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Mary Anne is my mentor and also my grandmother's friend. Her parents were immigrants from Malta and she has lived in San Francisco and the surrounding Bay Area her entire life. She has three children and five grandchildren and worked a variety or roles in the education system from financial aid counselor to finishing out the last 15 years of her career working with high school students learning English as a second language. She has lived through so much from being widowed at a young age to losing half of her house in a fire. She is resilient, open minded, kind and an older adult I truly admire and hope to be like as I age.

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I also really enjoy taking to Mary Anne because I currently work with kids and most of them are bilingual with English being their second language. I find language very interesting and the process of learning it being so different at different ages. She grew up with her mother speaking to her in Maltese and her father speaking in English. What she also mentioned was when she was growing up and her parents came here, they had to learn English to live. There wasn't any translators or many other people that spoke Maltese. Compared to today, translators are available and you can change the language when looking online. She also mentioned that she has lost of lot of her Maltese just because she has no one to speak it to anymore. She has a lot of experience with language and she mentioned that when she was still working, the biggest high school in that area had 37 different languages that were spoken either by students or at home by their parents or family.

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"Get all the education that you can because with education you have power."

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Growing up in San Francisco, there was major diversity and a lot more acceptance than other places in the US at that time. She told me a story about how when she was 10 her family moved from a very diverse neighborhood to a nicer, whiter part of town which she described as an, "isolated society". She said that even at 10 she recognized the divide and recognized where she was. She also said that she didn't really like that neighborhood and enjoys being in a diverse environment. She said that where she grew up really shaped her view of people and culture and it was a much different place to be than the rest of the US at the time.

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Working in the education system, Mary Anne has seen the changes in it and even just children in general. We talked about how with technology such as spell check and grammar check, it is much harder today for students to learn the basics as she did and taught for so long. I also asked about the difference when she was raising her kids to now seeing her grandchildren grow up- she said her kids had more freedom and were always riding bikes and the whole community was looking after them. Now, the world is much scarier and that sense of safety and community is something her grandchildren don't get to enjoy.

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One of my favorite things that Mary Anne pointed out that has changed greatly from her time is that when she was growing up and as a daughter of an immigrant, everyone seemed to be trying to assimilate and almost getting rid of their identity and where they came from to be an American. She said today it is the complete opposite where people want to own their cultures and their heritage rather than erase it. This made me very happy to hear because although the world today may not always seem is, we are so much more accepting of different cultures and heritages and where people came from.

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I asked about songs that were important to her or had more of an impact and she talked about how her father would always play this song and loved Hank Williams. As well as her mother played a lot of 50s and 60s pop music.

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When I asked Mary Anne about ageism and explained what we had learned, she had a very funny view on it. She said that sometimes she forgets how old she is and she's the one calling other people "old" or making old jokes. I found this very interesting and it made me think what factors contribute to how much ageism a person tends to experience and how that changes their aging experience.

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The world has changed a lot over Mary Anne's lifetime and when I asked what she thought the biggest difference from when she was growing up to today and she talked about the sense of community and knowing your neighbors. She told me stories about how every afternoon at 4 she and the other neighborhood ladies would sit and have a cup of coffee. She was younger than most of her neighborhood when she moved in and was a widowed mother of 3. After coffee, the ladies would break out the booze she said which she would pass on due to the three kids running around that she still had to take care of! They had block parties and community events which is not something we see so much now. Also, being young when she moved into her current home, she said that many of her original neighbors have passed away and only about 4 original owners are still left in her neighborhood.

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After discussing major life events and things that have happened in her lifetime I asked how this has changed her view on the world excluding just the way you change with age and time. She grew up in San Francisco for her entire life and explained that she had always had a pretty liberal view and, "As I've seen more pain being inflicted on people and the reasons for that pain being inflicted on people, I've become a lot less tolerant."

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One of Mary Anne's most memorable big world events was the assassination of JFK. She described, "They made and announcement that there had been a shooting in Dallas over the speaker at my school and the President had been injured. I was in a social science class. They told us we all had to go home and by the time we all got home we found out that he had been killed." She also spoke about the news when she was younger explaining they heard a lot about the Cold War and Castro.

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November 22, 1963: Death of the President | JFK Library

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Although he had not formally announced his candidacy, it was clear that JFK was going to run and he seemed confident—though not over-confident— about his chances for re-election. At the end of September, the President traveled west speaking in nine different states in less than a week. While the tri…