Making a House a Home

I feel like a quote out of context, withholding the rest, so I can be for you what you want to see…” —Ben Folds

I have never been a Harvard freshman. I didn’t go on a FOP trip. I wasn’t in your freshman entryway, I never had a prefect, and I didn’t take Expos. I have had one meal in Annenberg.

No, my freshman experience was an 11-hour drive away from Cambridge, at Oberlin College in Ohio. I am a junior, yet Harvard has been my home for just under a year. I don’t use the word “home” lightly—it’s a tricky thing. During my first winter break back at my first home, in San Diego, I returned to find my former bedroom converted to a sterile guestroom. Stripped of my pictures, the walls begged for personality. My bed had new sheets, charcoal gray, and the bookshelves were empty. The tightly woven strands of high school memory, made of the stuff of Hanukkah candle-lightings, of late-night drinking and Pacific Coast sunrises, of first kisses and baseball championships, had already begun to unravel.

It was a confusing time. Coming back to Oberlin, I realized that I was not comfortable there either. For the first time I had no home, only people I loved scattered around the country. After all, home is not a location, a set of four walls covered by a shingled roof. Home is a feeling, a magnetic attraction to what makes one feel safe. I found myself flying twice a month to Providence to slide into the arms of my girlfriend; it was there alone that life felt right. Oberlin never got better, and I was ecstatic when Harvard offered me a spring transfer my sophomore year.

I was greeted upon arrival by the New Ts and Links—fellow New Transfers and a few transfer veterans, respectively—who were prepared to help me get acclimated to my new surroundings. The Links threw us a party, and it was then that I made my first and closest Harvard friendship. We bonded over music, books, and a keen sense of wanderlust, a trait that took us on 2 a.m. runs to rural Connecticut and spur-of-the-moment interstate memory trips. Things were starting to look good.

Yet transfer orientation is like a big on-ramp to the Harvard Social Autobahn. I know what you’re thinking: Harvard social life moves at the speed of a 19th century coach, not a Ferrari. But when you arrive on campus in the middle of the year, fresh out of a painful breakup with the girl who may have pulled you to the Northeast in the first place, all the while watching people trickle in from warm-weather intersession trips cracking inside jokes in the dining hall in groups of eight to 12, you begin to feel very small. You are a floater, a piece of paperwork for the house administration, and, more often than not, especially mid-year, you are the disappointing replacement of a close friend either graduated early or gone abroad. It feels immediately like a mistake, and you miss your old friends and you miss warm arms. It does not feel like home.

If home is a feeling, an impression, it is a transitory one. This fall I was a floater again, living in a Currier third-floor single. I had loose connections with some of the guys on my floor and one strong friendship. I was hopeful, though I knew that nothing is more difficult than infiltrating a group of friends. There are house rules, longstanding jokes first cracked at 4 a.m. in a Canaday hallway, hookup histories. After a couple of weeks, I felt like Jack Bauer in 24, learning to blend in and snoop around for clues—that girl, who stopped in last night, she was his first time two years ago, but things didn’t end well. I make a hasty note.

Then, just like that, it happened. The Red Sox played the Yankees, Game 7, Yankee Stadium. On a whim, we took my car, three third floor guys and I, and the result was a man-date for the ages, an epic moment in the lives of four young men in love with baseball. We yelled until our lungs hurt, celebrated in the house Ruth built, even took a Yankee Stadium seat with us.

In the end, it wasn’t about me having a car. It wasn’t about the game, about the stadium seat that sits in my room, or the size of the baseball moment. For me, it is about a feeling I had almost forgotten—what it feels like to be home. A few months have gone by, and the memories have piled up to become the bricks of Currier House, a house I now proudly represent as HoCo president. Hours upon hours have been spent here on Tuchman 3rd watching Scrubs episodes, figuring out how to keep Beirut stats, listening in silence to Jeff Buckley’s version of “Hallelujah,” and welcoming new kids to what now feels like my floor. Slowly but surely, I have stopped feeling like the outsider. And now, I can only say thank you to my friends for giving this transfer a chance.

Jonathan C. Bardin ’06-’07 is a Visual and Environmental Studies concentrator in Currier House. He apologizes profusely for embarrassing Tuchman 3rd.