The social schedule in Danvers was topped by he Glen Magna ball and antique show, and Twi-League baseball. Other than Route One's meat-on-he-hoof singles spots, the town's only after midnight establishment was Supreme Roast Beef.

You never really appreciate the luxury of accessible, stimulating surroundings until they're gone. Four years of Cambridge makes you fat and complacent--stimulus is routine there, served up like glop on the cafeteria line. It's departure is tangible.

If you're near enough to Cambridge, you try to stockpile the stimulus, greedily gathering it on short-term visits to take home and hoard until you're next in town. But it doesn't work.

The brick walls with their Ivy lattice become two-dimensional, depthless. Everything is theater with your role obscured.

Overextended, Harvard's stimulus dulls. The people and surroundings, so interesting while you were there, somehow seem to bore you.

At first you try to equate the change in us-and-them terms. The new generation just isn't as interesting, as committed, as your own, you argue.

But the strange new boredom is more than that. It's not so much that the people, the surroundings and issues, are less stimulating. They're just less stimulating than memory has made them. Or less stimulating than you think they ought to be.

It's the initiation into unbelonging.

One day it hits you that you no longer get worked up about which English professor screwed which class on which midterm exam, and you realize you're outside.

The realization brings the purge, consumation of the break. You cut off all your hair or change your wardrobe, try on new styles, sample different characters. You stop the Cambridge visits and mumble inarticulate responses when asked where you went to school.

After the blowout came two hard months. Caught between lines--Harvard to the rear, who knows what ahead--I floundered. The job offered little solace. It gobbled my energies and attention, but after work I still had to go home, and a two-room apartment, however small, is large alone.

Slowly, though, things began to coalesce. New interests brought new people. New people new relationships. The matrix began to make sense again.

I still missed Harvard--the discordant pastiche of people and philosophies, the confrontation and debate, the bid to make the world (at least your mound of it) a little more humane.

I still miss it, though sporadically. The brick and ivy, the crush of the Square, the swarms of class-goers evoke the patented responses in me.

Or maybe not. My longing is somehow hollow, ennervated. My niche is elsewhere.