Square Dance

HARVARD SQUARE has been gripped, while you were away, by the sprinkling of Summer that passes for Spring around here. The winds are generous, gushing, the fading-blue sky spreads milky sunlight--and the humans below etch jaunty patterns.

The lights change to a fixed "DON'T WALK" for traffic to contentedly break into a shuffle. Just then a 9-year-old girl, blonde hair wheeling, a Titian on thin limbs, ambles resolutely into the street, waving her cigarette. The cars squeeze to stop, the girl reaches the opposite bank and vanishes into the faulted crowd. If Moses were alive today he wouldn't be a bearded patriarch swinging a knobby wand.

"They ain't complaining about the flu at least these days," said the chunky newspaper seller corralling compulsively spent loose nickels.

There are other ways to lose your money. Moving on Mass Ave, skimming the Cambridge Trust's gory window pulpit, you plunge uncomfortably into the massive inert space of Holyoke Plaza (Forbes Plaza did you know?) and a long-haired boy in a cleanly drawn face asks diffidently for some change, "I haven't eaten all day."

The hippies have hit upon a stupid, inescapable, infuriating Truth when they assert their right to your money. That may be how you tell the Harvard-Radcliffe neo-hippies in their equally savage, equally expensive, clothing from the real hippies. Certainly none of us churning past text-books and drifting through exams, really believes that a man's wealth is not his own.

So you buy guiltily from the Avatar man too. Momentary pause, the Square beckons, an elderly Japanese gentleman in a grey Sherlock Holmes hat jostles freely and the parade swirls again. A passing van swallows its music splashing choice bits benignly at you so you don't feel left out. "Come on without/ Come on within/ You'll not see nothing like...(grateful to the Great Commercial Prophet holed up in New York, fill in the blanks)...the Mighty Quinn."

The girls flash their pewter colored flowing dresses and the men, hopeful boys all, hope for pranks. It always goes this way though the setting may change as Harvard Square, for all its unmoving garish architecture is changing below the surface. Club 47 perishes in a side street, Nini's has been sterilized. Even the Brattle, now a complex, is taking on the unmistakable unfriendly glint of the established money-maker.

Nevertheless, some of the behavior is characteristically new: flaring Music-ins on Cambridge Commons every Sunday, snake-dancing in the streets on LBJ night. It all means simply that Spring is leaking into existence and Harvard Square is proving as embarrassingly voluptuous as ever about a welcome.