My Sweet Old Town of Yesterday
I was at work last Friday and a coworker, who is too young to remember the Rubik’s Cube, let alone the Magic 8 Ball, was “reading” the paper, loudly commenting on the stories. I excuse her because she is too young to know any better. It had been a particularly bad week for the borough of Queens. The pages were riddled with crime after crime, one more violent than the next.
There was the small argument about cutting in line at the bus stop in Jamaica, Queens that ended with the stabbing death of a 15-year-old girl. A teacher in another Queens town assaulted one of his students, just as the school year ended. A South Ozone Park guy was arrested for an armed robbery.
She is smugly shaking her head, amazed, she says, that anyone can live there. From the other side of the room, I roll my eyes.
This child, as I have begun to refer to anyone born later than 1985, is an extremely frustrating person to have to work with. She is not at all highly educated and I suspect she got the job based solely on her looks, something that is becoming more and more prevalent these days. Although she feels she needs nothing more than a high school degree, you can sense that the little blue-eyed, blonde beauty has a chip on her shoulder about people who have gone to college. She is on the defensive all of the time. We adults in the office find ourselves measuring our words in her presence because any little thing sets her off. She is like a stick of dynamite near a gas stove. The slightest thing and she erupts. It is becoming increasingly exhausting to have to tiptoe around this brat all of the time. I think that she is pushing too far and one of these she will find that I am the one who is on the edge and when I fall off, she is not going to like what she finds. However, for now, I will deal with her like the child she is and demonstrate by actions, if not words, how a mature person behaves in a business environment.
The girl is new to the city. She and her loser boyfriend – a guy who is pushing 30, but behaving as if he is 14 – chose to live in Brooklyn. For now, Brooklyn is all she knows of the City (aside from her job in Manhattan). She ventures no where and is content to stay put and just point out the shortcomings of all of the places she has never been to. She thinks it is pretty great in Brooklyn and I am sure that it is where she lives. However, just like the whole planet, there are places in Brooklyn that are not so nice, just as there are places in the Bronx that are not so nice, places in Queens that are not so nice and places right here in the City that are not so nice.
Try to tell her that. She is always right and must always have the last word. So, for today, it is her expert opinion that all of Queens is, and has always been, a crime-ridden slum.
Just a moment ago, I attempted to explain to her that growing up in the Queens, in the bustling little town of Jackson Heights, was – for the most past – wonderful for me. She responds with her usually eloquent: “Nuh-uh! It’s bad there.” She states this authoritatively, but ask her when she visited Queens and she will admit she has never set foot there. Don’t you love that?
Well, if anything good can come out of this “meeting of the minds” is that she gave me the necessary material for today’s entry.
I wanted to call it “Remembering Jackson Heights”, but as I fill with warm memories of my old neighborhood’s streets and how my mom occupied so much of my time of discovery there, I felt that the word “sweet” had to somehow make an appearance in the heading.
When my parents moved from the Bronx to Queens in late 1972, it was because the Bronx neighborhood where they had their first apartment in America was starting to go bad. The niceness of it was expiring slowly, rotting away like old milk. Indeed, parts of the Bronx where I was born and spent my first couple of years never would recover from the societal ills that plagued it. I tried to explain to the child at work, every place has good and bad. Brooklyn is no different.
For my family, moving to Queens was the next logical step. It was considered a step up and it helped immensely that our first place in Queens was in the historically beautiful and easily navigated Jackson Heights. One of the things I remember vividly about Jackson Heights is that it had a lot of green grass. Grass was lovingly tended to on every block and behind structures in outdoor gardens. Although mostly buildings lined the avenues, with attached homes filling the side streets, you got a sense of peaceful suburbia in the park-like setting of the town. We started out renting in an old brick face three-family house on 83rd street, right off of Northern Boulevard. My aunt, her six kids and my uncle lived on the first floor. When the apartment above became vacant, she let my parents know and we swiped it up before anyone else could leaving behind the Bronx and our old apartment on the 3rd floor of an ancient walk-up on East Tremont Avenue.
For a while, we lived a harmonious and communal existence in Jackson Heights. Though I was merely 3 years old, my cousins – who ranged in age from six though 16 - and I played endlessly. The door between the two households was rarely closed and it was a while before I discovered that we were not all one big happy family. As sisters, my mother and my aunt shared talks, advice, and food freely. After a while, they even shared bus rides to their job at the same location, most likely, doing the same thing. Those times I was watched by one of the older cousins. It was a wonderful time to be a kid and I thoroughly enjoyed it. We had a deeply seeded sense of family, which we children benefited from greatly. It was the closest we would come to living on a commune.
