied to anything in life, you know. If you stop, and rest, and get calm, and look outward a bit, then you’re going to do better. And it’s like a puzzle, you know, you’re working your muscles but you’re also thinking of it like an obstacle course, like, how am I going to get through this rapid? Or what do I need to avoid, where do I need to be? And then execute that. I think that’s good for the brain, I hope it will help me as I get older, and I hope I can keep at it as I get older. That is a worry but, I really hope so. Previous Next

< Back Jesse's Story, 2021 Jesse shares a story with Kelly about his trip to Bhutan and the lessons helearned from his Buddhist practice. 00:00 / 03:09 I've been a Buddhist my whole life. And I had been working with a teacher who had a very big impact on my life. I studied with him for about 13 years and he died in 1987. And I was kind of grieving and wondering, you know, where do I go from here? I felt kind of lost. I just had this idea of going on a retreat, maybe not a retreat, but a pilgrimage, to Bhutan, which is nearIndia. And because that was a place where he had spent some time and it had a very powerful impact on him; it changed his life. So I figured I'd go there and just experience that place as he did. I didn't want to do it alone. It's just that I don't like traveling alone. So I looked for some of these tours, that were going to Bhutan, which there aren’t many of because it is kind of out of the way. And it's kind of expensive to get there. So I was looking for some tours, and I found one in a Buddhist magazine. These people went exactly where I wanted to go. They're going to India and Bhutan and Nepal. And the guide was a Buddhist painter. It sounded interesting to me. And I contacted them and signed up. There were about 10 of us on the trip. And they were all Sufis for some reason. They were American Sufis and their main goal was going to India, where they had a temple that they were going to. My main goal was to visit a particular monastery where he spent time in Bhutan called Taktsang monastery. And it's just on a cliff. It's just like a flat cliff.And it's this, these buildings on the side of it are quite amazing. It's a very disorienting place because you're up on the side of a cliff, you know, and you just like space all around you. So it's quite remarkable. I almost didn't make it. I got sick in India. And I was in bed for a couple of days. And I was really worried that I wasn't going to make it to this monastery because that was the whole goal of this trip. You know, I was really getting kind of bummed out. But the fever broke. And the next day I was able to get up and go and we hiked up, it's about a three hour hike up to the monastery. And I was really hurting. And you know, I've been sick in bed for a couple of days. I was dehydrated. It was a tough climb. But luckily there were some horses that were going up and down to the monastery. And a fellow was with one of the horses and he just took a look at me. He goes, “Want to ride the horse?” And I agreed to do it. It took me up most of the way if not all the way, but most of the way, and I was able to get there in spite of being really sick. I beat most of them up there because of the horse. I don't know exactly how tall it is. But it's pretty steep. The monastery in the distance and it's up on this cliff. The closer you get the more you see these paths right along the edge of the cliff. It's pretty wild. It wasn't that scary. No, it was always a fairly wide path. You have these VISTAs you could see forever but it wasn't actually treacherous. It looked hard to get to but it wasn't that hard to walk there. Previous Next

< Back McKenna's Story McKenna describes her love of gymnastics in this story. The lessons it taught her and the people she met along the way are invaluable to her, and she will carry these lessons with her throughout the rest of her life. 00:00 / 03:21 McKenna: The reason that my mother put myself and my two younger siblings in gymnastics, um, was because my younger brother, who is three years younger than me, he always used to stand on his head in his car seat, um, like, as my mom would buckle everybody in. My siblings are twins, so getting everybody in the car was an ordeal because she didn't have enough hands to possibly buckle everyone in at once. And my brother would always slip on to his head in his booster seat and hold himself up there, and kind of swing around. And there were a couple close calls of him, you know, making some choices that maybe weren’t the safest for him. My mom put us into gymnastics, because she thought, you know, that this would be a safe place for them to learn how to be monkeys and not get hurt. Uh, and maybe not to put themselves in a headstand in the car seat. My brother, after - he did gymnastics only for a few years with us in the very beginning, and he quickly decided that that wasn't for him. And my mom for the most part was our chauffeur, here, there, and everywhere for gymnastics, um, although they both always made a point - sometimes, my sister and I had different meets, and we’d be in different places, so they would have to separate out for those meets. I think that, as I got older, a lot of my friends stopped doing it competitively, so I was - at one point I was like the oldest girl in the gym, other than one other girl who is a year younger than me by, like, a landslide. And, so. At that point in time - I don't know. I felt a little disconnected from my peers in that moment, but. Gymnastics is very physically demanding and, I mean, I dislocated my hip when I was thirteen and I tore some tendons in my ankle at 17. And there were days that I - there were 100% days where I was like, “Why am I doing this? Why am I here? I could be with my friends, I could be doing this,” whatever that could be might have been. “Why am I here?” and I think the life lesson from pushing through those days, and looking back on it now, the character I have for that, and the grit that I learned to say, “Okay, I made this commitment.” Some of my very greatest life lessons-and I constantly reflect back on things I learned from doing gymnastics-as like, you know, okay, back up and take a breather and we approach the situation as like, life skills as opposed to just physical sports skills. I learned a lot from gymnastics in the physical sense but most in the, like emotional and mental well-being and awareness sense. That I, I think I was ready to part ways. I felt like I had, I had learned what I could as a person. And sure, I could have kept going and learned new skills, and sure, I could have, if I really wanted to, have gone further with it but I just, I came to a point that I knew my body was not gonna be able to keep going. But, gymnastics was the first place that had an understanding that family could be more than just blood related. You come to college and you kind of have your home away from home or your home in a person more so than a place kind of thing and I learned that from gymnastics. Previous Next

