Category: Harvard

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Fellowship

This one’s personal. We sent off another one of the group tonight. Thabo from South Africa has a flight on Wednesday, so we told stories and clinked our glasses and traded long, slow hugs all the way to the cab. David is gone now, and Peter and Karin, and Sapiyat, and the rest of us will trickle away one or two at a time from this place and this moment. Most of us are going back to jobs we love and people we miss. But the truth is that none of us want to leave.

Last Friday the 2008-09 Nieman Fellowship at Harvard officially ended. We rushed through the ceremony because Harvard President Drew Faust was the speaker and we were on her tight schedule. It didn’t matter. No ceremony could have gone slow enough to suit us. We would have been thrilled to drag it out for weeks.

You know how you stay up late on the last night of vacation because you don’t want it to end? We’ve been like that for a month. Our body clocks are wrecked. Some nights we stay up ’til sunrise and some days we sleep ’til noon. There is always another party or another outing and we say yes, yes, always yes, because when we’re together we have superpowers, together we can bend time back toward us, together we can almost stop it.

There are 29 of us fellows; add in spouses, partners and kids and we come to more than 60. Think about spending a year with 60 strangers from all over the world. Think about realizing, late in the year, to your shock, that you like them all. Love them, even.

Our time together is called a fellowship, and lately I’ve been thinking a lot about that word. When I was growing up it was a church word. In the back of any decent-sized Baptist church there’s always a fellowship hall, and that’s where you went after the Easter service or at homecoming to grab fried chicken and deviled eggs, and then sit down at long tables to talk. That was the real purpose of the fellowship hall — to spend a little time, get to know each other, deepen friendships.

This year we have made fellowship halls everywhere. We have had fellowship around tables at bars, standing on the bow of a whale-watching boat, drinking coffee around a weathered wooden table, sitting on benches in a stately old theater, in our apartments, in subway cars, out on the sidewalk, walking the long way home so we can be together two streets longer.

We have learned more about one another than we know about some members of our own families. We have shared secrets. We have had bitter arguments and patched the hurt places. We are still talking, still fellowshipping, even though the clock has run out and we are deep into extra time.

The test, of course, is the follow-through — how tight we stay together when we scatter to the corners of the globe, back at our old jobs, with our old friends, with so many things conspiring to fold up this year and put it in a drawer until the names are too faded to read.

That has happened to me more than once.

But here’s what we learned at Harvard: Love and friendship is all. You don’t have to go to Harvard to learn that, but damn if it isn’t a lesson that fails to sink in for most of us.

There are these wonderful inventions called e-mail and Skype, and there are still such things as telephones and postage stamps. There are these glorious things called airplanes that will lift us up from Charlotte and deposit us in Dublin or Beijing or Mexico City, and they can lift you up, too, to the places you need to go and the people you need to see.

Love and friendship is all, and the only way to make it work is to live your life in fellowship, present tense. That is what we plan to do. And if we play it right these next few weeks of seeing one another off will just be commas instead of periods, and the sentence will run on and on and never end, and we will spend the rest of our lives hugging and waving and parting but never really saying goodbye.

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Harvard Sports

The forgetting machine

There were maybe a dozen people in the stands when we got to the arena for the Harvard-Brown basketball game Saturday night. Ivy League ball is not exactly UNC-Duke. By tipoff the crowd was maybe 300 people and we were treated to a half of air balls and dumb fouls and guys dribbling balls off their feet. Brown was slightly less mediocre and so they led 32-20 at the half.

But it was still fun, you know? At halftime they had two kids race down the court while putting on an adult-size basketball uniform (including size-18 sneakers). After that two teams of seventh-graders played for a few minutes — that was a reminder that seventh grade is when kids start to have growth spurts. A few of the kids looked like NFL linebackers and most of the others looked like members of the Lollipop Guild. But one of the Lollipop kids drilled a jumper right at the buzzer and everybody cheered.

Somewhere in there I looked down and saw Mike Tirico, the ESPN broadcaster, walking down the sideline. If you had given me 1,000 guesses on where Mike Tirico would be on a Saturday night, I’d never have picked the Harvard-Brown game. It turns out he was doing the Celtics-Spurs game in Boston on Sunday, so he had a reason to be in town… but still. You think he’d go bowling, catch a movie, you know, mix it up a little.

Harvard has a bunch of guys who can run and bang around on the boards, but basically only one guy who can score — a 6-3 guard named Jeremy Lin. The second half started and he started making shots. Harvard pulled to within three points right away, and some of the people who had started to leave went back to their seats, and the whole second half turned into these waves of Harvard getting close and Brown pulling away again.

Somebody was doing a radio broadcast but I’d be surprised if 10 people were listening. At that moment the two teams were a combined 1-9 in the Ivy League. Nobody knew or much cared about what was going on except the few hundred people in the stands and the teams on the benches and the 10 guys on the floor. But as the game ebbed away to the last couple of minutes, and you could tell it would be close all the way, everybody in that creaky old building cared a lot.