When my brother was born, I understood that families formed, when members arrived in the shape of little babies. I understood that my mommy’s big belly, which I had never thought to question as children do today, was where my brother was living, until the day she brought him home from the hospital. It was intriguing to me, to say the least, that she left me with my Godmother, who was over, as she and my Dad went away – then just a few days later, came back with a baby who was here to stay. Without going into detail, my Godmother had spent the evening explaining that a little surprise would be returning with my parents and that the surprise would make us all very happy.
Soon after my brother’s arrival, the house filled daily with eager family wishing to meet the newest member of our clan. There was bustling and cooing around the child all the time. While I did enjoy the constant line of visitors, I quickly realized that they were not there for me at all and that, for the most part, I was relegated to corners of the house or my bedroom to play with my dolls alone.
Just as the novelty of the little guy wore down, my cousins started the new school year. As I was not of age yet, and preschool was a place where wealthy kids went, I was left to my own devices, forced to find entertainment at home alone. Though I wished desperately to play with my brother, it annoyed me that my mother would not allow it. For long periods of time I would hang - bent at the stomach - with my feet at times dangling, at times hitched in between bars, over my brother’s crib watching him sleep. I was fascinated by his smallness and his total dependence on my mom. I wondered why he couldn’t sit up at first and, mostly, why he couldn’t play. “I’ll be careful”, I told my mother, thinking my promise was enough of a guarantee. She always shook her no. Rough housing as I always did with my cousins, she said, was not something my brother was ready for yet.
The early days of fall, after my brother was born, were long and lonely for me. I waited anxiously for the school bus that would bring back my cousins, only to find that my aunt started to close that perpetually open door, so they could concentrate on homework. “I want homework,” I stated one day, thinking of it more as like a place they secretly went to each day. One day, Carol, the oldest, looked at me and said: “No, you don’t,” and promptly shut the door.
Just around the time my brother began to toddle around, two big changes came about. My aunt and the family found another place to live on 81st street, right off of Roosevelt Avenue and my Dad found out that the top floor of the house right next to ours became available. Therefore, after living in such close proximity, the Laras and the Macchis were parting ways. To drive the distance between the two places today, you realize how close they are. However, it might as well have been Mars for all us kids could understand. We did not drive and so playing and visiting became a near impossibility, where before it was just a given. Now we had to depend upon our parents to bring us back and forth and a collective depression fell upon us.
Now that I had lost my built-in playmates, I was forced to socialize with other children on my block. As time permitted, I incorporated my brother into the social scene of 83rd, but I still longed for a time when the faces were familiar and there was no compulsory trying necessary.
Despite the yanking apart of our circle of kids, we retained a sense of innocence in old Jackson Heights that was both enviable and heart wrenching. When the families visited each other, we kids played as much as we could, talked at lightening speed and tried to incorporate a month’s worth of chatter and play into just a few hours. Then came the time to part again and my tears would flow because to me it felt as if the time in between visits was endless.
Once I was part of the whole school-attending clique, I became more aware of my town and its surroundings. My school, P.S. 69, was a school bus ride away at the time and I recall with precise detail the walk, still sleepy and groggy, up 83rd street to 34th Avenue to catch it. The first day of school, my Mom took me there herself. Feeling slightly cocky and grown-up that day, I attempted to imitate behaviors I had witnessed in my cousins, like walking, balanced, on the sidewalk’s edge. My Mom was having none of that and told me to walk beside her because I was going to fall and get hit by a car. I could not understand how falling between parked cars could get me hit, but as she was the mother, I obliged. Since I was already used to being surrounded by lots of kids, I was immediately comfortable in the classroom setting. Unlike some of the children in the class, I did not weep or cling to my mother, but discreetly told her she was free to go. Since my mother met the teacher, Mrs. Henderson, she assumed I too did not speak English. Once my Mom was gone, Mrs. Henderson approached me and said: “Eh…. You speak English? In my perfectly accented English, I responded. “Yes, I speak English and I speak Spanish, too.” It’s safe to say she was momentarily thrown by the boldness of the five-year-old at her knee length.
