The Demise of a Dropout

My Final Return to Harvard University
or
scribblings on an airplane

My friend Sasha, who ran away to Europe to become a composer and buy a house in Belgium, would warn me against using the word "final" too loosely. "You've said it before," he'd say, "And look where you are now."

He's right. I've always been too aware of endings--even of endings I've invented ahead of time, to mark progress in a life that has been more spiraling than straightforward. As a second-grader, I used to be sad that I would never be a first-grader again.

But he's also wrong. Because while from time to time I may still walk the streets of Cambridge (no doubt observing the increasing dominance of chain stores), and will undoubtedly have many more chances to pass through the Yard and study my Canaday A-13 window before some daring university president finally knocks the building down to make way for something less depressing, I have no reason to believe I will ever be back as a student.

Perhaps as a fellow. Or even a professor. These seem remote prospects, but I've learned not to discount the remote: in almost every case it's only a hop and a bus ride away. That's how I found Patzcuaro, a town in the Mexican mountains where I wrote parts of my undergraduate thesis. Arguably that's how I founded DemiDec (though you'd have to substitute a jaywalk and a Chevy Blazer for the hop and the bus.)

As I write this, I'm flying across the Midwest. A few minutes ago we crossed over Chicago; I looked out the window just in time to see it disappearing into the Great Lakes.

I have a template I ought to be designing, for Resources. I have poems that I kind of feel like writing, old-style sonnets, the sort that I like to utter now and then in cheesy homage to past greats (and, more than that, just because I love the way rhymes sound.)

But nostalgia has the upper hand for now.

The first time I flew to Boston, I did so with a teammate, Becky, and her mother. One week earlier we had won nationals, eaten Reuben sandwiches and--to the best of my knowledge--said our farewells to Decathlon. I brought along a trenchcoat. It seemed like the appropriate thing to wear. The next day, I would be standing on the steps of a dorm feeling the wind lift it a little, pondering whether I could spend four years in this place full of bricks and homeless men, when a student unexpectedly approached me with a psychic flash.

"I know what brings you to Harvard," she said. "You want to be a writer."

Maybe I looked the part: hands in pockets, studying the grass, at a slight remove from everyone else. Or maybe everyone who goes to Harvard either wants to be president or a writer of prose, and I just clearly wasn't the former. I was still digesting the import of a year in which M Building defined the outer limits of fun and purpose. Those limits were busted, the purpose fulfilled, the fun captured in an album full of anecdotes. It seemed reasonable to imagine that anything was within reach, if I only designated to it the same passion that had helped my teammates and I find our way, via mischief and, well, mostly more mischief, to New Jersey.

...to be continued...