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Wednesday, May 28, 2008

How my heart breaks....

Whenever I read stories like this....

http://www.roanoke.com/news/roanoke/wb/163576

When I was 15 years old, I took Driver's Ed at Franklin County High School. My instructor was a wrestling coach. He was big and burly and scared the hell out of me. He would yell 'RANSOME' at top time of his lungs when he would tell me to go left and I turned right. He showed up for class one day with a big black permanent marker and put a 'L' on my left hand and a 'R' on the back of my right hand and then he said when I tell ya to turn right...look at your hands. It didn't come off for about 6 months. I have never confused my left and right since. But this is a story of my heart and you all know it is attached to my sleeve and gets bruised and battered regularly. So I'm 15 and a 1/2 , driving down the streets of Rocky Mount with Coach and 2 other students. The radio was on and a news story began about a mother who had taken a one pound can of black pepper and poured it down her 9 month old's throat, asphyxiating him. I began to cry and my hands shook so badly that the coach ordered me to stop right in the middle of the road and that big bear of a man patted my shoulder and told me it would be OK. I looked up to see that he was crying as hard as I was. I just could never understand how a mother could do that. We sat there in the car for over 20 minutes and then he instructed one of the students in the back to take over driving. When I finished Driver's Ed, earning my certificate, he told me to do myself a favor and never listen to the radio in the car. This is a true story and can be verified by my buddy Mark who was in the back seat at the time. Call me I'll give ya his cell number, he lives in Portsmouth, VA and is a Special Ed teacher. Coach also took to calling me 'the smartest dumb girl he ever met.' All I know is that whenever he would see me in the hall or around school....he would walk over and ruffle my hair and wink at me...like I knew his secret....he was a softie!

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