By Linda Wessling

I have experienced numerous highs and lows in my life, each leading to emotional and spiritual growth. My life lesson, sunshine is not always easier than rain. I was elected to the 1978 Boston Globe All-Scholastic team in my senior year at Winthrop, Massachusetts high school. In 2008 I was inducted into the Winthrop High Hall of Fame. In the quarterfinals of the Eastern Conference State Championship match between Newburyport, Mass and my high school, exhausted from playing the entire game I was fouled after sinking an outside shot. The ball rolled into the basketball net and out. That loss which knocked us out of the semifinals remains like a ghost haunting me to this day.

At the end of my basketball career, at the banquet dinner, I experienced one of the most incredible pains of my life. The Coach’s Award each year is given to a team member who displayed strength, courage and leadership. In my senior year of high school, the award was given to another member of my basketball team. In high school, I was quiet and soft-spoken, but also very respectful to adults. I was humiliated as my basketball coach gestured deaf signals saying, “In the four years I have known Linda, this is how much she has spoken to me.” I ran to my house through Ingleside park with my sister following me and plopped myself into my bed and cried as if someone had died. My mother, unable to handle the situation, said that if acting in this manner was how I responded to my coach’s despicable behavior, she was not going to allow my participation in sports. I awoke in the morning upset at everything that had occurred at the sports banquet, but I held my head high and went to school. That pain cut through my heart as if Cupid scored a direct hit with a flaming arrow through my heart.

Pain can be the loss of a loved one, enduring a child’s broken heart, enduring your own broken heart, and in Hemingway’s words, “the betrayal of false friends,” and estrangement from a family member. My physical pain experiences include spinal fusion back surgery, lacerated righthand surgery, and in addition, I played assistant coach to my husband, Jack’s, many injuries and illnesses. One horrific experience occurred when my husband was hit head-on in an automobile crash. A 16-year-old boy on his way to pick up his friends, collided with Jack’s car on a rainy fall day. Jack was on his way back from watching the New York Marathon at a friend’s house in Lincoln, Massachusetts. 

I worked at Heartland Drug store in Allston at the time. I received a telephone call urging me to drive to the Mass. General emergency room because Jack was potentially facing surgery. Alone in the rain, I drove to MGH without any indication of where I was going.  After driving in circles, with tears streaming down my face, I pulled my car to an obscure side road. In a state of shock, I began walking, until a kind stranger pulled next to my car. He asked if I was in “some kind of trouble.” Through my tears I explained the situation and asked him for directions. Thank God for the kindness of strangers. The gentleman drove me to the emergency room instructing me to inquire at the nurse’s desk about my husband. 

In the emergency room, I was escorted to a waiting room, scared at what I might discover about my husband. Was he dead? A kind ER doctor took my hand and led me to the room where my husband lay bleeding from his jaw.  I overheard the boy’s parents discuss with each other how their son, knowing he was going to crash, threw himself across the passenger seat and thus endured minor injuries.   Jack suffered 14 fractures in his jaw, which a plastic surgeon who was called to the MGH Emergency Room, repaired with catlike precision. Jack’s jaw was wired shut and he was required to drink liquids with a syringe to keep the wires intact. It was Thanksgiving time and the best liquid available to me was turkey gravy. Each night I went to Brigham’s located in downtown Winthrop to buy a frappe for my husband. The employees at Brigham’s came to know me and would prepare extra-large frappes for me.

That frenzied MGH emergency room remains the scariest event of my life. When you experience a near death situation, you long to talk to the very person you need to speak with, worrying he is not there. Jack, a tough Marine sniper 14 years my senior, survived the crash with an extremely long road to recovery. I learned more about pain than joy that day. But that pain is embedded horrifically in my mind.

In 1984, I worked as a bookkeeper at Heartland Drug store located on Commonwealth Ave in Allston. I graduated from Boston University in 1982 with a degree in journalism with a concentration in magazine writing. I moved out of my childhood home in Winthrop with no clear path for a career. At 23 years old, I needed to experience living alone away from my parents. My parents were naturally upset by my need to spread my wings and fly away from my cozy childhood home. I spent less than a year substituting in the Boston school system. One day I was sent to East Boston as a fill-in for a teacher who experienced emotional upset from trying to control a basically uncontrolled classroom. At that time Boston was undergoing school busing attempting to give each student a chance at graduating from rough neighborhoods and into more well-established school systems.

I rode the MBTA line from Allston to East Boston with no expectation of a situation in a rapidly descending immersion into a school system with literally no controls. The classroom in which I found myself was something akin to a Farside cartoon. Paper airplanes, made from the fourth worksheet the students were given in a month’s-time, flew around my head with rapid speed and precision. At one point I called the principal to my classroom. I was fascinated by what little discipline he was able to dispense. When the day was over, the principal pleaded with me to return the next day. That experience ended my career as a substitute teacher.

My job at Heartland Drug was literally one of the best decisions I made in my life. Located in the heart of Allston, I met and have met friends from Tennessee, neighboring cities and towns to as far away as Egypt.  My biggest worry at the time was rent and utility bills. That job allowed me to meet my best friend and husband Jack where he worked at Pizzeria Uno bar and grill, located around the corner from my Allston apartment. As is the case with friends in life, I believe some friendships carry on while others dispel into infinity. 

Life isn’t about waiting for the storm to pass. It’s about learning how to dance in the rain.

                              

Linda Wessling is a resident of Uxbridge and a new correspondent for Blackstone Valley Xpress.