It was tied at 63 when Brown took the ball downcourt with maybe 40 seconds left. Their best player, Matt Mullery, had killed Harvard inside all night — he finished with 27 points. With less than 20 seconds left he got the ball down deep again. Everybody standing now. He gathered himself, went up to shoot — and Harvard forward Evan Harris flew in and blocked the shot.

Harvard raced upcourt. Lin got the ball. Two Brown players smothered him. He tried to get off a shot but it squirted out of his hands as the buzzer sounded. Overtime.

Wait.

One of the refs had called a foul on Brown. They huddled for a minute, then made their decision. The foul came right at the buzzer. Lin would get two free throws with no time on the clock. Make one and he would win the game.

I have to tell you at this point that I have played in hundreds of basketball games and watched thousands more and never seen a foul called with 0:00 on the clock. I’m not sure it’s even possible. If there’s a foul during the game, doesn’t there have to be some time left? But that was the call and here came Lin to the free throw line.

The rest of the players went to the other end of the court — no need to try for a rebound with no time on the clock. The ref handed Lin the ball. Here is the thing about being in a small gym. It was so, so quiet. You could hear him spin the ball in his hands before he shot. The ball had a high arc and everybody watched it.

It bounced on the rim once, twice.

And in.

Harvard 64, Brown 63. The Harvard cheerleaders screamed their lungs out. The two teams lined up to shake hands, both teams in a daze, and then the Brown kids trudged up the steps to their locker room while the Harvard team lingered on the court.

I am pretty sure, at that moment, no one there was thinking about the financial crisis.

Earlier that day we went to a seminar on careers in the humanities, and one of the speakers was the great Washington Post sports columnist Sally Jenkins. She talked about how covering sports is really about covering the athletic heart, and how the athletic heart can tell us a lot about ourselves as human beings.

She’s right. But I think sports is about more than just the athletic heart — it’s about the heart of the fan. Why do we spend so much money on sports, spend so much time watching games, care so much about a battle between the two worst teams in the Ivy League? Well, one reason is that sports is the great forgetting machine — no matter how terrible your life is going, no matter how bad the world, you can get swept up in a game for a couple of hours and pretend that nothing else matters.

We walked out into the cold night, warm. We talked to strangers, suddenly friends. Of course Mike Tirico would come on his day off. Even a small game in front of a tiny crowd can do that to you. It is a rare and valuable thing.

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Harvard partial nudity

A PG-13 post

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As my Nieman buddy Ernie Suggs said afterward, “One of those naked people will be president one day.”

Last night at midnight was the annual Harvard tradition called Primal Scream, where students let off steam — and shed their clothes — on the night before final exams begin. When we got to Harvard Yard about 11:45, there wasn’t much of a crowd yet, but five minutes later the Harvard marching band showed up — not naked, but a bunch of them were wearing shorts. (I should mention here that the temperature was in the high teens. Feel free to shudder.)

The band played “The Stripper,” “I Touch Myself,” “Centerfold,” and by the time they hit “Born To Run,” we heard a roar from the other side of the Yard and saw a long line of flesh rounding the corner toward us.

There were a couple hundred streakers in all — probably 80 percent guys, but lots of women too. Somebody wore a wrestling mask, somebody else had a knight’s helmet and ax. One guy was riding a bike. (The sidewalks up here have been slick and I said a little prayer that nobody would wipe out. That would be some nasty road rash.)

I think the whole experience was summed up by our friend Megan, who said simply when it was over: “I’ve never seen so many weiners.”

The whole thing was over in 20 minutes. It was silly and sexy and pointless and fun. In other words, it was like a lot of college — silly and sexy and pointless and fun and over before you know it.

Most people put on clothes quick after the run was over and the crowd started to scatter. There was one guy still walking around, naked and sweaty, with two words painted on his chest: FREE HUGS.

He wasn’t getting any takers.

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Harvard Photos weather

Snow day

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We woke up this morning to about 6 inches of snow on the ground and more coming down. This was on top of all the unmelted snow that hardened into land glaciers over the past few weeks. Back home, you can wait the snow out — it’s bound to melt in a couple of days. Here there’s going to be snow on the ground until April. Either you get out in it or you hibernate.

Today we had a brunch date with some friends at the Temple Bar, maybe a mile from our apartment. Staying warm hasn’t been the problem, at least so far — I’ve got good heavy boots and thick socks and Thinsulate gloves and a couple of wool hats that make me look like a serial killer. Plus you may have noticed I have a good bit of natural insulation. What I’m worried about is falling. I probably have this quote wrong — I seem to remember Oliver Hardy saying it — but the gist is this: Why do big guys walk so carefully? Because it’s a lot harder to get up when they fall.

