About this time, my parents rear-rived in town for Freshman Parents' Weekend, a new innovation to raise money. Drinks were served in a crimson and white striped tent by the Palmer Dixon Tennis courts. White coated flunkeys distributed crimson buttons lettered in white: HARVARD 1972. I took a handful to preserve, sure that I would pass them on to my children when they, favored children of a famous man, entered Harvard. But even as I did so I felt ridiculous. Really absurd. To hide the absurdity, I made a compulsive game out of it, testing how many I could steal and cram into my sport coat, much the way I would later steal 65 books of matches when the cigarette clerk in the Coop turned her back to pick out my pack of Larks. These weren't really hokie tokens of success, badges of rank, that I was collecting. It was all a game.

During the buffet lunch, I led my parents to a table next to the one where President Pusey and his wife were eating alone.

"Come on," said my father, "Let's sit with Mr. Pusey."

"No," I mumbled. We sat at the next table. But during the meal, I kept my ears open. Pusey ate two helpings and didn't say anything.

After lunch, we sat on exquisitely uncomfortable wooden chairs and listened to Pusey. "Many students become enraged when they think the University is trying to act 'in loco parentis'," he said. "This is a fallacious assumption that dates back to the period when parents had some authority." The fathers chuckled.

Dean Glimp ("What a handsome man," my mother said) remarked that many parents were worried because the University doesn't seem to be willing to punish students for anything. "Well, I don't think that's true." he said. "There are many things we are willing to go to the mat about. We'll go to the mat about defacing a library book. Students have been expelled for that."

In loco parentis? Library books? I asked myself: Who are these gleaming, silver-haired, immaculate mannequins?

Who are these people?

Later at the football game, we beat Bucknell 59-0. Being a freshman, I could only get tickets on the Bucknell side. When the score reached 45-0, some of the Bucknell players were in tears. The Harvard band sent emissaries over to the three Bucknell cheerleaders. Each crossed to the Harvard side on the arm of a Crimson-jacketed saxophonist. From where we sat, it did not seem quite so hilarious a joke.

But after all, what difference? This was Harvard football, honing up for its most glorious season in 50 years.

And who ever heard of Bucknell?

November: Richard Nixon won the elections. I watched the returns at Radcliffe with a girl at whom I had so fervently stared in Soc Sci 11. What success! What a hitch to my self-esteem! A friend of my roommate's, perhaps remarking how often I would stare at her picture in the Radcliffe freshman register, invited me to come watch the returns with a girl he knew. She had a friend, he said, whom I should meet. Lo and behold....

She told me she had lived in Japan for two years. She spoke Japanese fluently. She made an A on the Soc Sci 11 hour exam. She planned to major in Far Eastern Languages.

She was undoubtedly smarter than I am. Perhaps everyone in that room was smarter than I. Maybe every person, I began to feel, in every room of every House and Radcliffe dorm and Freshman dorm and off-campus apartment and faculty suite and common room was smarter, more interesting, more confident, more successful than I. My badge, my token, was in tatters.

After Nixon won, I stood up to leave. Peering into the top bunk I suddenly saw a mysterious, black-haired girl who had apparently been there through all the hilarity without saying a word. Her eyes were pools of sorrow. I loved her at once.