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.

Be My Friend? Look, Here's My Allowance!

 Yesterday I seem to have invited everybody in my entire Contact list to be my 'Friend on Facebook' talk about embarrassing, since some of my contacts are famous people. Like Gloria Steinem. And Garrison Keillor I think maybe. And the POPE! and the Center for Wart Removal in Atlanta, and OK yes I’m making it up about the Pope and the Wart Lab but not the others. I HAVE these addresses but I never use them - or I use them only sparingly.

For example when I was younger, see photo, that's me in the chair sobbing, no of course not, that's me the mother, sorrowing over the first haircut... When I was younger my mom died at a party right in front of us all just as we were toasting her birthday, and this highly shocking event caused me in the 2 or 3 years following her death to do all kinds of odd things: Like wearing hats, I think to channel her old jauntiness. Like CRYING while giving speeches that were suppose to be light and funny, making the whole audience cry too, talk about your Typhoid Mary. And like writing letters to famous people.

I wrote to Ronald Reagan and sent him the column I did about him when I saw him in Concord NH. I wrote to the Prince of Wales after seeing him at the 350 birthday of Harvard. I remember sitting in the Yard looking up at all those ivy leaves declining like Latin nouns down the sides of the old buildings and thinking 'Damn you Ten Thousand Men of Harvard, why did you keep my kind out for like 99 % of your history?'

I wrote to Garrison Keillor when I applied to be the first Journalist in Space. I had mentioned him in my application essay and have always kinda figured that's why I got to the final 40 in that contest.

I even wrote to the great John Updike when I read a short story of his in the New Yorker that made it apparent his mum had died too. I sent him a condolence note and a copy of the column I wrote about Cal’s dramatic death – that was my mom's name, 'Cal', as jaunty a name as she was a person, a cigarette held tight in her teeth as she took the corners on two-wheels to get us to that convent school she enrolled us in by mistake where she was in a fight with the nuns from DAY ONE.

And they all wrote back, these famous characters: Ronnie R. wrote right back. The future King of England did too or at least His Honor Lord High-Fanny of the Royal Equerry wrote on his behalf. And Garrison Keillor and John Updike sent actual postcards, John Updike's saying a thing so nice about my writing it pulled me up out of obscurity like the wave of the Bibbity Bobbity Boo wand of Cinderella’s fairy godmother. In fact just last month he had another story in the New Yorker, this one so beautiful I was forced to write him again and what do you think? Another postcard came, as gracious as the first.

Now 15 years had passed between my first letter to him and my second, that's how careful I am. And I wouldn’t DREAM of writing to the Pope even if I had his email address, and the same goes for Lord High-Fanny who gave me some serious attitude in his letter just because my column said Prince Charlie wore the academic hood of his alma mater whereas in fact he wears the robes of the University of Wales just because he like OWNS Wales or some insignificant thing like that.

Gloria Steinem though? Gloria’s address I was saving for a special occasion, like offering myself to come be the jester at the next Inter-Galactic Women’s Conference. And now – agony!- my girl has called her girl if you can call an Address Book a girl and I seem to have asked her to be my friend on Facebook! The Queen gets invited to the worker bee’s after school party, Aaargh I could die! But, on the other hand in the last 24 hours I've heard from people I haven’t seen in decade and have admired their pictures and have written on their walls so why be embarrassed? Because really we're ALL members of the Class of '08, right? So really, why NOT write in each other's yearbooks?