Boldness came sporadically. I remember how after that first day, I had to take the bus alone each day and how terrifying an experience that was for me at first. While I climbed on the bus a fearless child, after the driver pulled away and the shape of my mom waving got smaller and smaller, tears would well in my eyes and knots would build in my stomach until I arrived at school.
During my six-year stint at P.S. 69, my kindergarten teacher was Mrs. Henderson. My 1st grade teacher was Ms. Centeno. My 2nd grade teacher was Ms. Muir, My 3rd grade teacher was Ms. Allen. My 4th grade teacher was Mr. Lastoria and my 5th was Mrs. Cashman. While I could go into detail about each year I spent in these roles, I can also summarize it in one word per grade.
Kinder – Fun
1st – Sweet
2nd – Forgettable
3rd – Chaotic
4th – Upsetting
5th – Stressful
I have made mention of my junior high school years, a topic I would rather not revisit. Yet, despite all of the angry years, my surroundings lent themselves to be a pleasant canvas for growing up. Some of my more fond memories of Jackson Heights revolve around the walks all over that my Mom went on with us two kids in tow. Everything in Jackson Heights was in close proximity and so walking was a hobby we maintained throughout. If you were fortunate enough to find parking, you certainly did not want to waste it going to the supermarket – Shop Wise on 37th Avenue, or to Woolworth’s on 82nd street, or to any of the myriad of shops and restaurants on Roosevelt. If we behaved and my mom was able to get all her shopping done, she would treat us to ice cream at Carvel on 82nd at the foot of the steps to the elevated (7) train. Licking away at our cones, chocolate always for me, vanilla for the rest of the family, we would sit and feel the vibrations of the trains above and hear the screeching halt each made, as it stopped.
A special treat was our family’s weekend treks to Junction Boulevard in Corona for the Spanish-Chinese restaurant. By Spanish-Chinese it meant that every employee and cook in the place spoke fluent Spanish, even though they were Chinese and the food was a fusion of flavors that was totally delicious. I remember how we had to order things in a special way, too. They would ask what accompaniment we wanted: “Platano maduro y tostones, o habichuelas y arroz blanco,” which inevitably sounded like: “Platano madulo y totone o habichelas y alloz blanco.” My brother and I would try to laugh at that, but my parents were quick to quiet us and explain that it was impolite to make fun at other people’s expense. When the food arrived, my Dad would put into practice the lessons from home making both my brother and me cut our food, using a fork and knife, correcting our style and approach to it.
Since we only had one car, not an uncommon situation in a place where parking was a luxury, we would sometimes take a bus to our destination. If we had to go father than our usual haunts, my mom would take us on the Q33 bus right on Northern Blvd. My brother and I would be able ride for free, which we didn’t think anything of, yet we wondered why mom had to drop a coin into the slot by the driver. Once, for reasons that I never knew, we ended up at the end of the bus route, where we were forced to disembark in unfamiliar surroundings. I can vividly recall that we were somewhere near water. It was windy, though not cold. It must have been in the summer months, as I was of school age already but not in school that day. Maybe my Mom had not been paying attention and missed our stop. I remember that the driver was not patient with her and was unkind when he realized she did not speak any English. I did and I understood what he was saying to us. “This is it, lady. Last stop. You gotta get off.” I can see him even today; how he peered down at us with a level of disgust I could not understand. He had ruddy cheeks and bauble of a nose, with visible veins and pores so big and nasty, it terrified me. He looked at his, his steel green-gray eyes at once heartless and disgusted. He wanted our kind off his bus! It angered me that he spoke to my mother that way, but I was angrier still that I did not have the wherewithal at the time to respond with an equally cruel and nasty retort to his condescending talk.
Once we were off that bus, I knew instinctively that we were lost. Children are so inherently tuned to their parents and so entirely connected to their mothers that my fearlessness disappeared the instant I saw that my Mom was frightened. For the briefest of moments, she walked aimlessly, a child on each side. She picked up the pace when she saw a pay telephone on a corner. “Hold on to my skirt, both of you,” she demanded, as she went through her handbag in search of a dime for the phone. When she contacted my Dad at work, I heard both relief (to be able to speak in her own tongue) and embarrassment (at being so careless in the first place). She gave my Dad a summarized version of the day and, at one point, sounded on the verge of tears. For the first time in my short life, I felt sorry for my mother. I was sad that she did not speak or understand English at the time. I was sad that she had come to a country where she would never feel wholly comfortable but where, nonetheless, she had to raise children. I was sad that she was made to cry because a bus driver did not take pity on a lost woman with two small children. We got out of our dire situation that day because my Mom explained to my dad our surroundings, carefully spelling out in Spanish the street signs of where we were. My Dad became my hero that day, and would be many times afterwards, when he found us. On the drive home, I was grateful that, instead of anger, my Dad was loving and genuinely forgiving to my mom, reassuring her that it was already forgotten.
