A Happy Lottery Story

On the day we found out we'd been randomized to Cabot House, one of my blockmates said it for all of us when he yelled the f-word at the top of his lungs in front of University Hall. All six of us moped around in mourning for the rest of the school year.

In two weeks, I will receive my undergraduate degree at Cabot House. Here's what it is for me today.

Turning off Garden Street onto Shepard Street, the Quad comes into view suddenly and startlingly: a wide-open space framed by classically Harvardian red-brick buildings, a mirage in the dense residential area that surrounds it. Bertram Hall is on the corner; it is older than most of the River Houses and originally held 12 Radcliffe women in grand style. The curved staircase rising from the front door, the stained glass windows and the fire-escape balconies on each landing still make it one of the best places to live on campus.

This time of year, quilts and beach blankets are laid under leafy green trees that reach higher than five floors. Liz, Breda, Cindy and Michelle are reading heavy sourcebooks and paperback novels, distracted by pleas to join the two or three games of frisbee being played on the lawn.

Volleyball nets are set up by displaced Californians, little kids from the elementary school play soccer with Brad; and occasionally even a croquet course or an inning or two of cricket takes root. Adam walks by in his Wachusett T-shirt and yells up to my window to ask if I want to play tennis at three.

A few years ago, some students worked with visiting artists to build a set of picnic tables that were cut around Cabot's trees, some that fit snugly into the terraced corners of Whitman Hall and others that were free-standing. These tables are places to linger over a meal outside and listen to Hannah's sparkling laugh echo across the Quad; they are surfaces to sketch out thesis notes and to do take-home exams. One table, tipped on its side, becomes a backstop for a pitcher when Julian, our senior tutor, steps up to home plate and slugs a ball into the cupola on top of Briggs Hall.

At six o'clock, anyone can wander into Cabot dining hali and find a table full of friends. There, two of the most popular and frequent dinner companions are Jurij and Emanuela Striedter, the masters. Emanuela gets a compliment on her performance in intramural tennis yesterday and Jurij talks German Philosophy with Dirk.

Mary, our checker, calls you by name and sometimes adds "cherub" or "buttercup." At special meals, Sandy, Anabela and the rest of the staff think up decorations for the dining hall that make it look like a themed playground. First-years come up only for a meal but they stay a long time, lounging on the grass and talking to upperclass students about good rooms (all of them) and asking house residents for a straightforward definition of a 'lambing'. There never is one.

Every spring, wild applause showers our assistant to the master, Susan Livingston. She rehearses night and day to produce an all-house musical production that's sold out every night and gets great reviews. Everybody in it--the tech crew, the cast, the orchestra--comes from our house. People you never thought would go near a stage belt out numbers with chutzpah to the cheers and laughter of their friends in the audience.

At night the Quad lights up, and from my window I see the soft burning of a hundred different lights, people playing pool in our JCR and friends lying on their backs in the cool grass to look up at the stars.

Opening the window, I hear the familiar sounds of "ABBA" blasting in the Library Suite, the laughter of a group returning from the Square and the subdued murmurs of a couple sitting under a tree. The Quad is calm and it is alive. The night security guard, John, looks off the porch of the Grand Entryway, in front of the cabinet that will hold the Straus Cup another year. This is a remarkable place, and just think: There are eleven more just like it, but nothing that could ever be the same.

Sitting here in my last College days, I know that randomization isn't such a bad thing after all.

This is Patrick S. Chung's last column as an undergraduate.