a perfectly good life

When I was at Harvard studying Russian Lit. twenty-nine years ago, my friends were convinced that I would be either a famous writer myself, or, if not that, then I would without a doubt teach at an Ivy one day. No one would have expected to find me living on the streets of New York, homeless, and writing my novel in the various Apple stores on any computer that was free for a moment.

I got into Harvard because I convinced my best friend from Henniker High take my SAT’s for me, and my brother Tony, an unusual genius, wrote my application essay. Tony suffered from Aspberger’s Syndrome, but in spite of behaving like a cardboard box, he wrote like Philip Roth. Since I have always been a top-of-the-line bullshit artist, I charmed the pants off the pretentious admissions committee at Harvard. I talked to them about my mother, who cleaned the bathrooms at the cinema in town, was married to an abusive man (not my actual father), and how I worked three jobs in order to stay away from the family chaos. Of course I included my two volunteer positions. One was that I assisted Dr. White, the town GP, who was famous for delivering babies at home. A large percentage of Henniker residents live in the back woods, where a dirt road and a wood-burning stove, is the norm. There’s always been a preponderance of hippies in town, and many of the homesteader types insist on delivering their babies at home with Doctor White.

I am not bullshitting, but Doc White is about sixty, has white shoulder length hair, a full white beard, and is always seen wearing a pair of very baggy white jeans, with a red and yellow plaid flannel shirt. His footwear is exclusively dirty white bucks. Since the White’s live two doors down from me, right in the center of town, I regularly played with their black Labrador retriever, who was my therapy dog (for the times when I needed to break away from the claustrophobic climate at home). Francis White adored me and I think he sympathized with my situation, so when he asked me to join him on his home deliveries, I was intrigued. He needed an assistant to work with the family members who, from his point of view, were “a pain in the ass.” My job is to play with the kids, and if it’s a first time mother and father, I am supposed to be there to keep everyone on track. Since I am a long distance runner, I have a combination of enormous self discipline, the ability to withstand physical pain, and a great appreciation and understanding of the breaths impact on the mind and body. Dr. White admires me for this, and he thought that I would make a great coach and assistant during his home deliveries. I was thrilled by the offer, felt really valued, and jumped at the opportunity.

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 …)