Cambridge Journal

I.
I came here with new glasses, and I'm still getting used to them, so that when I climb a stairway I look down at the steps and they appear to me to be curved. I keep looking down at my feet, wondering how they got to be all the way down there, wondering how I got to be so tall. My eyes haven't learned yet how to navigate the depths of what they take in. My left eye is the good one -- better than 20/20, the optometrist said. The right one is weak. I can close my right eye and read the label on an electric fan from ten feet away with my left. With my left eye closed, everything is a blur in the right.

II.
Harvard Yard: six in the morning on a Sunday, the Fourth of July. I forgot to wear my glasses, but even through the blurred edges that form the shapes of things around me I can tell that we are the only ones about, Ben and me. Ben is unusually quiet in his stroller. I wonder what he sees, how he is learning to process it. He is just learning his colors, and we are practicing with the things we see on our walk, especially the blue of the hydrangeas, which look as though someone had spray painted them: it doesn't seem like they could be real. To me, without my glasses, they look like cotton candy on a stick, something out of Dr. Seuss.

We cut between buildings, through alleys of brick, through the silence of Divinity Avenue this early in the morning. Automatic sprinkler systems are shooting water deep into the green of green grass. There's enough brick here to build a castle in four dimensions, enough wrought iron to build an ocean liner. Wonder how all that iron railing made it through the war without being commandeered by the government, but then again this is Harvard. We don't quite belong here, feel a bit like intruders, but this early on a Sunday morning any place is yours if you are walking through it quietly enough: on tippy toes.

The moon is still up in the sky, fragmentary, pouring out of a cup you might make with your left hand. Ben points it out to me. Signs: It's natural ... Organic Landscaping; All Pets Must Be On A Leash, stick man walking stick dog. Commemorative plaques, various and sundry in nature. The words are ragged around the edges, but I can still read. The difference between what's there and what I see is only a little less pronounced than it ever is, even with glasses. I'll never know what it is that a bird sees, what stick man walking stick dog sees. Through the gate by Canady Hall and up on top of the building there to the left, a hawk screams from a high perch. Not a warning to the little birds below but a summons to some other hawk somewhere else, a hypothetical bird that might be in the vicinity: a call to all hawks, if anyone out there is listening.

Still no one else. Then we see a jogger, and the gig is all up. We're no longer the sole inhabitants of the grounds of America's oldest university.

Past the statue of John Harvard: once I walked by here, years ago, and he had a pigeon on his head. It seemed apt, somehow, a humbling message: that we all might end up splattered with pigeon shit someday. There are more people now, a couple standing at the top of a set of monument-worthy stairs: Widener Library, repository of knowledge. It's late night for the lovers, I can tell. They are oblivious to anything, lost in their embrace. Summer school students who found each other more truly and more strange, it seems. One wonders where they are off to next, if they'll see each other again when summer's over. Either way, it couldn't matter to them now: they are embedded in the moment.

A covered passage through the middle of Wigglesworth Hall and into Harvard Square. Rampant commercialism tamed, at rest on a Sunday morning. That is, nothing's open. We pause at the bookstore, look over the titles, the names of visiting authors posted on the calendars, used books for sale. I tell Ben about the books I'd like to get, but he doesn't seem much interested. He quietly waits it out. The couple walks by, down from their vertiginous perch and among the walking and fully awakened once more. Hand in hand, delighted still at each other's company, and who would ever begrudge them that? The world is newly created for them and they the only couple. Just don't set foot ouside of the garden, I want to tell them. Stay here forever. If you can.

And then we wander through the residential areas below and to the east of campus. A good place to live, no doubt, with brick sidewalks and gardens well maintained in the side yards. They're New England gardens: the hydrangeas are tall and upright from the long New England spring and the mild summer, bright blue from the acidity of the soil. Onward and around, I'm looking up and squinting at street signs, registering the names and cataloguing landmarks for future navigations.

I pride myself on my sense of direction. I refer to it as innate, a natural product of the midwestern sensibility, but it's not. I claim that it comes from a childhood spent lying flat next to my brother in the bed of our dad's pickup truck, looking up at the blank of a blue sky as we crossed over the line from Johnson County into Wyandotte, guessing where we were and taking occasional glances over the edge of the truck bed to see if we were right. But more likely it comes from my willingness to learn the ground the old-fashioned way, on foot, finding a few landmarks and fixing them in my mind: an apartment building on Kirkland that I can recognize from any direction, a patch of sidewalk under construction, a walkway that I discovered that leads you out of a dead end street. Keeping track of your turns and always knowing which way is north.

Soon I've navigated our way through slums of hydrangea and clematis and brick sidewalks and back to our street, Francis Avenue, wondering about the prices, what it would cost to live here instead of just staying here for a month. The phrase "prohibitively expensive" comes to mind. Then we are on the grounds of the Divinity School. Is everything holy here? What about the infidels, the non-believers -- like us? What does it take to believe in things you can't see when you're not even sure about the things you do see?

These questions don't matter much to Ben: he's ready to get out of the stroller by now and go inside for a cool drink of water.

III.
My daughter wakes late, still terrified of the redcoats. The patriots, too, for that matter: anyone with a gun. The re-enactors are out in force this weekend. Yesterday she had a bad run-in with the redcoats on Boston Common; cannons were involved. Fourth of July on a Sunday, the cradle of liberty: that's what you get. There's the particular and peculiarly fervant brand of patriotism espoused by New Englanders. The revolutionary era is their heritage. They bring out cannons to every major park around and fire them off at fifteen minute intervals. No live rounds, of course, or at least we assume.