Lucky for us, we had the best kind of snow for walking — soft and dry, like beach sand.  We made it to brunch and back just fine. A good lesson — the stuff you fear is rarely as big a deal as you think.

Of course, I’ve just jinxed myself into taking a header into a snowbank before the week is out.

Tomorrow night is the event of the winter at Harvard — Primal Scream. At midnight before the first day of exams, undergrads strip naked and sprint around Harvard Yard. (The Wikipedia article is priceless: Beginning in the 1960s students would congregate in the Yard or open their windows and just yell for 10 minutes. It was designed as a way to release stress. By the 1990’s, the streaking aspect of the evening had become prominent. The transition from yelling to streaking is unclear.)

We’ll be there to root them on, and, of course, to laugh ’til we choke. Apparently photos are encouraged. (We’ll see about sharing the pictures. This is a family blog.)

Weather forecast for tomorrow night: 18 degrees, possible snow. Could make for some interesting frostbite.

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Harvard

Tutu

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Photo by Alicia Anstead

This is why we’re luckier than a sack of shamrocks to be on this fellowship. This photo was taken a few hours ago at the Copley Plaza Hotel in downtown Boston. The large-headed white guy in the back row is me. The gray-haired gentleman in the center of the frame is Desmond Tutu.

Yeah… nice night.

On Friday we got an e-mail address to leave Tuesday night open, that we had a chance at meeting someone special but it wasn’t locked in yet. (All the scheduler would tell us is that it wasn’t Barack Obama.) Only this morning did we get a note telling us the meeting was on — and revealing our guest.

Nieman conversations are generally off-the-record, so I’ll just say that Tutu is inspiring, hopeful, a compelling speaker, a believer in God’s wisdom, and — this was a surprise to me — REALLY funny. He cracks himself up, and cracked us up too.

Anyway. None of this is to brag or name-drop or anything. It’s just to say that one of the things this year provides is an occasional dose of magic. And none of us get enough magic in our lives.

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Harvard

FOMO

(Two things: 1. Image lifted from fomo.com, fine purveyor of spray foam insulation products; 2. No, that’s not me in the photo. My haircut was even worse back then.)

On Wednesday I had the chance to see Al Gore. When I say “I had the chance to see Al Gore,” I mean he was going to be right outside the window. My English class let out at 3 p.m. and about 30 steps away Gore was scheduled to speak at 4 in the Tercentenary Theater, which is a fancy name for the patch of grass between Memorial Church and Widener Library here on the Harvard campus. (It’s called the Tercentenary Theater because it’s where Harvard celebrated its 300th anniversary. That was 72 years ago. Yes, this place has a bit of history.)

It was cold and wet and did I mention the speech would be outdoors, and just a reminder, the speaker was Al Gore. Seems like a nice guy. Probably right on global warming. Not exactly electrifying at the microphone. I stood in line for the free water bottle (“Green is the New Crimson” — little Harvard in-joke there) and started to skedaddle.

But then FOMO kicked in.

A few days ago somebody on the fellowship started using the word, and now I use it half a dozen times a day. It sums up what we’re all feeling. FOMO. Fear Of Missing Out.

There’s more to do here than you could do in 100 years, much less one. But one year is all we have. So we try to cram everything in.

For me, that means reading science experiments on the cerebellum then crowding around a living room to see if a few of us can write a song together then listening to two poets talk about sex then driving up to Maine for a day then trying (and pretty much failing) to understand Immanuel Kant then watching the Red Sox trying (and failing) to come all the way back.

That’s not all in the right order, but you get the idea.

There’s so much to do here — so many possibilities every day — that you always wonder about the events you didn’t go to, the speakers you didn’t see, the classes you didn’t take.

I know, I know, I can hear you playing the world’s smallest violin. Having too much great stuff to do is nothing to complain about. Nobody’s complaining, I don’t think. But the clock started running the day we got here and if you’re not careful all you can hear is the ticking in the back of your head. That makes it sound like a deadline. That makes it feel like work.

It took me two months to figure this out but now I think I understand FOMO. It’s not about missing out on what you could do here. It’s about missing out on what you couldn’t do  — or don’t do — back home.

We’re batting a thousand so far this year — we haven’t done a single thing yet that I came away from going Well, that sucked. But we do have lectures in Charlotte, and ball games, and I’m sure Al Gore will honor us with a visit at some point.

What I can’t get back home — or haven’t figured out how to get enough of — is those long sustained moments of quiet and beauty and grace that this year also provides, if we let it.

I skipped Al Gore. I went back to the Lippmann House (the fellowship HQ) and grabbed a cookie and a couple of magazines and sat at a long table in one of the front rooms looking out on the street. Couples strolled on the cobblestones and wet leaves danced down toward them like a ticker-tape parade. I stayed there watching for almost an hour. Wouldn’t want to miss out.