Another thing also happened that day, I decided that I would always fiercely shield my mother from the kind of humiliation she endured that day at the hands of that driver. From then on, I become a kind of echoed translator. I spent all the years of her life repeating in quick succession in Spanish whatever anyone was saying to her in English, so that her responses could be as immediate as anyone needed them to be, even if they did flow directly out of my mouth.
I grew up understanding that standards were different for the parents who spoke English. It garnered a lot shame and sadness in me. Yet, despite the shortcoming of my family’s existence, my little Jackson Heights became the true champion in it all, being open-armed in welcoming us and allowing us to find kindness in strangers, sometimes, in our own language.
As I got older and discovered cutting classes, my friends and I would run the streets of Jackson Heights putting miles on our feet, while rediscovering our hometown without the burden of parents chauffeuring us around and making decisions about where we would go. With terror at getting “busted” in good supply, we would find new treasures all around the town, even in places we’d gone to before, as if seeing it all through new eyes.
We left Jackson Heights at the end of my junior high school years. Part of it was because of all of the troubles I had during my time there. Mostly, though, it was because the aunt with whom my family had lived with at the start had found a house. My mom began to feel the ache to have a house of her own. Not knowing a lot about towns or locations, we played Follow-the-Leader. My parents also looked for and found a house east of Jackson Heights in Queens Village, just like my aunt had done, following her brother’s footsteps.
From age 14 right through the first five years of my marriage, Queens Village was my home. And despite having spent many more years at the Queens Village address, it is really Jackson Heights that I recall with a sense of longing and nostalgia. To this day, though I cannot say I enjoy the crowds or parking situation anymore than I did back then, I still get a bit of a thrill when I go back there. I still find the familiarity welcoming and the knowingness of it all very appealing. To this day, I miss my sweet old town.
There was the small argument about cutting in line at the bus stop in Jamaica, Queens that ended with the stabbing death of a 15-year-old girl. A teacher in another Queens town assaulted one of his students, just as the school year ended. A South Ozone Park guy was arrested for an armed robbery.
She is smugly shaking her head, amazed, she says, that anyone can live there. From the other side of the room, I roll my eyes.
This child, as I have begun to refer to anyone born later than 1985, is an extremely frustrating person to have to work with. She is not at all highly educated and I suspect she got the job based solely on her looks, something that is becoming more and more prevalent these days. Although she feels she needs nothing more than a high school degree, you can sense that the little blue-eyed, blonde beauty has a chip on her shoulder about people who have gone to college. She is on the defensive all of the time. We adults in the office find ourselves measuring our words in her presence because any little thing sets her off. She is like a stick of dynamite near a gas stove. The slightest thing and she erupts. It is becoming increasingly exhausting to have to tiptoe around this brat all of the time. I think that she is pushing too far and one of these she will find that I am the one who is on the edge and when I fall off, she is not going to like what she finds. However, for now, I will deal with her like the child she is and demonstrate by actions, if not words, how a mature person behaves in a business environment.
The girl is new to the city. She and her loser boyfriend – a guy who is pushing 30, but behaving as if he is 14 – chose to live in Brooklyn. For now, Brooklyn is all she knows of the City (aside from her job in Manhattan). She ventures no where and is content to stay put and just point out the shortcomings of all of the places she has never been to. She thinks it is pretty great in Brooklyn and I am sure that it is where she lives. However, just like the whole planet, there are places in Brooklyn that are not so nice, just as there are places in the Bronx that are not so nice, places in Queens that are not so nice and places right here in the City that are not so nice.
Try to tell her that. She is always right and must always have the last word. So, for today, it is her expert opinion that all of Queens is, and has always been, a crime-ridden slum.
