Word Count 428

Once, as a teenager—bored with studying, anxious over my pending SATs—I asked my mother if I absolutely had to go to college. After all, she hadn’t, nor had my father or older sister. Why was it expected of me?

“I hope you go,” she answered, “and that you’ll come out speaking beautifully.”

We lived in Far Rockaway, a thin strip of Queens flanked by the Atlantic ocean and Jamaica Bay, and what my mother meant was that she hoped my education might wash away the outer-borough New Yorkese that she, my father, sister, and nearly everyone around us spoke. Awe in our coffee. Don’t when doesn’t was called for. Potato and window both ending in a…