How can I say ‘Good-bye’ to Harvard?
When one lives for a long time in any one place, one not only leaves an imprint on the place, but the place itself makes an increasingly pronounced mark on one’s life.
I knew very little about this town when we moved here nearly 34 years ago. Apples were my introduction, then its physical beauty…clean air…the schools that my then three young children would need to educate them in the future. There were many surprises in store, and mostly wonderful ones: finding familiar wisdom in Fruitlands, the AFS, the VNS; the PTA, the HES and Tooth Fairy, the Pond, the scouts—boys and girls, Harvard Pro Musica, History Art Workshop, the Harvard Schools Trust, “the Writer’s Group”…the Harvard Help, the neighborhood, Halloween, snowstorms, the community gardens…Apple Runners, the people who’ve lived in my house and visited (invited or spontaneously). Looking back, I realize just how quickly that time has gone by; looking with a bit of care I see how much has happened…how much we’ve laughed and cried, enjoyed and reflected.
Before I knew anybody here, the most influential person in my life was my amazing paternal grandmother, who was one of the first women to graduate from medical school in her country. She was a great reader, activist, and supporter of many good causes, but she was mostly a believer of things good. In fact, she often said that all her learning and study would be wasted if it were not used wisely; that wisdom is not learned from studying books but from knowing wise people and understanding how they live and make their choices.
I once asked her who was the wisest woman she knew, and was expecting her to name one of her many well-known friends, but to my surprise she answered without hesitation, “my masseuse.” Oh, I knew that person well, too. She would come once a fortnight by train from the country to work over my grandmother’s tired body. This woman was a war widow—a mother earth type, jolly and wise indeed—a patient listener and a wise counselor. She’d lived through two world wars, a civil war, births and deaths and losses only an evacuee could understand. She had had minimal opportunity for education, but she knew its value and ways to educate herself informally. She was an old woman in my young eyes at that time. Over the years, I realized that she had indeed taught wisdom to my now wise grandmother.
So, this wise grandmother in turn gently dropped many words of wisdom in my presence: “Education is everyone’s responsibility”; “If you keep your eyes and ears open, you learn, because everything is educational, although perhaps not desirable”; and “Learning with your heart and with thought, pondering and questioning, can in time even become wisdom.”
She also lived what she taught: “Do all the good you can, in all the ways you know and learn to recognize, to all the people you meet in all the places through all your life with the available energy and ability you have.”
In June of 1974, our first summer in Harvard, we went to the Fruitlands Museums that had just opened for the season. We looked around the picture gallery, the Indian Museum, and the Shaker House with great interest, and then we ended down in the bottom of the valley at the Fruitlands farmhouse. We were in awe—for how familiar and yet how distant each generation of people is. As I looked around with my three children in tow, I read something that struck me incredibly strongly: Rules for Doing Good. As I read these, I could feel my grandmother close by. Perhaps she had read Bronson Alcott’s writings. I am not sure of that, but I am sure that this life philosophy of doing and being good was shared by the two of them. And I knew that a circle was made whole, and that this was where my home would now be.
Now, things have come full circle and my time here in Harvard is coming to an end. My children have grown, and are scattered far and wide, but they come ‘home’ to Harvard when they can. It is not just the house or the parents or even their friends; it is the place—the very town of Harvard—that is home.