Just a moment ago, I attempted to explain to her that growing up in the Queens, in the bustling little town of Jackson Heights, was – for the most past – wonderful for me. She responds with her usually eloquent: “Nuh-uh! It’s bad there.” She states this authoritatively, but ask her when she visited Queens and she will admit she has never set foot there. Don’t you love that?
Well, if anything good can come out of this “meeting of the minds” is that she gave me the necessary material for today’s entry.
I wanted to call it “Remembering Jackson Heights”, but as I fill with warm memories of my old neighborhood’s streets and how my mom occupied so much of my time of discovery there, I felt that the word “sweet” had to somehow make an appearance in the heading.
When my parents moved from the Bronx to Queens in late 1972, it was because the Bronx neighborhood where they had their first apartment in America was starting to go bad. The niceness of it was expiring slowly, rotting away like old milk. Indeed, parts of the Bronx where I was born and spent my first couple of years never would recover from the societal ills that plagued it. I tried to explain to the child at work, every place has good and bad. Brooklyn is no different.
For my family, moving to Queens was the next logical step. It was considered a step up and it helped immensely that our first place in Queens was in the historically beautiful and easily navigated Jackson Heights. One of the things I remember vividly about Jackson Heights is that it had a lot of green grass. Grass was lovingly tended to on every block and behind structures in outdoor gardens. Although mostly buildings lined the avenues, with attached homes filling the side streets, you got a sense of peaceful suburbia in the park-like setting of the town. We started out renting in an old brick face three-family house on 83rd street, right off of Northern Boulevard. My aunt, her six kids and my uncle lived on the first floor. When the apartment above became vacant, she let my parents know and we swiped it up before anyone else could leaving behind the Bronx and our old apartment on the 3rd floor of an ancient walk-up on East Tremont Avenue.
For a while, we lived a harmonious and communal existence in Jackson Heights. Though I was merely 3 years old, my cousins – who ranged in age from six though 16 - and I played endlessly. The door between the two households was rarely closed and it was a while before I discovered that we were not all one big happy family. As sisters, my mother and my aunt shared talks, advice, and food freely. After a while, they even shared bus rides to their job at the same location, most likely, doing the same thing. Those times I was watched by one of the older cousins. It was a wonderful time to be a kid and I thoroughly enjoyed it. We had a deeply seeded sense of family, which we children benefited from greatly. It was the closest we would come to living on a commune.
When my brother was born, I understood that families formed, when members arrived in the shape of little babies. I understood that my mommy’s big belly, which I had never thought to question as children do today, was where my brother was living, until the day she brought him home from the hospital. It was intriguing to me, to say the least, that she left me with my Godmother, who was over, as she and my Dad went away – then just a few days later, came back with a baby who was here to stay. Without going into detail, my Godmother had spent the evening explaining that a little surprise would be returning with my parents and that the surprise would make us all very happy.
Soon after my brother’s arrival, the house filled daily with eager family wishing to meet the newest member of our clan. There was bustling and cooing around the child all the time. While I did enjoy the constant line of visitors, I quickly realized that they were not there for me at all and that, for the most part, I was relegated to corners of the house or my bedroom to play with my dolls alone.
Just as the novelty of the little guy wore down, my cousins started the new school year. As I was not of age yet, and preschool was a place where wealthy kids went, I was left to my own devices, forced to find entertainment at home alone. Though I wished desperately to play with my brother, it annoyed me that my mother would not allow it. For long periods of time I would hang - bent at the stomach - with my feet at times dangling, at times hitched in between bars, over my brother’s crib watching him sleep. I was fascinated by his smallness and his total dependence on my mom. I wondered why he couldn’t sit up at first and, mostly, why he couldn’t play. “I’ll be careful”, I told my mother, thinking my promise was enough of a guarantee. She always shook her no. Rough housing as I always did with my cousins, she said, was not something my brother was ready for yet.
The early days of fall, after my brother was born, were long and lonely for me. I waited anxiously for the school bus that would bring back my cousins, only to find that my aunt started to close that perpetually open door, so they could concentrate on homework. “I want homework,” I stated one day, thinking of it more as like a place they secretly went to each day. One day, Carol, the oldest, looked at me and said: “No, you don’t,” and promptly shut the door.
