A Friend Gone To (S)lumber

Friends, summer students, first--years to be, lend me your ears:

I write to praise my Holworthy tree, not to lament its passing.

The joy that my old elm inspired lives on.

And the insidous cancer that besieged its tissues, sapped its strength, and made necessary a violent euthanasia will never mar the memory of its nobility.

I loved the tall, ancient elm that once stood in front of my first-year dormitory, Holworthy Hall. On sunny days, I savored the moments I spent sitting in its shade, reading and talking with friends as they passed by on their way to class. And, as flaky as it sounds, I also loved to hug it.

Walking through the Yard last weekend, I was shocked to find that nothing remains of my tree but a six-inch, vaguely heart-shaped stump and mounds of smelly, rotten sawdust.

That tree, though it was far from the most majestic in the Yard, represented much that was happy and perfect about my first year at Harvard, much that matched my romantic visions of the Harvard experience.

After years of disappointment and disillusionment in high school, I had decided that things rarely turn out the way you imagine them.

My visions of lingering over cafe au lait at a bistro on the Champs Elysees, for example, bore no resemblance to my actual visit to Paris, a series of lunches spent gobbling Grand Macs and Cokes only minutes before meeting stuffy tour buses. And thus, I had low expectations for my first year at college.

But my first year proved to be a pleasant surprise.

The grass was as green as I had imagined, the trees abundant and elegantly placed in the Yard. And to my delight, it was the very same field of grass in which Emerson and Thoreau had slept and studied.

I went into further spasms when I learned that Holworthy had been built in 1812, that my spacious room had two window seats overlooking the North Yard, and that time had been gentle to the names carved into the window frames. I could make out "Dinsmoor '00" as well as more recent initials from 1986 and '87.

That fall, my roommates and I received a chrysanthemum plant from the three men who had lived in our Holworthy suite 25 years before. Their note, written in fountain pen, wished us well and hoped that room 22 would bring us as much happiness as it had brought them. To that day, they were still the best of friends.

I basked in this moving display of friendship, this tradition which I'd just entered. Here was the idyllic setting I had refused to allow myself to imagine. Never mind that Harvard's past was not part of my own cultural heritage. For someone who had gone gaga over things colonial--over quill pens, tricornered hats, and Georgian architecture--living in Holworthy, in the Yard, was perfect.

And there was the venerable tree, which, as the year progressed, achieved "friend" status for me and my roommate, Sonya. Not only did the tree provide shade for daydreaming and procrastinating, it also became the final resting place of Sonya's pepper plant. Her miniature plant had attempted suicide not once, but twice by leaping from our window sill.

We buried it ceremoniously among the weathered roots of the tree with the vague hope that one day it would resurrect itself.

After midnight movies in the Square or our occasional party hopping tours, my roommates and I would leisurely stroll home and find groups of Holworthians lingering on the front steps or under the tree.

We stopped and joked and laughed and talked nonsense with these people with whom we had become great friends in just a few short months.

One night Sonya walked over to our tree to make a routine check for pepper plant sprouts. But this time she started hugging it.

Impulsively, I joined her in embracing the massive trunk. Even with our arms encircling its wonderful girth, our fingertips barely touched.

And though the trunk's rough, wrinkled bark pressed into our chests, our stomachs, our knees, we stayed there for a long time.