Jane’s Creative Writing - Part 2
The committee included two Harvard Alums, one current senior, and an anthropology professor. The senior might have been the most taken with himself of the group. He was on the short side. (Don’t ask me how I could tell from only seeing him in a seated position; it may have been that his head wasn’t much higher than the mahogany table we all sat around in a distinctly fake, casual way; or, it might have been his attempt to act smarter than I think he was, that added to my impression that his legs most likely did not reach the floor.) It was he who threw out the first question. “Your application says that you have lived your entire life in a small New Hampshire town, of 3000 residents. Is there anything about your provincial life that might make you particularly equipped to take on the unique challenges of a school like Harvard, and then, potentially, to go out into the world at large and make an impact, a difference, in society at large?”
He’s got to be kidding! How seriously can one pretentious little Napoleon take himself? I could tell instantly that he must have been one of the boys from the club. One who comes from a family where the path includes an exclusive private school education until high school, and then it’s off to an elite boarding school. In addition to the best schools, the long line of family money also affords students like “Napoleon” private tutoring for hundreds of dollars an hour, expensive music lessons, and summers abroad mastering French or Spanish. Hours of impressive community service in places like Somalia, where he probably fund-raised an impressive amount of money so that he could institute programs designed to give the teens of some remote African village an Aids Education Program. What a lucky chap! He had it all, and now he was enjoying the challenge of getting to know a middle-American hick like me. I was probably more foreign to him then the Somaolian teens.
I felt the pressure to speak impressively weighing on me. I wanted these four strangers to hunger for me when I got up from the table to leave the wood paneled room at the Harvard Club. “My provincial life.” Was I even sure what that meant? I figured it had something to do with province, which means a small area, or a small town, I guessed, and then I found myself ranting about my job as Doc’s makeshift midwife.
“There was that time, when Doctor White and I drove ten miles into the woods, to deliver the Spaulding baby. Jack Spaulding and Jennifer Martin-Spauding were homesteaders who built their A-frame completely themselves from the Maple trees found in the woods around the property.” I spoke of the twenty-five degree below zero weather conditions, freezing the tears on our faces as wind seared our cheeks.
(to be continued …)