Obi's Story Obi discusses the influence of one teacher in his life, and how that teacher influenced not only his future career goals, but also his work ethic. Scroll to Listen Obi's Story 00:00 / 03:14 Obi: So when I was a kid, gonna say sixth, seventh grade, I was definitely in the wrong crowd. Did not work hard, played too much, skipped classes. It was all slowly accumulating and it really hit seventh grade. Seventh grade is when I stopped caring about school, it was when, um, I was emailing professors - teachers at the time - “How can I bring my F to a C? Or how can I bring my D to a B?” two weeks before the semester ended. So, and I didn’t really think of my future like that. Like if someone asked me, “Where do you see yourself in five years?” I wouldn’t know what to say. Eighth grade hit, the beginning of eighth grade, I had an engineering teacher, named Mr. Dawes. And I really liked engineering class for some reason. It just made sense to me. And, there was one time during lunch, mind you I was in the rambunctious group, you know. So in lunchtime we’d be making noises, you know, throwing stuff, all that stuff. And I was in lunch with my friends, and Mr. Dawes came out of nowhere and was like, “Obi, can I talk to you?” I was like, “Sure, yeah, what’s up?” So he pulled me aside in the hallway and was like, “Obi, if I could be - you want me to be completely honest with you, I could see you as a really great engineer in the future.” And in my mind, I'm like, “Is he serious right now? Like, is he - you’re telling me this?” I come from a place that’s predominantly white and doesn’t really give any second thoughts to African-American kids, other than sports. You know, the only compliments I had growing up was football-related, or sports-related. Never academic. And the other kids that looked like me never had any compliments academics-wise. It was only sports. So this was the first time in a school setting where a teacher approached me and said, “You can do this.” And it wasn’t had to do with sports. It doesn’t have to do with a game I had last weekend. It has to do with academics. So that really changed my perspective on life, honestly. He said, like, “Yo, I want you to be connected with me for the next couple of years, and we can talk about this. I can hook you up with people.” And I’m like - I was starstruck. I was starstruck because a person that’s older than me, who’s not my immediate family, who looks different than me, who’s a teacher in my school, really genuinely thinks I can make it in academics. My life really changed academics-wise to like - I gotta kill it. Not just for myself, but for the people that believed in me. My parents, this engineering teacher, who really took the time and told me - you can do this. So for the past like - for the next two years, I wanted to be an engineer. Like, engineer, engineer, engineer. I don’t care what I’m doing. You know, then I fell in love with biology. And that faith that my engineering teacher instilled in me, it carried on to my new profound love for medicine and my goal to become a doctor. And I’ve been riding that ever since. Of course I’ve found multiple reasons and multiple passions and multiple motives of why I want to become a doctor after that, but that one moment in the lunchroom. That one interaction I had with that engineering teacher, really propelled me to be great in this.