Just around the time my brother began to toddle around, two big changes came about. My aunt and the family found another place to live on 81st street, right off of Roosevelt Avenue and my Dad found out that the top floor of the house right next to ours became available. Therefore, after living in such close proximity, the Laras and the Macchis were parting ways. To drive the distance between the two places today, you realize how close they are. However, it might as well have been Mars for all us kids could understand. We did not drive and so playing and visiting became a near impossibility, where before it was just a given. Now we had to depend upon our parents to bring us back and forth and a collective depression fell upon us.
Now that I had lost my built-in playmates, I was forced to socialize with other children on my block. As time permitted, I incorporated my brother into the social scene of 83rd, but I still longed for a time when the faces were familiar and there was no compulsory trying necessary.
Despite the yanking apart of our circle of kids, we retained a sense of innocence in old Jackson Heights that was both enviable and heart wrenching. When the families visited each other, we kids played as much as we could, talked at lightening speed and tried to incorporate a month’s worth of chatter and play into just a few hours. Then came the time to part again and my tears would flow because to me it felt as if the time in between visits was endless.
Once I was part of the whole school-attending clique, I became more aware of my town and its surroundings. My school, P.S. 69, was a school bus ride away at the time and I recall with precise detail the walk, still sleepy and groggy, up 83rd street to 34th Avenue to catch it. The first day of school, my Mom took me there herself. Feeling slightly cocky and grown-up that day, I attempted to imitate behaviors I had witnessed in my cousins, like walking, balanced, on the sidewalk’s edge. My Mom was having none of that and told me to walk beside her because I was going to fall and get hit by a car. I could not understand how falling between parked cars could get me hit, but as she was the mother, I obliged. Since I was already used to being surrounded by lots of kids, I was immediately comfortable in the classroom setting. Unlike some of the children in the class, I did not weep or cling to my mother, but discreetly told her she was free to go. Since my mother met the teacher, Mrs. Henderson, she assumed I too did not speak English. Once my Mom was gone, Mrs. Henderson approached me and said: “Eh…. You speak English? In my perfectly accented English, I responded. “Yes, I speak English and I speak Spanish, too.” It’s safe to say she was momentarily thrown by the boldness of the five-year-old at her knee length.
Boldness came sporadically. I remember how after that first day, I had to take the bus alone each day and how terrifying an experience that was for me at first. While I climbed on the bus a fearless child, after the driver pulled away and the shape of my mom waving got smaller and smaller, tears would well in my eyes and knots would build in my stomach until I arrived at school.
During my six-year stint at P.S. 69, my kindergarten teacher was Mrs. Henderson. My 1st grade teacher was Ms. Centeno. My 2nd grade teacher was Ms. Muir, My 3rd grade teacher was Ms. Allen. My 4th grade teacher was Mr. Lastoria and my 5th was Mrs. Cashman. While I could go into detail about each year I spent in these roles, I can also summarize it in one word per grade.
Kinder – Fun
1st – Sweet
2nd – Forgettable
3rd – Chaotic
4th – Upsetting
5th – Stressful
I have made mention of my junior high school years, a topic I would rather not revisit. Yet, despite all of the angry years, my surroundings lent themselves to be a pleasant canvas for growing up. Some of my more fond memories of Jackson Heights revolve around the walks all over that my Mom went on with us two kids in tow. Everything in Jackson Heights was in close proximity and so walking was a hobby we maintained throughout. If you were fortunate enough to find parking, you certainly did not want to waste it going to the supermarket – Shop Wise on 37th Avenue, or to Woolworth’s on 82nd street, or to any of the myriad of shops and restaurants on Roosevelt. If we behaved and my mom was able to get all her shopping done, she would treat us to ice cream at Carvel on 82nd at the foot of the steps to the elevated (7) train. Licking away at our cones, chocolate always for me, vanilla for the rest of the family, we would sit and feel the vibrations of the trains above and hear the screeching halt each made, as it stopped.
A special treat was our family’s weekend treks to Junction Boulevard in Corona for the Spanish-Chinese restaurant. By Spanish-Chinese it meant that every employee and cook in the place spoke fluent Spanish, even though they were Chinese and the food was a fusion of flavors that was totally delicious. I remember how we had to order things in a special way, too. They would ask what accompaniment we wanted: “Platano maduro y tostones, o habichuelas y arroz blanco,” which inevitably sounded like: “Platano madulo y totone o habichelas y alloz blanco.” My brother and I would try to laugh at that, but my parents were quick to quiet us and explain that it was impolite to make fun at other people’s expense. When the food arrived, my Dad would put into practice the lessons from home making both my brother and me cut our food, using a fork and knife, correcting our style and approach to it.
