LAGUARDIA CC DAZE

Some stories you remember because you were there, and your mind has a way of indexing random negatives. Other stories are pure incantation, either because your physical presence was not an ingredient, or because every time you tell the story you are working your way towards making the episode more real and whole.

In the winter of 1979, Estela entered LaGuardia Community College in Queens. Horacio and her had completed their G.E.D.s at Dewey High School in Bensonhurst the previous year and were primed for some vocational education. The concession machines in the student union buzzed with pure American products, and on the far wall a projector played an episode of "Sanford and Son." I can tell it was "Sanford and Son," because of the theme music (a jangly, gypsy chortle set to harmonica puffs), which even today makes me crave Twinkies, Ding-Dongs, and TAB.

Or maybe it was the following year, after Estela had worked her ways towards higher-level Fashion technology classes. Those where held in a refurbished, repurposed factory barracks and parking athenium; they had left the walls exposed brick and all the doors to the classrooms where china white. Inside the classrooms there were drafting tables and mismatched mannequins (brown heads and necks and pale torsos, etc.) and jeweler's repair tables. They had not changed the factory windows so there were what seemed like hundreds of glass squares each dolloped with a little landscape. I wish I could say that my mother created thousands of original, fashionable iterations but that would be like cheating because it never happened.