How did I end up at Harvard?

I usually forget that I ever attended Harvard, but today, I took my french foreign exchange student on a tour and remembered walking to class across Harvard yard at twilight, surrounded by centuries-old brick buildings and the smell of October and woodsmoke in the air.

People often wonder how a delectable little cream puff like me ended up at Harvard. I have one answer for them: because I love to read.

For me, reading was the key that unlocked all the doors.

I attended a high school where I never went to class and no one really cared. There were many days when my little sister and I would take our cat, Romeo, for a ride around town, or go to the local donut shop when we were supposed to be in class. But what did I do at the donut shop? READ! And my sister would sit across from me eating a chocolate donut and complain (by throwing pieces at my head) that I was ignoring her with my book in hand, so I would read to her, steamy passages from books like Endless Love, much to her fascination and disgust.

She also didn’t appreciate when I would flip the light on in her room at midnight to yell some gorgeous poetic lines from my antique Ella Wheeler Wilcox book. My Dad kept poetry books around the house, and I’d read them, underline the lines I loved the best, and bend the pages so I could find them again easily. (Shhhh, don’t tell my current librarian who is furious with me for returning a book with slightly steamed pages because I had read it in the bubble bath. It was a book about a murder in a bakery, so steamy pages seemed perfect, but she made me pay for it, and fined me extra for disrespecting the book.)

If my little sister yelled at me to turn off the light, I would gush the beautiful words anyway before she could stop me.

In my Baudelaire “dark poetry” phase, I would dress in black with big sunglasses and a red scarf to go visit my grandfather’s grave in a meadow at the foot of the mountain. I had only met him once, but the rumor was he could fall asleep with a book of poetry on his chest and when he woke up, he would know every line “by heart,” a skill my Dad said I had inherited. Then he’d add my best quality was my memory.

I wouldn’t say that was my BEST quality, I have other qualities I think are better than my memory.

(Just ask my kids who are shocked when I ask them to watch a movie with me and they tell me we already watched it together. It actually makes mysteries great fun because I always forget who the killer is, and so can read Agatha Christie AGAIN and be surprised AGAIN.)

But I do love that phrase for memorizing: “by heart.”

I love knowing things “by heart” and it is true that if given the chance, especially after a glass of wine or two, I will recite to you sonnets by Shakespeare, poems by Whitman, Yeats, Dorothy Parker and Tennessee Williams, a completely useless skill in the world but I have to say, useless skills are my favorite skills.

But back to Harvard… After years of performing with my circus tribe, I began to crave books in a new way, outside of just reading on my own. I decided to return to school, and though it would make sense to major in World Arts and Cultures with my years immersed in performing multicultural dance around the world, I decided I wanted to major in books. And I was in heaven at UCLA, with enormous stately buildings that served one purpose: to give a home to books and a place for people to study them.

This was me. I loved being assigned books I had never heard of, books I didn’t love, but once the spirited class discussions began, my mind changed. Having my mind changed is one of my favorite parts of reading.

So, that’s the story of how I landed at Harvard. And when I say landed, I hope you imagine me as some exotic flamingo-like owl with soaring wings, maybe in a 1940’s plane wearing goggles and a flying ace hat.

So, I was walking around my old campus in Cambridge today, remembering hours spent reading in the library. My favorite classes were the ones about topics nearly impossible to define, like how emotions create who we are, how dance, music, bookmaking, and a caring teacher can reach the unreachable, and how best of all, love and books can change the trajectory of someone’s life. (I added that last piece myself.)

I left these classes feeling like my brain had become a jigsaw puzzle thrown into the air, mind blown, and now I needed time to think and reassemble the pieces. I would walk home while the sun set over Longfellow’s house, where I could imagine Thoreau and Emerson having a spirited discussion by the fire. Cars whooshed by me, and I would think about all the stories in my head in a jumbled parade: the romance novels, thrillers, Agatha Christie, even mystery novels where the detective was a cat; academic books, philosophy, biographies, and classic literature written by Russians where the characters names might be an entire page long. I loved to say these names out loud while I read, they sounded so strange, rolling off my tongue like a parade of cats dressed like great literary figures.

I even thought about books so complex I could barely understand them, but I still read them because I knew with some exquisite turn of phrase that I’d never heard before was heading my way, a phrase that just might make me understand the world in a new and different way. (I’m looking at you James Joyce!)

I guess the point is that, even now, a million years later, books are my Orient Express, my journey into the Sultan’s Palace, my feet slipped into the upturned toes of a genie’s slippers, and my three wishes involve more books, the kind that feel like catching magic by the tail and making it into a kite, the kind that change minds and nourish souls, and of course, living, passionately, wildly, softly, and always always always, living “by heart.”