Brattle Street Elegy: My Personal Brand of Weirdness

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In 1967 when I was eight years old, my family moved from Salt Lake to Cambridge. The building on Longfellow Park quickly became a symbol for what I had brought with me from Utah: a traditional faith and a culture that at first seemed at odds with the strange new world I encountered. 

It took a little while to be proud of that place. I blamed some of the culture shock I was feeling on that colonial architecture. It wasn’t the warm contemporary building that I was used to in the Federal Heights Ward in Salt Lake (another meetinghouse rare in its uniqueness and beauty). I remember absolutely dying of embarrassment when, at my mother’s behest, my carpool (not a churchgoer among them) would drop me off at the steps of the Cambridge Ward for Primary on Thursday afternoons. I was baptized there on a gray November Saturday afternoon, still homesick for Utah. 

But soon enough I figured out that being different was prized in the Harvard community of the late ’60s. I could embrace Mor monism as my personal brand of weirdness and be respected for it. 

I used the round glass window in the chapel to get me through sacrament meetings. (Remember when they were an hour and a half?!) You could count the squares, then divide them, rearrange them in your mind. There is a golden color of sacrament meeting light that came through the window that, in its own humble way was as unique as anything in a Venetian painting. 

Blessed are the children that get to grow up in student wards. Sure, our numbers were often few, but we got the very best teachers and role models you could ever ask for. I wanted to grow up and be like all those graduate students: loyal, smart, and always asking questions. These busy people not only taught us the gospel but coached us through roadshows on the stage, readied ungraceful teenagers for dance festivals, decorated the gym for dances … Thank you Connie Cannon, Diane Wilcox, Hal Miller, Cheryll and Dean May, Kathryn Kimball, Sandra Buys, Val Wise. One of my fondest memories in the gym was my Beehive basketball team’s Billy Jean King-inspired challenge to the Scouts. After several weeks of intense practice with coach Randy Wise, we were sure we could beat the boys. The media was alerted. On game night we came charging out with Helen Reddy’s voice blaring. We lost. With honor! 

It was always special to sing “I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day” in the Cambridge chapel, knowing that Longfellow wrote the text right next door. The choruses from Messiah I have memorized were learned in the chapel choir seats under the direction of Judy Dushku. And who out there was lucky enough to hear the amazing performance of Bach’s Mass in B Minor on Easter Sunday in 1981? (Thank you, Paul Dredge!) In addition to filling every choir seat, we squeezed a fine orchestra, including two beautiful kettle drums, around the piano and the sacrament table. Tympani in a sacrament meeting! Only in Cambridge. 

I ended up being a Harvard student myself; and no matter what chaos was going on in my life, the Sunday walk along Memorial Drive from Eliot House to Longfellow Park was always therapeutic. When the guy I’d been dating for two years finally said, “I think we’d better see the missionaries,” it wasn’t long before he was baptized in the Cambridge font. Our last calling before leaving Cambridge was Primary music in that sweet little room upstairs with the teeny little pews. My favorite Sunday was reenacting the First Vision where a little female Sunbeam was cast as God the Father.