“Figured that’d be impossible for an Indiana farm boy.”
During the years I taught school I was often assigned to teach driver’s training. All those experiences are a separate chapter (book) within themselves.
Near the end of the six weeks training, I required each student to plan a trip. It had to be a trip totaling at least one hundred miles round trip. I would have each student use a road map and write out the routes and highways they would be taking. They had to list the mileage they would be driving and figure the gas mileage they would be getting. They could choose to go where ever they pleased.
I had a student who, after planning her trip, was asked where she would be going, and she said, “To the cemetery.” “What?, to a cemetery?” “Yes, a cemetery,” she answered. She said there was a grave there she wanted to visit. I asked her if it was a relative and was told no. “You’ll see when we get there.” She drove us to the cemetery.
The cemetery was in Grant County in eastern Indiana. When we got there it was similar to any other flat land cemetery you might see in Indiana. As we drove in I thought of my grandfather’s resting place a few miles south of Terre Haute. When we got out of the car the student told me there were two graves here she wanted to see; one was a school teacher the other had been a student of that teacher.
“There wasn’t anything very different about him except
that he had a strange ability to take you along with his feelings.” (Adeline Nall)
For six years Nall taught Dean literature, Spanish, math, and speech. Dean once told Nall that someday he was going to be in the movies. “Course I didn’t pay attention, figured that’d be impossible for an Indiana farm boy.”
Speaking from personal experience, you never know the abilities, the desires, or the outcomes of some of those boys or girls who came from rural Indiana. A lot of folks have miscalculated what would be the outcomes of others.
I know.
March 15, 2014
Keep on,
Larry Adamson