Harvard students spend their first year living in The Yard, after which they move into one of thirteen dormitories—known as “Houses”—for the remainder of their college daze. Why “House?” Here we have one example of the many ways in which my alma mater tries to distinguish herself from the ranks oflesser educational institutions. The terminology is supposed to echo that used at Oxford and Cambridge, where halls are called colleges. Harvard’s founders attempted to capture that spirit without copying it outright; hence “houses.”
A powerful lesson resides here, one which any Ivy League grad can vouch for: plagiarize from the best—but don’t make it obvious.
The residential system is a dearly beloved facet of Harvard life, such that the first question alums ask upon meeting is, inevitably, “What House were you?” This question meant more in days of yore, when students got to choose their Houses. Those with common interests tended to cluster, creating reputations for an artsy house, a jock house, a snobby house.
But even today, when one’s House is randomly assigned, those reputations linger; and to a certain extent, students adopt the practices and attitudes that are expected of them. It’s interesting to see how a person heretofore uninterested in nudism and waltzing will take them up, all because a computer has decided that he belongs in Adams. A second powerful lesson: the importance of social context. (Cf. I Am Charlotte Simmons, by Tom Wolfe.)
One of the upsides of living in the same place for three straight years is that you don’t have to make a major move every summer and fall. While it’s true that you change rooms every year—in theory, your lodgingsimprove with seniority—generally, the most you have to do is lug your futon down into the basement in June and back up in September, or from one side of the house to the other.
I tried to use the same storage space every summer, to help me avoid forgetting where I’d stuck something. I knew I could go to a certain corner of the Cabot House basement and find the rocking chair I bought for $60 my freshman year—the one missing a spindle—or the 100 year-old framed family portrait that I hung above my desk. (Not my family. I found it, as well, in a junk shop.)
It was in the midst of just such a retrieval, in the fall of 1999, between my sophomore and junior years, that I discovered a plaque atop the shelving units, threatening to come crashing down. I climbed up to restore the plaque to its rightful place, and in glancing it over stumbled into one of the greater mysteries of my adult life.
The plaque read:
National Black MBA Association
This is to certify that
Gisele J. Ransom
is hereby awarded this
National Black MBA Association Scholarship
on this 30th Day of September, 1995
during the 17th Annual Conference and Exposition
Boston, Massachusetts
Naturally, I was intrigued. Someone had obviously taken the time to mount and laminate the plaque; it looked thoroughly professional. Why, then, was it still sitting on a basement shelf, four years later? Who was this Gisele J. Ransom, and why had she abandoned this proud part of her history?
I certainly didn’t want the plaque to fall back into obscurity. I took it with me and hung it up in my room, as a reminder to look for its rightful owner.
I started to ask around. Nobody in the House knew of any Gisele J. Ransom, not the House Master or any of the tutors who had been around long enough to have known Gisele.
Thinking she may have been a member of a different House, whose possessions somehow ended up stashed in the Cabot basement, I searched the Harvard alum database. I found 20 other Ransoms—who knew it was such a common last name?—but no Gisele. (As a side note, I should mention that I discovered exceedingly few Harvard graduates named Gisele. Someone ought to look into this. Methinks a kind of Gisele-discrimination might be at work here.)
Flummoxed, I turned to the Internet. There, too, I hit a wall: Google could tell me nothing about Gisele. And as everyone knows, when you’re lost to Google, you might as well not exist.
By the time I graduated, two years later, I had still uncovered no new information about Gisele J. Ransom. It wasn’t until I moved into my first apartment—taking with me Gisele’s plaque—that my roommate very intelligently suggested we contact the National Black MBA Association itself, or as we liked to call it, the NBMBAA. That’s pronounced “nibbum-bah-ah.”
We wrote them a very earnest e-mail explaining the situation and requesting an e-mail address for Gisele so we could give her back her plaque. No answer was forthcoming, so my then-girlfriend (and current wife) wrote a second e-mail, one employing a more restrained tone.
Eventually she received a reply. The NBMBAA’s official position was that, while they didn’t have any means of contacting Gisele, I could send the plaque back to them, and they would hold it in trust for her, until such time as she came looking for it.
Naturally, this offer we rejected outright. I hadn’t been schlepping Gisele’s legacy from abode to abode, like a frickin plaque-bearing nomad, only to drop it in the hands of a bunch of strangers.
The fact is I had come to feel a sense of kinship with Gisele, daresay a partial ownership of her plaque. By that point I had been stewarding it at least as long as—probably longer than—she had. When it got dirty I gently massaged it with Windex. When it felt lonely I told it, not to worry, Mommy will come back for you someday. (I always felt guilty telling it that. The lies we tell to protect a child!) And whenever I moved into a new home, I accorded it a place of prominence.
Now that my wife and I have begun settling in to our new home in California, the matter of where to put Gisele’s plaque has once more arisen. It might go in the guest bathroom, where no art currently hangs. (Lest you doubt that Gisele’s plaque qualifies as art, I encourage you to take a look at it.) It might go in my office, between the oil portraits of my ancestors. It might go in the kitchen, to remind us that though we sup aplentifully, many plaques yet go hungry, for lo they are without mother to suckle them.
Gisele J. Ransom’s scholarship certificate may be the most lasting piece of Harvard I take with me. I’ve forgotten most of what I learned in class, but in the plaque I have a tangible reminder that I once lived in Cambridge, that I once spent a few days every year hauling furniture out of a dusty basement with my friends. This simple object, this piece of wood and plastic, has become for me a sort of time machine.
One part of me hopes beyond hope that Ms. Ransom reads this and gets in touch with me. I’d really like to do the right thing and reunite her and her plaque. Moreover, I’d love to finally connect a real person to the name I’ve been staring at for close to ten years. What a treat it would be to shake hands with this person who has unwittingly played such a large role in my life.
Then again, another part of me hopes that she’ll remain mysterious, a funny little ghost taken up residence in my mind. Because when I try to imagine Gisele herself, I forever picture her stuck at the age of 24, a fresh-faced business school grad proudly bearing her bona fides and ready to take on the world.
By now she’s probably achieved great things; but my Gisele will never get old. She is my Dorian Gray; my fountain of youth. In accompanying me wherever I may roam, in never changing though I change every day, she has become for me a kind of reverse memento mori, a friend I’ll never meet, a story I’ll never finish. And it’s the never-ending stories that keep us running, isn’t it?
