A half-century removed, a benevolent gesture to a “pop-up migrant” is affectionately recalled…
by: Dion Dennis
In the Spring of 1968, D and John Alan Simon were classmates in William Glickman’s high school history class. Vigorous, short, with a steely head of slicked back hair that framed a pinkish face, Glickman, customarily and impeccably dressed in a white dress shirt and blue or sterling tie, was an erudite, passionate intellectual fond of the Socratic method. His source materials were college-level texts. At that time, Sullivan High’s academic reputation, among Chicago’s public schools, was high, and Glickman’s classes attracted the most promising among the cohorts of that period.
Among this group, Simon’s intelligence, verbal acuity and disposition stood out. A head of curly brown hair, bushy eyebrows, and a cherubic face were paired with a low, soft and quietly confident voice, one without a trace of hubris. Simon was Harvard bound, in the Fall of 1968. In one conversation that following Spring, Simon casually invited the then-sophomore D to visit him in Cambridge. Two years later, after a compressed series of adolescent and family traumas amplified by the turbulence of the late 1960s, D acted on that invite, without notifying Simon, or anyone else, for that matter. He bought his first plane ticket, and flew into Logan, destination Harvard Square, in mid-March of 1970.
A cab ride deposited the seventeen year old high school/early entrance college dropout, at Harvard Square. In the Spring of 1970, the Square was nothing like the soulless outdoor corporate mall, chain-dominated space it has since devolved into. Back then, it was a bohemian cauldron, a tempest of souls: Hippies, anti-war political activists, preteens on acid, buskers, professors, first-wave feminists, Reichian orgone proponents, panhandlers, prostitutes, dope dealers, the homeless, and students traversed the streets. He took his post at one side of a magazine and newspaper stand, next to the entrance of the Square’s subterranean T stop, which was then the terminal point of MTA’s Red Line. The semi-enclosed stand sported an illuminated sign that ran across the top of the open front, and along the sides of the structure: “Out of Town, Newspapers and Magazines, National and Foreign Periodicals.” Anxiously, D paced all sides of the stands for hours, desperately seeking Simon. At sunset, he spotted a head of curly brown hair darting between the shadows near Harvard Yard’s brick perimeter, playing hide-and-seek with unseen peers. D bolted, abandoning his post at the newsstand as well as his backpack, yelling Simon’s name across the Square, in the twilight. As he caught up with his target, the young fool exhaled. Simon, hearing his name, turned around and smiled.
Either Simon remembered or pretended to remember D. He did not turn me away. He took the young fool that D was back to his dorm room, explained the situation to his roommate, and subsequently convinced a cafeteria manager to issue a meal card to this pop-up migrant. While D had to sleep on the floor, for six weeks, before returning to Chicago, Simon gave D shelter, a generous gesture recalled more than five decades after his own attempted escape.
Dion Dennis is a retired academic with a cross-disciplinary publication history. His initial literary publication is in the 8/25 issue of The Write Launch.
