By Nina Bowers

My grandmother, Nettie Good, always tells me the same story when I visit her. Actually she tells a few of the same stories due to her fading memory but this one she especially has trouble shaking.

When she was a girl growing up in tenement housing on the Lower East Side with her mother and four other sisters she adored school since it was her escape. As she approached graduation her guidance counselor took her aside and asked if she had considered going to college. She explained that she'd thought about it but was unsure she could afford it, which prompted the advisor to tell her of the various schools with free tuition that she could attend around the city.

She was most struck by Hunter, then an all girls' school, which she fell in love with when she visited. She always remarked on how cool she thought the girls at Hunter were since they all wore leather jackets and were extremely fashionable. When she returned home to her widowed mother and told her of Hunter, how nice it was, and that she could go to school during the day for free, Great Grandma Anna (now my sister's name) told her that she couldn't go to Hunter but instead had to attend night school and work during the day. She cried for weeks but resentfully found and job and began night classes. She went on to meet my grandfather, move out to the Long Island and pursue her education throughout the years as her children grew up and left her.

When her mother became ill she visited and comforted her, as daughters often do. Her mother Anna, before she passed, reminded her of her youthful wish to attend hunter and how she refused to let her, which caused my grandma to cry for weeks. My great grandmother explained to Nettie that she remembered  because she cried the whole time my grandmother had. Now it is her turn to be taken care of and visited, because her stories inform the way I live now.

I returned to the city for many reasons, but mostly because I craved an education that required working and learning together - being a part of something bigger. Going to a school that my grandmother wouldn't have even dreamt of from her tenement on 7^th and D, with fashion students that never wear the same outfit twice, and jazz musicians, and intellectuals beyond the point of pretension.

At 90, she no longer has the interrogational style she was so popular for. She asks questions to tell stories. Now, when she asks me about school, I know no matter what I tell her, she'll always say, "When I was a little girl, I wanted to go to Hunter..."