Janice's Story In this story, Janice explains her life long connection to animals and how her experiences working with animals have become her most fulfilling achievements. Scroll to Listen Janice's Story 00:00 / 03:36 Janice: I have to say I was drawn to animals from the very start of my life. As soon as I—I grew up in the woods basically and explored a lot and can’t remember a time where animals weren’t special to me. I had a parakeet when I was a kid, as an adult I’ve had dogs, cats, rabbits, snakes, turtles, fish, a wonderful rat who traveled around on my shoulder, mice, gerbils, guinea pigs—I’ve might of left something out but you get the picture. When I got to be an adult, I read more, I learned more, and I started to support a lot of animal welfare organizations. And I got older I transitioned from animal welfare to animal rights. And basically, now I think I support both of them. The experience I’ve had with the most depth was also volunteering for a shelter, but this was for their training department. I worked as an assistant trainer for five years. I had just—I just learned so much. I mean, I was essentially was just thrown out to the training and floor and said, “ok now you work with them.” Rebecca: Oh my—what were you working with, dogs? Janice: Oh yes, dogs. Many of which were shelter dogs, and a lot of those owners were kind of really at the end of their rope because they couldn’t get the dog to respond the way the wanted it to and it almost was like we were the last stop before being returned to the shelter. So I realized that my biggest job was to make get the owners to like their dogs, and to get the dogs to trust the owners, and to get them all to realize training was fun. I had an amazing assortment of dogs. In five years, you can imagine—a golden retriever who wouldn’t work at all for treats but would do anything for a hug; a Doberman pinscher who had to do everything behind a curtain because she was so frightened of all the other dogs. I had dogs—little Shih Tzus—who had terrible abuse histories who just tried so hard. They were so earnest and so brave. There was another dog there who was being raised in a bilingual household and we had to say, “Bueno! Bueno!” I was never bored. I was in my element. I became the hotline for my friends and family who were having trouble with their dogs, and I only stopped when I moved away. When I moved away from Massachusetts to Maryland. I do consider it one of the greatest experiences of my life. Rebecca: That sounds so incredible. Janice: I’m proud. Rebecca: You should be. Janice: You know, I’ve had a lot of jobs, a lot of professional positions, and I have two master’s degrees, but when people ask me what I do, well I say I’m a former dog trainer because I’m just so happy that I did that.

< Back Yaliah's Story 00:00 / 04:46 Previous Next

< Back 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. 00:00 / 05:05 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 Previous Next

< Back Mary Ann's Story, Fall 2025 Mary Ann reflects on a life shaped by early loss and resilience, following the sudden death of her father, which forced her family to quickly adapt and develop survival skills. A pivotal moment came when her future husband encouraged her to pursue a long-held but unimagined dream of becoming a doctor. Today, she looks back on a rich, unexpected life filled with family, professional accomplishments, and personal fulfillment, appreciating the support and opportunities that helped shape her journey. 00:00 / 04:13 When I was growing up as a child, I really didn't have any idea of what my life was going to be like; I really didn't imagine that. My family didn't have a lot of money, and there was no family business or, you know, career pathway that I might have been expected to follow. No one was really asking me what I was going to be when I grew up. But, um, I think what really sort of derailed any thoughts that I might have had about my future life was my father dying suddenly several days after his 48th birthday. His death was certainly nothing my mother, my younger brother, and I were prepared for. Uh, there was no money, and my mother had never learned to drive, so the next few years, we were learning survival skills, including driving lessons for me and for my mother. And then my mother went back to work as a nurse, although she hadn't done any nursing for over 16 years. Um, so my main task, though, was applying for colleges that would offer me full scholarships. So, I've been a good student, and I was very fortunate that I ended up going to Brown University on a scholarship. Um, during the summers, I worked as a waitress, which is where I first met Ralph, who eventually became my husband. During college, it was sort of like, let's get through four years and then figure out what we're going to do. Um, teaching seem to be a good thing, and I thought I could probably do that pretty well. So, I ended up getting a full scholarship at Yale, and I did a Master of Arts in Teaching there, and I trained to be a biology teacher. And then my very first job ended up being here in Massachusetts, in Brookline, at a public school that was very progressive and very innovative. So, Ralph and I stayed in touch during our college years, and when he was in Senegal, in West Africa, in the Peace Corps. Um, so when he came back to the US, we reconnected, we fell in love, we got engaged, and married. And then we started our life together on Long Island, and we were both teaching there. So one day, we were coming back from a weekend ski trip, someplace up in Vermont, and I was complaining about getting bored grading 125 biology lab reports every week. So, Ralph said, “Is there something else you like to do?” So, I told him, “I would like to be a doctor,” and he said, “Well, why don't you do it?” Um, I really didn't expect that at all because as a kid and a teenager, even though I spent time in hospitals, um, I had never really wanted to be a nurse. But, becoming a doctor was something that I had never even dared, um, imagine. So, I wouldn't have gone any further without Ralph’s support. So, I went to medical school at New York Medical College. Later on, I became a pulmonologist and then a radiation oncologist, and I worked at several medical centers on Long Island. And then I received a job offer here in Springfield. So, I worked in Springfield for 27 years, and then I retired from medicine around nine years ago. So, when I think about my life growing up, becoming a doctor was something I never could have imagined as a child. Um, it definitely wouldn't have happened without Ralph’s support, and his willingness to go where I wanted to be or where my work required has been a gift that really exceeds any value. Um, I could never growing up, I could never imagine having a husband, a daughter, a son-in-law, and now we have a wonderful grandson named Avery who just turned two years old a couple of weeks ago. So, um, I've gotten to have a very rich, complicated life that I never could have imagined at 5 years old or at 16 or 25 or 30 or 75, and now, after 80 years, um, it’s still amazing me now. Previous Next

