A child's T-shirt

When I was two years old, my father gave me this T-shirt when he came home from Harvard Business School.

Last Autumn, we went on holiday to New England, and I wanted to see the place whose name became a toddler's metonym for my father's absence.  

When we got to Cambridge, it was unusually warm for November, and uncomfortably humid; I rolled the sleeves of my thin shirt, but it was soon soaked with sweat.  My son fell asleep in his pushchair as soon as we arrived, as if anaesthetised by the thick, damp air.  

On the other side of the Charles River, the main campus buzzed with students; but the Business School was deserted, an abandoned film set with yellowing leaves banking against the gutters.  It was very unsettling: with no one around us, we might have stepped out of the taxi into a dream of 1972.  

Once there, I no longer had any idea why I had come. Hunter S. Thompson’s ‘remembered line from a long-forgotten poem’ comes to mind:  “All my life my heart has sought a thing it cannot name.”

Now, perhaps, I see it:  I had thought I might find my father, or at least find something there to make sense of him. But there was too much to make sense of, none of it visible, all of it 40 years gone.  Swimming in the warm, wet afternoon, it slipped through my fingers, and all I could hold onto was the clear sense that I did not belong here.  

As a young child, I was rarely out of this T-shirt; but my son has never worn it.  Somehow, he has always been too big for it.