When You Struggle, I’ll Be Along for the Ride

In first grade, I took the public bus to school.

You would have to know what our old neighborhood was like, and how protective and careful my mother was, to fully understand how unbelievable this is, but you will just have to trust me on this. The hometown of my youth, today a tony suburb of Baltimore and D.C., was just a piece of Americana then, a small boating town where everyone knew everyone.

Like most of the moms in the neighborhood in those days, my mom had the car only one day a week,...