ABSTRACT
Like many kids, I loved learning but not schooling. I especially dreaded the first day of class. I would wake up early, jump nervously out of bed, and run to open the window. From my fifth-floor apartment in the South Bronx, where I grew up, I would lean out and see my old public school across Bruckner Boulevard, a street busy with a stream of traffic on the way to Manhattan. Sometimes, if I was lucky, a big gray fog bank rolled in from the Long Island Sound, covered the weedy flats behind the school where Gypsies camped and veterans once lived in Quonset huts, and swallowed P.S. 93. My dreams were answered. Miraculously, the school had disappeared.
