Success Stories & Cinnamon Twists (Or, How a Doughnut Helped Me Become Independent)

I know I already posted today, but my mother just told me a story worth sharing.

She and a friend were out to brunch this morning, and their waitress recognized her. My mother told her she used to work in the bank in Winchester, the town my family lived in before moving to the city. The waitress then told my mom and her friend that she used to run a bakery across from the bank my mother worked at. Normally, the conversation would've ended there, but this was a pretty special bakery.

This particular bakery, my mother told the woman, was the very first place I was able to walk to on my own! It was about a three-minute walk from my house in Winchester to the bakery on Winchester's main street. In the summer, when I was about nine or ten years old and could finally walk with minimal assistance, a short stroll uptown with either of my parents (usually my mother) was a typical source of physio. Early on, the bakery was typically as far as I could go. As a reward, we would go inside (the building was easy to get in and out of) and I would be treated to one of their cinnamon twist doughnuts!

As I got a little older and my walking improved, I was able to make the trek on my own. Once I mastered the distance between home and the bakery, I was allowed to go further. First, another few minutes to the local pharmacy, one of the first places I got comic books from, then further still to the post office to get our mail, a major source of allowance for me at the time. Eventually, I was capable enough to traverse several blocks to the town's convenience and video stores, for the occasional movie and snack!

My mother shared this, with her friend, whose daughter is also disabled, chiming in, and had the waitress in tears, telling them how much the story made her day. Hearing about it, it kind of made mine, too!

Cheers