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MIT and Aunt Barbara
My dad and I traveled to Cambridge, Massachusetts in 2011 because his sister died unexpectedly. I lived in Portland, Oregon, and he lived in NW Indiana, an hour from Chicago.
Massachusetts Part 7
In front of Aunt Barbara’s condo, a guy was loading his baby into his car. My dad asked him which way MIT is. We knew it was up Memorial Drive, this very same street, but weren’t sure in which direction. The guy told us, finished putting the baby in the car, and offered to drive us up there. So we got in his car.
It turned out he was a schoolteacher. We told him where the administrative building was — that’s where my dad believed we needed to go to talk about having a memorial service at MIT. So the guy dropped us off there, and we thanked him profusely before entering the building. Unfortunately, it turned out to be the wrong place: the guy behind the counter gave us a bigger and better map of MIT and told us where we needed to go.
The place was, oddly, an office in the student center, which was a 1960s building crawling with students and occupied by fast food joints. We walked to this building and took an elevator to the office in question. The two students at the front desk didn’t have much information, other than this was the place to go to schedule an event on campus. They directed us to the office across the hall, where we talked…