This is arguably the best place in the country to be on July Fourth, but Edie will have none of it. My wife explained to her that the redcoats were the bad guys, the others (white shirts, mostly, it seems, coarse cloth) are fighting for freedom. More or less. I'm about to side with the redcoats myself, thinking that maybe we should have just shut up and paid our taxes, then we wouldn't be dealing with cannons going off right next to the playground. I might openly declare myself a Tory. Edie goes about with her fingers in her ears, asking questions -- the answers to which she can't hear because her ears are covered. She can't figure out why anyone would ever want to go to war. We tell her that guns aren't allowed on campus, that she's safe here. No one is ever allowed to bring a gun on campus, and certainly not a cannon. Not in the residential areas, either. (I explain to her what a residential area is: it's a place where people live, and they don't want to be bothered. There are playgrounds in these residential areas that we can visit. No cannon, no musket, no grape shot.) She's very sensitive about noise, despite the fact that on any given parcel of land where she might find herself she is usually the loudest thing there -- no volume control yet. She had bad dreams last night about the redcoats.

Just outside the range of the cannons, though, we find ourselves in a little utopian socialist enclave, also known as the playground at Cambridge Commons. Wood bricks and plastic buckets are all held in common. Children work together to send water through a stainless steel aqueduct. It's an inversion of the instinct of mine at work here: no such thing as private property, and that takes the kids a bit of getting used to, but it's a good thing. The redcoats are forgotten, for the time being, at least. Boston may or may not be the hub of the universe, still, but it boasts the best playgrounds I've ever seen, anywhere.

IV.
Later in the morning, we are all walking together through Harvard Square. I stop into a cafe for coffee to go, and when I come out my wife is gesturing wildly at a figure just crossing the street. I turn to look and I know who he is instantly, and after the initial shock of recognition the entire mystery of his character suddenly makes sense.

Even from half a block away, he is easily distinguished by the particular qualities of his gait, the guitar that he carries with him everywhere in a hard shell case. I have my glasses on, but the pattern of his movements is so distinct that I think I would recognize him even without them on. He wears a rumpled suit, a white shirt with no tie, and his white hair is combed back, down almost to his collar: this is the same ensemble, the same look that I have associated with this fellow for almost twenty years. His face is red, weathered from walking so much, but at the same time you don't get the sense that he lives out of doors. He's a walker, a wanderer, no stranger to public transportation. Shabby but dignified. He comes from a cultured background. For twenty years, he was a fixture of Lawrence, Kansas, the town where Amy and I live, but here he is in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and as I said it all somehow makes sense.

The man with the guitar is named John. For years, Amy and I seemed to see him wherever we went. He could often be found sitting quietly at a coffee shop, staring at nothing in particular. He played guitar -- expertly -- during Sunday brunch at a restaurant where I worked. We track him down. He has a head start, and the walk signals are against us, but Amy catches up with him when he stops at a newsstand. He is happy to see us. He recognizes me, or he pretends to -- it's hard to know. He has a soft, refined voice, and he is very courteous. He grew up here, he says, and after twenty years of living in Lawrence he has just moved back. He plays every Monday night for the dinner crowd at such-and-such restaurant here in Cambridge, and he encourages us to come see him, and we agree to do so even though we know that it's not likely, given the fact of the young children who seem somehow to follow us around wherever we go.

A small world, I say, as we prepare to part ways, but even as I say it I know it's not true. The world is big and wide, and Boston, sadly, is no longer its hub, and there is much to see throughout the world's expanse. It's not a small world, you just keep running into the same crowd everywhere you go, like these children who keep following us around. We go our own ways. I have no doubt that we will run in to him again: he's the kind of person you keep running in to. Nevertheless, for some reason, we are all indescribably happy to see each other, even though if pressed on it none of us would be able to explain in the least why, except that we have these two places in common, here in the whole wide world.

V.
The kids go to bed around eight o'clock on the Fourth of July. Ben is too young to get much out of fireworks, we assume, or at least we don't want to navigate the crowds with him in tow, and Edie is still terrified of loud noises, explosions, and it's their bedtime, anyway. So here we are, the best place in the world to experience Independence Day, and it's lights off at eight-thirty. I set my glasses aside for the evening; I don't need them now. Amy and I stay up reading until she falls asleep. I turn off the light, then go into the bathroom so as not to keep her up and sit on the edge of the tub reading: about why we need wolves in the wilderness today, about an underappreciated Danish painter whose paintings radiate with an inborne light, about new translations of old scriptures -- what do the words mean, and where did they come from? The extreme degree to which Christianity depends upon translation -- translations of translations, even, of works by a person or persons unknown. All of which is to say that we do indeed see darkly through the glass. Advertisements for books, ridiculous personals: Uninhibited telephone exploration of your sexual fantasies. Call Julia. Dating/Intimacy Coach: Manhattan, Upper East Side location. The hand-in-hand couple are far, far away from this now.

I crinkle the magazine shut, then I, too, head for the mattress. It's a heat wave, and there's no air conditioning in our apartment. We've got four fans running. We had hoped to escape the heat by coming here, but the heat came with us and settled in, at least for a few days, at which point the winds off the ocean will push it back to where it came.

I lie in bed for a long time, awake, waiting to get settled in to the darkness, but I know that when I do sleep I will sleep until dawn. We're not so different from John, the man with the guitar. We're different from the hawk. You might remember things (scenes, images) but you don't know what it's like anymore to be young, to be very young. I see now what I see when my eyes are awake.