Optimism Should Be Driving Force

A gain, there are more stories and just as much talk about the horrible dilemma confronting so many young Americans who go to work burdened with a daily headache on account of worries that their children aren’t being cared for adequately.

Because the country seems to be minus a memory, this problem - baby-sitting, day care, whatever you want to label it - is described in terms that would easily lead you to believe it only became an issue in the wake of a famous trial.

“I was 12 when I first went to work,” Mary Fasano was saying. “It was at the Warren cotton mill in Rhode Island. I worked the looms. I spent seven years in the mill. I was so good at my job that I became a weaver when I was 16.”

Mary Fasano is one of my resident experts on life in general and working mothers, specifically. She will be 90 in May and Monday she wore a tan sweater, black skirt and glasses as she sat at a desk in the front room of her home in Braintree, Mass. writing her autobiography by hand on a yellow lined legal pad.

“I don’t do well with typing,” she pointed out. “My son is getting me a computer. An IBM, I think. This week maybe.”

In June, Mary Fasano became the oldest person ever to graduate from Harvard. It took 17 years as she traveled back and forth from college to her house using public transportation, and she did it without whining about any hardships.

Perhaps because, by the time she got accepted to Harvard, the idea of juggling school, work and family was a snap. After all, she didn’t begin high school until she was 69 but graduated in only two years, at age 71.

“The reason I never went to high school was I was raised in sort of a foster home,” she recalled, “and the culture then was that boys would go to school and girls would go to work. But I still remember there was a rich girl from Tiverton who came to school in Warren driven by a chauffeur and I always thought I was just as smart as she was. I could keep up with her.”

Today, we’re in a country where many seem capable of collapse when a certain brand of brie cannot be located on a grocery shelf. Our idea of sacrifice is an evening without cable television or assembling dinner minus a microwave. We have difficulty imagining a single day without cell phones, computers, automobiles, dry cleaning and take-out meals.

Then, with the Louise Woodward trial, society was suddenly immersed in the legitimate problem of child care as if no women ever worked and not a single infant had been watched by a babysitter prior to February of 1997. Self-absorption often seems to be one of our most prominent social characteristics.

Mary Fasano has five children, 20 grandchildren, and 20 great-grandchildren. She worked in the family diner - Fasano’s - for 25 years, seven days a week. About 15 years ago, along with her daughter Marta, she sold the diner and started a catering service out of the first floor of the single-family home she still lives in directly behind the old diner.

“I was going to UMass-Boston,” her daughter Marta said. “And I told her, ‘Ma, we can go together.’ But she told me, ‘You go to UMass. I’m going to Harvard.”’

“I knew Harvard from reading about it all my life,” Mary Fasano said. “That’s where I wanted to go.

“It wasn’t that hard,” she said. “Life is hard when you make it hard. If you spend all day talking about how difficult things are or what a tough time you’re having, then that’s your fault. People can do incredible things when they set their mind to it, but you have to stop complaining and just do it.”

Today, like clockwork, she will take the ‘T’ from Braintree to Harvard in order to attend a computer class on Church Street in Cambridge. She is almost 90 yet cheers the arrival of each day with the infectious optimism of a teenager.

She has raised a whole family and worked an entire lifetime without ever submitting to depression or anxiety because a baby-sitter was undependable, the latte wasn’t hot, or the kids had nothing to do. Now, beside a computer class, she attends lectures on Greek literature a couple of times a week and dreams of being invited to the White House because she is proud, curious, and ever alert to any potential opportunity.

“I went to China a few years ago,” Mary Fasano recalled yesterday as she wrote in longhand about her wonderful life. “And I’ll never forget: A kid on a bike came up to me in the street and said, ‘How can I get to America?’ We don’t realize how good things are here and what a marvelous country we live in. People should be more optimistic.”

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