The deadline just passed for Julie and me to reserve a room on the Harvard campus for my 50th college reunion. It was an event I wanted very much to attend, but the uncertainties surrounding getting there, getting yet another Covid booster, and remembering how to get from Logan Airport to Harvard Square on the MTA began to overshadow desire. Also, when I looked over the list of attendees sent by the reunion committee, I only really remembered one.

His name was Vince Lackner. He’s on the reunion committee, so most of my reunion email is from him. In 1970 he was on the Harvard basketball team, and he tried to recruit me for the team my first year there. We weren’t even in the gym. We were in a college administrator’s waiting room. I don’t know why he was there, but I had recently become financially disconnected from my parents and I was trying to cobble together enough financial aid to stay in school.

I was a lousy recruit. I’d never played basketball. I told him so. He said I’d pick it up quickly. I said I sincerely doubted that I would.

I remember him because even after it was clear I wasn’t going to show up for practice, he still insisted I could play basketball, possibly because his experience was that if you played basketball well enough, they’d let you into Harvard.

He’s a lawyer now and not a retired basketball coach. At the reunion, I was going to ask him if he remembered talking to me about joining the team, and if it was too late to suit up.

But we’re not going. The events of the reunion—the class breakfasts, the lectures on higher education, government, journalism and retirement, the class photo on the wide steps of Widener Library, the memorial service, the class dinner and dance, the conversation with Vince Lackner—we’ll miss. Julie says she still wants to visit Boston, but in the fall, when we can afterward drive up through New England as leaf-peepers, moving slowly along maple-lined two-lane roads in miles-long traffic jams.

 

A 50th reunion is a milestone, one rather near the end of the road. You’re supposed to have accomplished a bunch by the time it happens, and if you haven’t, you’re supposed to gracefully accept the fact that you’re not going to be drafted into the NBA. Also, that Nobel in Physics? Forget it. The best-selling novel about a hippie commune in the desert? Too late. Your brilliant plan to strengthen democracy in Russia?

I did recognize a couple of semi-famous names in the attendee list. One was Ty Cobb, an eponymous relative of the old baseball player who was briefly Donald Trump’s defense lawyer during the first impeachment proceedings. The other was Michael Kinsley, a journalist and political commentator on Crossfire and founder of Slate, Microsoft’s online journal. I didn’t know either of them in college.

There may be other famous people coming to the reunion, but they’re not famous in the way that Lady Gaga is famous, or Elon Musk, or Ty Cobb the baseball player. For a while when we were planning to attend, I invented tense scenarios where I was introduced to somebody famous and didn’t know they were famous and they had to ask me, “You don’t know who I am, do you?” to which I would reply, “Apparently you don’t know who I am either.”

There we would be, two infinitely small human beings refusing to recognize each other’s existence in a universe whose boundaries won’t be discovered even by the James Webb telescope.

If you think people should know who you are even when you haven’t been introduced, you should first find out if you’re talking to someone who’s been hoping to see photos from the James Webb before nuclear war solves the Fermi Paradox. If you get the chance, you should probably look at those photos whenever you start worrying about what you’ve done in life and if it was enough.

 

For many years after graduation, I told people that Harvard had pretty much worn off by the time I was twenty-five, but that has turned out not to be true. For one thing, I knew by graduation that being a Harvard graduate did not mean that I was educated. That was the central truth of my post-college life, and I remembered it every time I looked at my diploma. My life, in retrospect, was a series of attempts to fill holes in my education.

For another, my diploma, however lacking in substance, got me my first teaching job, and later on, after grad school, a professorship at the College of Idaho. A lot of people were like Vince Lackner. They assumed that I had skills I lacked and plugged me into their plans.

Fortunately, I did know enough about writing to teach it. That didn’t keep me from being barely able to stay ahead of the students I was teaching.

The most durable part of my Harvard education turned out to be an autobiographical writing seminar that I took during my first semester. The professor was a psychologist, and he assigned Carl Jung’s autobiography, Memories, Dreams, and Reflections, as a text. He also assigned Sylvia Plath’s Ariel, a collection of poems written just before her suicide.

Those two books—one by a possibly psychotic depth psychologist and the other by a death-infatuated woman trapped in a brutal and unhappy marriage—may not have been the best works to introduce to an 18-year-old memoirist. Our professor pointed out that most people who write autobiographies think they have a self and the experiences to back it up, but upon trying to write things down, everything falls apart. “You find out you’re not the person you think you are,” he said. “You find out a lot of your memories have been bequeathed to you, and the things you think happened to you happened to someone a generation or three ago.”

 

The class became an exercise in explaining our selves, and those selves were delicate, poorly constructed things, not durable enough for the hard knocks that waited on the other side of college. Life was going to give us a down-to-the-studs remodel whether we wanted one or not.

