Driving Miss Norma by Tim Bauerschmidt

Author:Tim Bauerschmidt
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2017-03-23T04:00:00+00:00

Late one evening just a couple of days after the CBS crew had left, we received a photograph on our Facebook page from a sweet-looking gentleman located in Zurich, Switzerland. It showed him holding a handwritten note on a piece of white paper that said “Bravo, Norma, I you,” and we could see that he had signed his name at the bottom. “What a nice man,” I said to Tim, sliding the laptop toward him so he could see.

Exhausted, I closed the computer and tried to get some sleep. The next morning when I opened my laptop’s silver lid, the photo of the nice man was still up on the screen. Tim and I looked at it more closely and at the same time exclaimed, “Holy shit! That’s Paulo Coelho!” The man in the photograph turned out to be the author of The Alchemist, a favorite book of mine. He was also the world’s most-translated living author and a national hero in his native country of Brazil. Paulo Coelho had posted the photo on his Facebook page too, which happened to have twenty-eight million followers.

The next day the Driving Miss Norma page received tens of thousands of messages from around the world, most of them from Brazil. Soon Tim was teaching himself some Portuguese phrases so he could reply to as many of the personal messages from there as possible. The Facebook page received 39,000 new “likes” and we fielded 93 media requests from around the world that day. At one point there were more than 106,000 unread messages, and the computer screen was flashing with new ones coming in faster than we could possibly read them. We had officially gone “viral”—and the CBS piece had not even aired yet.

Nothing else, though, had yet changed in our lives. Norma still followed her routine like clockwork—up at nine in the morning and dancing to bed at nine at night. She would peacefully work on jigsaw puzzles set up on the picnic table outside our motor home, Ringo, her constant companion, napping by her feet while Tim and I went through all the messages. In a virtual sense, everything had changed, but in reality, things were exactly as they had been.

Then one afternoon we took Norma for a walk on Saint Augustine Beach. Tim pushed his mom in her wheelchair over the hard-packed sand while Ringo and I dipped our toes into the water. Two women nearby were out collecting seashells.

“Is that Miss Norma?!” we heard one of the women ask her friend.

“It is—it’s her!” the other exclaimed.

Both women quickly approached Norma. “Oh, you are such an inspiration!”

I stood there astonished. The words that I had seen on the computer screen suddenly had breath and faces, gave handshakes and hugs. They smelled of sunscreen and perfume. My tiny mother-in-law had been recognized in public. She was being hailed as a hero.

Sitting tall in her wheelchair, Norma smiled broadly at the women, her eyes full of life. She engaged with these lovely strangers like a professional, laughing and shaking hands.

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