Jesus,_ I prayed silently, __lease fix it so that my turn to read won__ come around._ And then the nun called my name, but before I stood I thought, ____l bet you think this is funny, huh, Jesus?_ I stood and stared at the sentence assigned to me and believed that, through some miracle, I would suddenly be able to read it and not be humiliated. I stood there and stared at it until the children started giggling and snickering and Sister told me to sit down.

The next day, when I came home from the library, there was a small, used red record player in my room. I found my mother in the kitchen and spotted a bandage taped to her arm. __a,_ I asked. __here did you get the money for the record player?_ __ had it saved,_ she lied. My father lived well, had a large house and an expensive imported car, wanted for little, and gave nothing. My mother lived on welfare in a slum and sold her blood to the Red Cross to get me a record player. __ducation is everything, Johnny,_ she said, as she headed for the refrigerator to get me food. __ou get smart like regular people and you don__ have to live like this no more._ She and I were not hugging types, but I put my hand on her shoulder as she washed the dishes with her back to me and she said, in best Brooklynese, __o go and enjoy, already._ My father always said I was my mother__ son and I was proud of that. On her good days, she was a good and noble thing to be a part of. That evening, I plugged in the red record player and placed it by the window. My mother and I took the kitchen chairs out to the porch and listened to Beethoven__ Sixth Symphony from beginning to end, as we watched the oil-stained waters of the Mad River roll by. It was a good night, another good night, one of many that have blessed my life.

I am here because I worked too hard and too long not to be here. But although I told the university that I would walk across the stage to take my diploma, I won__. At age fifty-seven, I__ too damned old, and I__ look ridiculous in this crowd. From where I__ standing in the back of the hall, I can see that I am at least two decades older than most of the parents of these kids in their black caps and gowns. So I__l graduate with this class, but I won__ walk across the stage and collect my diploma with them; I__l have the school send it to my house. I only want to hear my name called. I__l imagine what the rest would have been like. When you__e had a life like mine, you learn to do that, to imagine the good things. The ceremony is about to begin. It__ a warm June day and a hallway of glass doors leading to the parking lot are open, the dignitaries march onto the stage, a janitor slams the doors shut, one after the other. That banging sound. It__ Christmas Day 1961 and three Waterbury cops are throwing their bulk against our sorely overmatched front door. They are wearing their long woolen blue coats and white gloves and they swear at the cold. They__e finally come for us, in the dead of night, to take us away, just as our mother said they would.

Denny thought our parents needed a combination of material goods and temperamental changes before he could return home. __f Dad buys Ma a car, then she__l love him, and they__l get back together and she won__ be all crazy anymore,_ he said. For years he held out the possibility that those things would happen and all would change. __f we had more things, like stoves and cars,_ he told me at night in our bedroom, __nd Ma wasn__ like she is, we could go home.

For the first time in my life, I was eating well and from plates__lass plates, no less, not out of the frying pan because somebody lost all the plates in the last move. Now when we ate, we sat at a fine round oak table in sturdy chairs that matched. No one rushed through the meal or argued over who got the biggest portion, and we ate three times a day.

I'm too much of a coward to kill myself. And too much of a coward to live