Notes on Harvard

My family is moving, which means I'm packing boxes and finding old things. Tonight I came across the notes I wrote when I first visited Harvard as a pre-frosh. Here are some excerpts...

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The good: Freshman accommodations generous, campus beautiful, free long-distance calls for pre-frosh. Food not unpalatable. Lunch area very polished. Well-versed professor. Spring weather.

The bad: My host was late and very hungover. Some people look unfriendly. Some dorms remodeled, many not. "It takes six months to develop friendships." -- Stranger #1. "The change in culture and climate can be a shock." -- Stranger #2. Limited conversation at lunch table, almost a reluctance. See no fire, only ice.

* * *

I flip on. The notebook is filled with my small, black script. Different pages are dated different years. Here and there, an e-mail address. Physics notes. A blank page labeled, "Notes on AP Government." A story sketch titled, kind of pretentiously, "For Peace to Endure." Notes on health, from when I took it with my running coach over the last six weeks of high school (it was that or not graduate.) Diary entries from each time I visited Harvard, for whatever reason, between when I left as a freshman and when I returned for grad school. One of them leads off with, "What you leave behind can find you again." On another page, I lament the loss of Baja Fresh's original "to go" dishes. I flip again, and find an equation: "E equals h times v." Next to it, a quote from my friend and teammate Sage Vaughn, now an artist: "Creative ideas are sown in the soil of noncomformity."