I Pahked the Cah in Hahvahd Yahd

I went to Harvard's Commencement exercises last week to see my girl Annie get her Master’s and was amazed to find myself steeped in the same resentments I feel every time I step into that famous Yard.First I think about how when I was applying to colleges they didn’t take my kind at the Ivies - meaning women. I remember looking at my future husband’s  Freshman Classbook from this place and thinking “I must be as smart as at least some of these jokers, yet I couldn’t even apply here!”Then I think about the snooty guys who turned away Uncle Ed 60 years ago when he applied to the Medical School, he an Armenian-American, small  and ‘swarthy,’ a code word for  ‘not of our pure northern races.’  They rejected him and when he asked for an appointment to find out why, the man across the desk lifted an eyebrow and said “Tell me,  Mr. Haidostian, where did your father go to college?” His father, a man born in the 1880s when even here in the States the average young man never even finished high school!“My father is a graduate of the University of Tarsus,” said Uncle Ed simply. "In Asia Minor,” he added when the guy seemed unable to answer, and maybe he really was speechless but it  didn’t get  Uncle Ed any closer to his dream of being a doctor.So when I first walked into that Yard last Thursday all I could think of was grievance.And then I looked around – and saw among the graduates and family members as many people of color as you would  see in any of our larger cities.Of those accepted into this class of ’09, as I have since read. a record 10.5 percent were African American, 17.8 percent were Asian American, 8.2 percent were Latino, and slightly more than 1 percent was Native American. And fully two-thirds of them received some form of financial aid, with an average total student aid package approaching $30,000.So I ponder all this. And then I remember something else too: My own husband, a Harvard grad himself, is the son of a man whose father was a tailor from a little village north of Naples. My youngest child, a very recent Harvard graduate, is, on his mother's side, the great-grandchild and namesake of  a man who grew up dirt-poor on a farm with a mother able to read and write in Gaelic only, but who yet became a lawyer AND a judge AND such a tireless worker for the public good that fancy-pants Harvard itself once gave him an honorary degree.So let me chose thanks over resentment here, because don’t we all believe that here in America the best can rise and rise?Anyway Annie rose, she who once thought she was the dumb one and her sister Carrie the smart one. Phi Beta Kappa in college Annie, you whose infinitesimal penciled numbers used to float like wee party balloons to the tops of all your math papers, making your primary school teachers cry Eyestrain!  and also Intervention!  Master of Arts, Annie Marotta, and isn’t your sister Carrie as proud as she can be of you, even as you pull her hair here in this picture?We are all proud of our graduates and humbly remember why our own parents sent us to school when it was our time as the young ones. They sent us to make things better. They sent us to learn to serve.