Reading Carl Jung brought the knowledge that my life might be made difficult by other people, but it was apt to be made even more difficult by various entities in my own skull. Archetypes—living schematics of human behavior tens of thousands of years old—could possess me. I’d end up fulfilling their demonic desires instead of my own.

Animus-possessed women would find anima-possessed men, and the resulting marriage could go for years without the partners ever really seeing the person they were married to. A job could become an imitation of a life. Poorly understood impulses could sweep through an entire country, driving people to political and religious frenzies that turned into paroxysms of hatred and made a mockery of free will.

Reading Sylvia Plath made me understand that being smart and sensitive and a genius with words didn’t guarantee you’d survive if your mind ever found reason to turn on itself.

One of the incidents in Jung’s autobiography concerned a patient of his that was deeply ordinary, average in every way, and middle-of-the road on every issue. A vague discontent with life had brought the man to Jung’s office, but once therapy began, the patient’s discontent turned into nightmare. He began dreaming that a maniac with a butcher knife was trying to kill him.

Jung intuited that the man’s ordinariness was a defense against an incipient psychosis, and quickly terminated therapy.

I remember thinking that if being ordinary was a defense against craziness, it wasn’t worth it. It was decades before I understood that if you’re living in a suicidal culture, ordinariness is a psychosis itself. When I read Sylvia Plath’s poems now, I see someone trapped in family life, motherhood, a traditional secondary role in a traditional relationship. Her life became a box that was suffocating the self that drove her to write those short, gemlike, horrific poems. I cannot help thinking that sticking her head in the oven in her kitchen was a final poetic gesture in defiance of her forced domesticity.

 

So Harvard didn’t wear off. I have on occasion wished it would wear off, but it didn’t and won’t. For me, Harvard is more of a habit of mind than a place. Reading those powerful and dangerous books created a self that takes little for granted. My attitude toward the world is, to borrow a phrase from oncology, one of watchful waiting.

Yet another reason not to go to the reunion, I suppose. Most of the people signed up have learned to run easy in the cultural harness. That’s one hole in my education I’ve never filled.

The people who will assemble on the steps of Widener will be exceptional and accomplished human beings, successful by all polite standards, professional, more than competent at what they do, proud of themselves and their grandchildren, and ordinary in the sense of being well adjusted to jobs and institutions. I wouldn’t fit in.

 

Come reunion week I’ll be thinking of Vince Lackner and his basketball team.

A quick bit of internet research established that the Harvard basketball team finished the 1970 season with a 1-13 record, which might explain why Vince was recruiting new players.

Then I looked at the roster. Vince Lackner’s name wasn’t there. I felt the sudden shock of having a warm memory—“you look like you could play basketball”—disappear. A comforting thought got a little less comfortable, and it was replaced by the disturbing idea that for fifty years, Vince Lackner and a few other people had been blowing smoke up my ass.

Not to worry. Vince showed up on the 1971 roster. He finished the season with two field goals, two attempts, and no assists, for an FG% of 1.000, and four points. There was no mention of him on the 1972 or 1973 rosters. Vince, I realized, had been recruiting me for the practice squad.

Which is fine. The idea of making the practice squad is as comforting as making the team, and the lack of pressure more comforting yet.

 

I started following Michael Kinsley’s career when I found out he and I had been in the same Harvard class, and I found much to admire in his quick mind and compassionate politics. I was saddened when Parkinson’s disease cut his public life short. Parkinson’s is a terrible affliction, and it must have taken courage and a great desire to see old friends to commit to showing up at the reunion. The timing is right for this to be his last hurrah.

I would have liked to have told him that he had a good, brave, and extraordinarily sane career. I hope he already knows that.

I also would have liked to have introduced myself to Ty Cobb, esquire, and asked him this: “How could you take on Donald Trump as a client, when you must have known that you would be tied to him forever after, and whatever you did in life up to that point would be lost in his (Jungian) shadow, and history’s verdict on his presidency will be history’s verdict on you?”

Then I would have asked him his batting average, and if the Red Sox were in town, and if so, could he get Julie and me tickets.

 

It’s just as well we’re staying home. Sometime this October or the one after that, I’ll escort Julie through Harvard Yard. I’ll show her the circulation desk at Widener Library, where I worked for three years, and we’ll walk down to Mather House on the Charles, where I lived for three years and joked about living in a building named after Increase Mather, an ordinary Puritan slaveholder who promoted the execution of witches.

Then we’ll drive up the coast to New Hampshire and Maine, and we’ll stay in small motels through the darkening end of tourist season. After the slow crawl through a deciduous world, we’ll eat lobster and enjoy the clear skies of a late New England autumn, and we’ll be as ordinary and unoffensive as we can be under the circumstances.