After a summer-soaker rainfall, the silver-flash of the black asphalt driveway sparkles.  I leave the threshold of Nanny’s driveway as the sun shines upon it, step away to start, run, find order, at eighteen-years-old.  I leave Darien High School behind, the little town of Darien, take a deep breath, leave Mom and her lack of order behind, to look for the meaning of my life.

Three teachers’ words follow me as I leave high school.

“Simplify your art,” said Mrs. Light, a jewelry and ceramics teacher.

“Why don’t high school students protest and stand up for something important today?  Why, when I was in school, we protested the Vietnam War!” said Mr. McCarthy, an English teacher, who looked at my class in disgust.

What am I going to protest?  Maybe I should protest that Mom has to sit in a car line at a station for gas, due to the gasoline crisis, which makes her late for her factory job.  Maybe I should protest about Mom’s stress that infiltrates my bones, as she hurries out the door and bitches, “I have to get to work.  I have five mouths to feed,” and leaves my sisters and me to fend for breakfasts, bag lunches, and getting to school ourselves.  Maybe I should protest how, deep down in my bones, I worry over Mom’s burden to support us, how I hate that she sits in a car line, how I hate St. Mary’s Thanksgiving donation of a basket of food that sits on the kitchen table, and of how I hate the person that I am, terrorized by my parents’ battles.  No, none of this is like the Vietnam War.  Someday, please, Dear, Sweet, Jesus, give me something important to protest about.

I sit at my desk in Mr. McCarthy’s class and stare at him, torturous, wiry anger in my throat.  I want to tell him everything, this young teacher with the beard and wide tie, who takes extra time to help me structure a writing assignment, and who writes in my yearbook that he hopes good things happen in my life.  Yet, I can’t do it.  Besides being disgustingly shy, I’d never let the snobby, rich, Darien teens, my classmates, know any more than what they presume about my rent-subsidized life in an Allen O’Neill home.

“Keep writing, Jean, you have something special in you,” wrote Mrs. Marshall, another English teacher, on one of my many stories.

I leave Nanny’s driveway.  I leave the sun-covered sunflowers that surround Uncle Pippi’s garden by summer’s end.  No longer do the flowers tower over my head, as years ago, when Mom paraded my sisters and me around the garden in her divorce march.  I leave this beautiful, simple place that God has given me the gift of knowing.

Note:  Eight years later, with a college degree under my workhorse thumb, a career that circles from New Haven, New York City, to Stamford, I marry, and raise my children, in a very different way from Mom’s way, learning how to love.  Even later in life, lack of order follows Mom, who suffers from Ataxia, meaning “lack of order.”  This is the complete opposite of me, one who wants order.