Grandson calls retired teacher Mary Wright “Babushka.”
FARMINGTON – Mary Wright takes her position as chairwoman of Farmington’s Board of Selectmen seriously though she’s known to toss in a quip now and then.
“If you can’t laugh, you might as well forget it,” the retired teacher said Thursday. “I enjoy life, I enjoy laughing.”
Wright, who turned 72 last week, grew up on rural Cape Cod and a glance at her license plate – CPE COD – clearly illustrates her love for the place. She still visits there often.
But she loves Farmington, too.
“It’s a nice, friendly town (where) people respect each other,” she said. “I feel fortunate that this is the town where I met my husband,” she added.
Wright has served as a selectmen for 13 years, and said she plans to run again in the next election.
“I can’t retire on 13. It’s too unlucky,” she said with a grin.
“I like doing it,” she added. She likes the other board members, the town manager and town employees.
“It’s so easy to get along with people. Even when people disagree, they’re very respectful,” she said.
A 1956 graduate of University of Maine at Farmington, which was then Farmington State Teacher’s College, Wright met and married her husband, Richard, here and so here she stayed.
The couple has two grown children.
Her daughter adopted a 4-year-old boy from Kazakhstan two years ago. It was Wright’s 70th birthday present, she said, and her first grandchild.
Her grandson calls her Babushka – that’s Russian for grandmother – as will her son’s son, now just 10 months old. Wright said she likes that moniker better than “grammy” or “grandma.”
“Not everyone can be a babushka,” she said.
Wright spent more than 30 years teaching, the bulk of it in Leeds. Her favorite thing about teaching was the kids, she said.
Since she retired in the late 1980s, Wright said she enjoys corresponding with family and friends on e-mail, telling and sending “foolish” jokes, sewing and bird-watching. The couple has several bird feeders and even a heated birdbath on their deck.
“You might say we spoil them, but they repay us with their antics,” Wright wrote in an e-mail.
She also goes to Foxwoods Resort Casino in Connecticut, she said. “But I never take more than I can afford to lose.”
She also enjoys playing cribbage and other games on her computer when she “should be doing housework.”
“There’s so many more fun things to be doing,” she said. “I retired so I could house clean. Someday, maybe I’ll have time.”
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