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A few days before Christmas, I met Am and Ken in Harvard Sq. to take their engagement photos. The winter setting was fitting, since their wedding is next December at the Boston Public Library.
I spend a lot of time in Harvard Sq. I not only photograph here, but it’s also where I meet with clients, shop, drink coffee, order takeout, and hang out with friends. Sometimes when I’m in Harvard Sq. I think about my first visit there and how it helped change my life.
When I was 15, I wasn’t doing so well in school. I was lazy and a bad student. All I wanted to do was socialize. My biggest goals were to dress like Madonna and get grades that were just good enough to graduate from high school. And graduating was in question since my grade point average was a 1.6! Needless to say, my parents and teachers didn’t know what to do with me.
I had spent my entire life in Fall River, Massachusetts. Going to Boston, which was only an hour away, was a big deal and I had only been there a handful of times. So one Saturday my friend Christine’s parents said that they would take us to Boston to see a jazz show. I wasn’t interested in jazz but I wanted to go to Boston, where I could possibly have adventures and discover new ways of goofing off.
The concert was at Harvard’s Sanders Theatre. It was Jerry Mulligan performing with the Harvard student jazz band. As soon as the music started I was mesmerized — mostly by the audience. There were people dressed all in black and women with big earrings and guys in berets and everyone was just bopping their heads to the music. We didn’t have anything like this in Fall River! After the show we walked around Harvard Sq. There were kids on skateboards, girls with pink hair, old hippies, street musicians, Buddhist monks, and professor-types wearing tweed jackets. And everywhere you looked, there were young people and college kids. “This place is nuts!” I thought. “I’ve got to get back here!”
The next day, back in Fall River, I proclaimed to my mother “I want to go to college. I want to go to Harvard.” She laughed a bit about the Harvard part, since my grades had ruled out any chance of that. But she was happy that I was thinking about college and she reminded me that it still wasn’t too late for me to turn things around. During those next few years of high school, my mind would often go back to Harvard Sq. When I had to study for a test or do homework, I’d remember what I’d seen in Cambridge, and realize how badly I wanted to go to college and get to a place where people went to concerts and bopped their heads and seemed to be part of a bigger, crazier, vibrant world.
Today, I live down the street from Harvard Sq. Sometimes when I’m there meeting with clients, or photographing an engagement session like Am and Ken’s, I think back to that first night here with Christine and her parents. And I’m so happy — I can hardly believe — that I made it back to Harvard Sq.
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