< Back Bert's Story, Fall 2022 Bert speaks about her life journey and how not everything went as she planned. She talks about her adventures with her husband and kids and how she found her way to her career as a Speech Language Pathologist and how that career changed her view on life. 00:00 / 03:33 It seems to me that lots of people have kind of a plan in their life of what they would like to do, and they set about doing it. I never had such a plan. I was kind of a vague wanderer among libraries and was really interested in English literature and English history and studied for a bit in England for a little while and I didn’t have a glamour of what I wanted to do with my life. It seemed like it would be good to be useful, but I didn’t have much other plan than that. I got married shortly after college and we had a child and then because I had been an only child pretty much in my life, I thought we don’t want this child to be all alone we should have another one pretty soon. And it turned out that that one turned out to be twins. And suddenly wooo, I had three babies, they were less than two years of age, and I was supposed to figure out what to do with them and I had to stop wandering around wondering what book I was gonna read next. So, it was a pretty hectic and transformative time for me. I had to think of myself as a very different person, responsible for these three little babies and then three wild little boys and I started to sort of become somewhat more assertive I think. I had never been before. After being at home for quite some time with them I thought I really gotta get out of here a little bit and I saw a notice that Children’s Hospital School for Kids with Hearing Loss was looking for some volunteers and I thought well I could probably do that. And I arranged for a baysitter and went down and helped out mainly in an art class with kids with severe hearing losses and they were very interesting. But the director of the program kept saying you gotta go to graduate school. And so after a year of so of prompting I did start a graduate program in speech language at Catholic University. A friend from graduate school who was a little bit ahead of me called and said Bert I’m working at this great school you’ve gotta come and work here with me. It’s a school for preschool children, very young children, with a variety of pretty serious physical and neurological problems and they need another therapist. Okay, here I am. It turned out to be wonderful. The schools had a wonderful transdisciplinary approach so that instead of passing kids around from therapist to therapist or teacher to teacher or whatever, we were in teams. The parents, teachers, physical therapists, the occupational therapist, speech language therapist, we were in a team and we all had to understand what everybody else’s goals were for this child so that anytime you interacted with them whether you were changing a diaper or you were helping somebody have lunch, or you were playing together all of those goals had to be integrated. It was an incredible learning experience and it taught me way more than any course ever could ever have taught me. I never imagined so many interesting, challenging situations just kept unfolding one after another and with the enormous good fortune of always having very good people to work with, not a lot of money but a lot of really good, strong coworkers. I feel very fortunate in my unplanned, kind of wandering way. Previous Next

Caleigh's Story Caleigh reflects on the importance of becoming a role model for her five-year-old niece, Natalie. Being there for her as she grows up is something extremely important to Caleigh. Scroll to Listen Caleigh's Story 00:00 / 02:37 Caleigh: I just love stories in general anyways because it makes people who maybe would have never interacted realize their shared humanities. I just want say a story that I heard in class—It was a story in class about a young man who welcomed a little brother into his world, and he realized that this world was no longer about him and he wasn’t just a big brother, he was a role a model. Everything he accomplished and everything he strived for wasn’t only for himself but to set a good example for his brother. When I read that story in class it made me think of my five-year-old niece, Natalie, and we are very close. She’s my whole world, I love her so much. After reading that story, I took a step back and I was like, “who am I as an auntie and how does she see me?” She looks up to me, she mimics me, she wants to be just like me, she always wants to spend time with me, and it made me think about what kind of person do I want her looking up to? I am no longer just an auntie, but I am setting a good example for her. I want to show her that she is capable of anything she sets her mind to. I am the first one in my family to go to college and I would love to be a role model for her to see, you know, auntie goes to college, and I can do it and I want to be just like her. And through just reading that story of the man—the boy—who welcomed his brother in the world, it just connected me and him and we’ve never met. I hope that everything that I’ve learned in my 20 and a half years—today is my half birthday—I want to share those experiences with her so that she doesn’t make some of the mistakes that I’ve made, but also that she can follow in my footsteps because I feel like I am a great role model for her. That’s—you know—I have two older brothers. I never really had a female role model, other than my mom, someone that was closer to my age, so in a way we are so close, and I’ve been with her since she was in the womb.

< Back Naomi's Story Naomi talks about her experiences growing up and about how these experiences shaped her approach to parenting and helped her understand what she truly values in her relationships. Scroll to listen 00:00 / 03:16 Previous Next

Edie Kirk shares stories with Elise Boehm about her mother. She starts off by talking about her family’s background and her mother growing up. She then shares a story about how her mother became a nurse and shares other stories that show why she admires her mother so much. Edie's Story Edie Kirk shares stories with Elise Boehm about her mother. She starts off by talking about her family’s background and her mother growing up. She then shares a story about how her mother became a nurse and shares other stories that show why she admires her mother so much. Scroll to listen Edie's Story 00:00 / 04:18