MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)

Charles River, view while driving down Memorial Drive

In front of Aunt Barbara’s condo, my dad asked a guy who was loading his baby into his car 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 that he was a school teacher. We told him where the administrative building was—that’s where my dad believed we needed to go in order to talk about having a memorial service at MIT. So the guy dropped us off there, and we thanked him profusely before going into 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.

 This is a fascinating building we walked past on the campus of MIT

 This castle-like structure is probably the oldest building at MIT, from what we saw. Most look like they're from the 1960s.

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 a lot of 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 with a much more helpful woman who had worked there for years. She asked us what department Aunt Barbara worked in, and my dad wasn’t sure. She found out that it was the Department of Urban Planning and Development, and she told us how to get there.

 Toto, I don't think we're in London anymore. This was inside the student center at MIT.

The building where Aunt Barbara would have worked, but she didn't actually work there.

We crossed the street to a museum-like building: most of the buildings on campus were modern, but this one looked about a hundred years old and neoclassical, with large ionic columns and Roman lettering. We eventually found the right department, on the third floor. Nobody sat at the front desk. We could see someone getting an interview in a glass room, and we noticed someone sitting at a desk down the aisle, so we approached her. While we spoke with her, she directed us to a tall woman who came out of an office. She explained what Aunt Barbara’s real association was with MIT—not remotely what we thought.

Aunt Barbara was a research affiliate of that particular department. She wasn’t actually an employee and didn’t actually work in the department on campus but rather at home on her little Mac book. Mel King (with whom my dad had spoken on the phone quite a bit) was a friend of hers who got her this research work, which gave her health care through MIT, but she didn’t get a paycheck. She did research for him, and he was a Professor Emeritus rather than a regular employee. Unlike her, he didn’t have a PhD. This was surprising, since I remember my dad repeatedly saying that she worked at MIT part time for $10 an hour; we were both under the impression that she was doing this for years.

Although Aunt Barbara was for some time active with the tennis program at MIT, my dad decided it would make more sense to have the memorial service at Harvard than at MIT, since Aunt Barbara’s PhD came from Harvard. Besides Mel King, the people most interested in having a memorial service were tennis friends from MIT. But I agreed with my dad—Harvard was the more appropriate location for a memorial service.