Since we only had one car, not an uncommon situation in a place where parking was a luxury, we would sometimes take a bus to our destination. If we had to go father than our usual haunts, my mom would take us on the Q33 bus right on Northern Blvd. My brother and I would be able ride for free, which we didn’t think anything of, yet we wondered why mom had to drop a coin into the slot by the driver. Once, for reasons that I never knew, we ended up at the end of the bus route, where we were forced to disembark in unfamiliar surroundings. I can vividly recall that we were somewhere near water. It was windy, though not cold. It must have been in the summer months, as I was of school age already but not in school that day. Maybe my Mom had not been paying attention and missed our stop. I remember that the driver was not patient with her and was unkind when he realized she did not speak any English. I did and I understood what he was saying to us. “This is it, lady. Last stop. You gotta get off.” I can see him even today; how he peered down at us with a level of disgust I could not understand. He had ruddy cheeks and bauble of a nose, with visible veins and pores so big and nasty, it terrified me. He looked at his, his steel green-gray eyes at once heartless and disgusted. He wanted our kind off his bus! It angered me that he spoke to my mother that way, but I was angrier still that I did not have the wherewithal at the time to respond with an equally cruel and nasty retort to his condescending talk.
Once we were off that bus, I knew instinctively that we were lost. Children are so inherently tuned to their parents and so entirely connected to their mothers that my fearlessness disappeared the instant I saw that my Mom was frightened. For the briefest of moments, she walked aimlessly, a child on each side. She picked up the pace when she saw a pay telephone on a corner. “Hold on to my skirt, both of you,” she demanded, as she went through her handbag in search of a dime for the phone. When she contacted my Dad at work, I heard both relief (to be able to speak in her own tongue) and embarrassment (at being so careless in the first place). She gave my Dad a summarized version of the day and, at one point, sounded on the verge of tears. For the first time in my short life, I felt sorry for my mother. I was sad that she did not speak or understand English at the time. I was sad that she had come to a country where she would never feel wholly comfortable but where, nonetheless, she had to raise children. I was sad that she was made to cry because a bus driver did not take pity on a lost woman with two small children. We got out of our dire situation that day because my Mom explained to my dad our surroundings, carefully spelling out in Spanish the street signs of where we were. My Dad became my hero that day, and would be many times afterwards, when he found us. On the drive home, I was grateful that, instead of anger, my Dad was loving and genuinely forgiving to my mom, reassuring her that it was already forgotten.
Another thing also happened that day, I decided that I would always fiercely shield my mother from the kind of humiliation she endured that day at the hands of that driver. From then on, I become a kind of echoed translator. I spent all the years of her life repeating in quick succession in Spanish whatever anyone was saying to her in English, so that her responses could be as immediate as anyone needed them to be, even if they did flow directly out of my mouth.
I grew up understanding that standards were different for the parents who spoke English. It garnered a lot shame and sadness in me. Yet, despite the shortcoming of my family’s existence, my little Jackson Heights became the true champion in it all, being open-armed in welcoming us and allowing us to find kindness in strangers, sometimes, in our own language.
As I got older and discovered cutting classes, my friends and I would run the streets of Jackson Heights putting miles on our feet, while rediscovering our hometown without the burden of parents chauffeuring us around and making decisions about where we would go. With terror at getting “busted” in good supply, we would find new treasures all around the town, even in places we’d gone to before, as if seeing it all through new eyes.
We left Jackson Heights at the end of my junior high school years. Part of it was because of all of the troubles I had during my time there. Mostly, though, it was because the aunt with whom my family had lived with at the start had found a house. My mom began to feel the ache to have a house of her own. Not knowing a lot about towns or locations, we played Follow-the-Leader. My parents also looked for and found a house east of Jackson Heights in Queens Village, just like my aunt had done, following her brother’s footsteps.
From age 14 right through the first five years of my marriage, Queens Village was my home. And despite having spent many more years at the Queens Village address, it is really Jackson Heights that I recall with a sense of longing and nostalgia. To this day, though I cannot say I enjoy the crowds or parking situation anymore than I did back then, I still get a bit of a thrill when I go back there. I still find the familiarity welcoming and the knowingness of it all very appealing. To this day, I miss my sweet old town.
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