Chapter 6
When Harold had started at MIT he was the son of a small farmer from a small rural town. It was the first time he’d been more than fifty miles from Lassiter. He’d never been to a museum. Never eaten out anywhere more sophisticated than a diner. Everything he knew about the wider world, was from books. He had a great deal to learn.
In many ways he was lucky to have roomed with Nathan. The Ingram's weren’t anything like billionaires but they were comfortably off. Much better off than Harold’s family had ever been.
Not that Nathan was a snob. He might own his very own fitted tuxedo but he ran around the campus in faded levis and tee-shirts. He liked fancy steak dinners and expensive liqueurs but he also liked peanut butter sandwiches and Dr Pepper. His father might have bought him his very own Camaro in honor of graduating high school but Nathan had left in back in Texas and used the bus or the T when he wanted to go anywhere.
Still, Nathan had been the first person to provide Harold with a decent glass of wine after discovering him dubiously sipping Ripple at a dorm party. He’d also been the one to take Harold to his first fancy restaurant and buy Harold his first decent suit because the only one Harold owned was an old one that had belonged to his father. Nathan had also been the one to drag Harold to a good barber because it hurts me to see you with that haircut, Harold.
Nathan hadn’t been the one to introduce Harold to classical music. That had been Robert J. Lurtsema on the local public radio station that Harold had discovered by accident while looking for the weather report. A Radcliffe student who was interning at the Boston Symphony Hall had added significantly to his education.
Harold’s initiation to fine art had come from a lecture on the Fibonacci Sequence in his Mathematical Theory class the day before the MFA had offered free admission for the day. Harvard’s museums had encouraged his interest.
Harold had been introduced to Sencha Green Tea by a very pretty Japanese student who had sat next to him during an all day seminar on Programming Languages.
Harold had discovered Rome when he’d been offered the chance to spend a summer semester at the Università degli Studi Guglielmo Marconi. A friendly student from Venice had showed him around the city and introduced him to a very sympathetic tailor which had allowed Harold to purchase his second decent suit.
Foreign movies had come about when he was dating an very handsome Film and Visual Arts student at Harvard.
Books, well books were old friends. The tiny library in Lassiter Iowa didn’t have a big selection but they did have all the classics and through some kind of special loaning programming, they could get ahold of just about any book Harold might ever want to read. MIT’s libraries had been even more impressive. He also got cards for the Cambridge Library as well as Boston Public. Cambridge is full of bookstores and Harold had begun his own collection there.
The Harold who leaves Cambridge is very different from the Harold who had arrived.