1995
Kids today growing up too fast
Nostalgic for the last ten years before the last ten years have passed
So why you gotta act like you know when you don't know?
It's okay if you don't know everything.

I set foot in Harvard Square for the very first time on a sunny, sweaty Sunday in September 1995. Ten years ago, or just about. Here's 1995-me: he's getting out of a taxi in front of Out of Town News. No, actually it was across the street in front of Mass Army Navy, where there's now a Verizon store inside another Verizon store inside a bank inside three co-located Starbucks. 1995-me wears jeans, Converse hi-tops, a Grateful Dead T-shirt, and a red and black hoodie: one of those rough wool hippy hoodies you might buy at a campus bazaar for Guatemalan social justice in the earnest early '90s. (Which is exactly where 1993-me bought it.) 1995-me is skinnier than 2005-me and he doesn't need glasses. He has much longer hair—not as long as it was four months earlier at graduation, but still shaggy, Kurt Cobain length. And he's dragging a humongous blue duffel bag, which weighs a ton because it contains most of his life. And he doesn't know anything about anything.

I'd been an immigrant for about four hours. My Mom and my girlfriend drove me to the Buffalo airport. We crossed the border at Lewiston, where a welcoming American yelled "learn how to fucking drive!" at my mother. The INS officer who processed my student visa said, "American History? What would anybody want to study that for?" My girlfriend cried at the airport. "Don't worry," I said, "we can survive a little long distance. And I'll see you at Thanksgiving, and you'll move down to Boston in the spring, and besides, how long can a PhD take?" (See above re: how much I knew.)

Benjamin Franklin opens his Autobiography with a description of his first arrival in Philadelphia. He has a few coins in his pocket which he immediately spends on three loaves of puffy bread. Then he wanders through the city gawking at everything, an awkward rube in ragged clothes with bread stuffed in his mouth and a big loaf under each arm. Franklin's Autobiography is of course the ur-American tale of rags to riches, the Horatio Alger story two centuries before Horatio Alger. Why does he emphasize the loaves of puffy bread? Wouldn't the rags to riches angle be more powerful if young Ben started out hungry and penniless? Maybe it would. But what I think amused the adult Franklin about the story was not the humbleness of his beginnings, but the dorkiness: What a hick I was, he is saying. What a rube. What a maroon.

You said it, Ben. The big blue duffel bag was my puffy bread, see? It was huge and ungainly, and the vestigial straps on it were much too short to loop over my shoulder or do anything really but awkwardly lurch and drag the behemoth down the sidewalk. I asked the cab driver to take me to Perkins Hall, the grad student dormitory, but he didn't know where that was or else couldn't be bothered, so he just let me off in the Square. "This is pretty central," he said. "I'm sure you can find it from here." Well, sort of. Perkins Hall is about half a mile from the Square, if you know where you're going. If you're too shy, too Canadian, or too dumb to ask for directions, it can be considerably farther. I lugged the bag through Johnson Gate, across Harvard Yard to Quincy Street, turning (the wrong way) down Quincy Street to Mass Ave and then (stupidly) back along Mass Ave to where I started, then wandered up Garden Street (I think) on the wrong side of the Commons, until I cut across to the Law School, finally hitting Oxford Street (a total fluke) and finding Perkins, my new home.

Franklin plays the same game in his Autobiography, reconstructing his walk through Philadelphia with the puffy bread under his arms. He even claims to have walked by the home of his future wife: "She, standing by the door, saw me, and thought I made, as I certainly did, a most awkward, ridiculous appearance." My own future wife would in fact move onto Oxford Street, just a block or two from Perkins Hall, the very next year. Maybe we passed each other on the street; maybe often. But we were still several years from meeting, and given my own awkward, ridiculous appearance, it's probably just as well.

So that's the first thing I think about when I look back on nearly ten years in Boston, ten years that come to an end in less than two weeks. This clueless kid from 1995, wandering around the Yard and the Square, too dumb to ask anyone for directions. A nice kid, don't get me wrong, but green as a Granny Smith apple. Of course, I didn't think I was a yokel at the time. I got into Harvard, didn't I? And I won all those awards at graduation. Maybe those mid-1990s punks in Harvard Square were a little scary looking to me. But hey, I'd lived in Toronto! It's a World Class City, some committee of the U.N. even said so! I spent a whole summer there, smoking cheeba with my friends, renting bootleg Banana Splits videos from Suspect, and inventing the concept of irony, which nobody had ever thought of before. My Toronto friends and I had a good laugh when the International Students Office wrote to ask if I'd like an American host family at Harvard, to ease my transition into American culture. That was rich. Who knew more about American culture than me?

Man. The stuff I didn't know—about America, about life, about what the next ten years would bring. How to find Oxford Street. How to cook something besides Kraft Dinner. How to live in the world. How to carry on a conversation about something other than WKRP in Cincinnati. How to go on a date. How to feign adulthood. How to fail. The sheer tonnage of what I didn't know, you couldn't lug across Harvard Square in a hundred duffel bags.

Ah, well. Like Ben says (Folds, not Franklin), it's OK if you don't know everything. I shouldn't beat myself up, much as I'm constitutionally inclined to do so, for having once been twenty-three. (It's not like I have all the answers now.) Historians have to be careful not to fault the actors of the past for not knowing what was going to happen to them next. That's harder to avoid than you might think. But it's strange to me to reconstruct that walk today, that clueless stumble through a place I now know by heart. When you're finding your way through something the first time, everything looks very different than it will when you return with just a little more perspective. All the wrong turns we take are so obvious in retrospect, but they aren't at the time we first take them. And the right turns, the ones we want to think were proof of our cleverness or perhaps preordained, they may have been just as flukey and random as the wrong ones. Why... it's almost like an EXQUISITELY SUBTLE METAPHOR FOR LIFE when you think about it.