Essay: "How Adrienne Rich Taught Me To Drive"
Read Kenny Fries's essay about Adrienne Rich from The Progressive here.
“When I was in high school, all of my friends took driver’s education. It was 1976, fourteen years before the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) would require public schools to provide full access to disabled and nondisabled alike. I was sixteen, many years before my awareness of myself as a disabled person would begin to blossom. I sat out driver’s ed during my high school years.
Besides Mrs. Green, my elderly next-door neighbor who had polio when she was a child, I did not know anyone who was disabled. And all I knew about Mrs. Green’s disability history was that when she was much younger she had rigged up a system of blocks and pulleys, her own primitive version of hand-controls, which enabled her to drive.”