Growing up in New York City, I was removed from my midwestern family: I was different. I asked my mother about this, and she said, We are different. We are intellectuals.

I didn’t really know what that meant, and I think she may have been using a non-standard definition of the word intellectual. I base this conclusion on one thing: her choice of daily newspaper. Rather than read the New York Times, home of news analysis and opinion pages, my mother read the New York Daily News – home of great sports reporting and the funnies.

I will concede she usually bought both newspapers on Sunday, which I liked because when I was done with the funnies, I could look for the Ninas in the Hirschfeld drawing.

This was a good arrangement until I was in fifth or maybe sixth grade, when my elementary school class did a stock market project. Our first assignment was to bring in the stock page from the newspaper, and on the day our homework was due, I was the only student who did not have several pages of stock quotes torn from the Times. My meager offering, from the Daily News, was titled “Stocks in Brief,” and listed barely 50 stocks.

The teacher seemed confused and suggested I borrow from another student. I said, no, it’s okay.

He persisted. We’re all going to be picking stocks to invest in. You don’t have much to pick from.

I clutched my snippet of newsprint, my homework that seemed right when I did it. I didn’t know it was supposed to be bigger, that there was supposed to be more.

The whole class waited while the teacher explained that, for this project, we were supposed to bring the stock pages in once a week for the rest of the school year. He didn’t seem to be angry with me, and while he talked, I thought about asking my mother to get the Times, like everyone else.

She would tell me all the reasons why the Daily News was just as good. Tell him I said that, she’d say. Stand up for yourself.

I looked away from the teacher, at my meager stock section, and recognized one company name. Howard Johnson! I said. I had picked my stock, I had done my homework, and I could keep doing the assignment with my mother’s choice of newspaper. Even though we’d only eaten at a Howard Johnson once, I knew what it was: a restaurant.

The teacher moved on, and though I peeked at my neighbor’s stock listings during class, I could do my homework each week with no trouble.

It is fortunate that the assignment was simply to choose a stock and keep track of how it did; if it mattered how the stock actually performed, I would have failed. The stock spent the school year plummeting, and the company was sold by the founder’s son around that end of the school year.

Eventually, I made some friends, and played along with their games. One of these involved using my lunch box as a pillow – it was white and fairly soft, since it was only made of vinyl-covered cardboard. It broke down fairly quickly, and I was heartbroken when it finally disintegrated completely.

My mother bought me another one at the dime store, but since it wasn’t the beginning of the school year, there wasn’t much selection. I got a sturdy metal lunchbox with Inch-High Private Eye on it, and my mother got an extra discount because it didn’t have a thermos – but my Alice in Wonderland thermos fit inside it, and I didn’t really want another one.

She filled the lunchbox with a food that was different from everyone else’s. Sometimes the difference was small: The American cheese that went on my sandwiches came from a pre-sliced block of slices that all stuck together, instead of the individually wrapped slices that seemed somehow better. These are cheaper, she told me, and they’re exactly the same. But it might not have been the cheese that bothered me as much as the healthy bread she always bought, which wasn’t soft like the Wonder bread I always asked for, but was hard, and brown, and crumbled into sand against the metal walls of my lunchbox.

In Wisconsin, since my mother couldn’t drive, she relied on family to drive us everywhere; I sat in her lap in the front seat, held securely in her arms. Once, I opened the door of my aunt’s red Pinto while we were on the road, but we weren’t going very fast, and since I got yelled at by both my mother and my aunt, I never did that again.

In New York, my mother only needed a token to come and go as she pleased, since the subway would take you anywhere you might want to go, and so we rode the graffiti-covered cars, filled with strangers: People smoking cigarettes, teenagers with loud radios. Sometimes there were musicians playing violins or other instruments in the tunnels, and sometimes my mother would let me put a quarter into their violin case.

The parks in Wisconsin were different: I could walk a block to the playground near my grandparents’ house, and get the merry-go-round going really fast, and play with whatever neighbor kids happened to be there, or go find one of my friends, who all lived a door or two away. In New York, the playground behind my apartment building had a metal fence with sharp spikes on top, and the one at school that the first-graders used was on the roof of the five-story building. There both had black mats to cushion any rough landings, although they mostly served to smear knees and clothes with soot. After lunch, if it wasn’t raining, we played in the cement courtyard in the center of the school building, and if it was raining, we just stayed in the cafeteria.

Mostly, the kids were different. They made jokes I didn’t understand, like one boy who had the whole class laughing when he held up paste to his nose and announced he was sniffing glue, and played games I didn’t understand, like one called Catch Me Kiss Me where everyone laughed at me for actually kissing the boy I was assigned to chase, even though I had been told that I was supposed to.