Sunday morning laundry melted inexorably into Sunday morning study. By the time Monday and Wednesday�s case lay strewn around me in wreckage my eyes hurt. Not unexpected perhaps, since one of the cases tomorrow deals with charity eye-surgery in Tamil Nadu, India. It lies across the channel from the gentle island of Ceylon, now known as Sri Lanka, where the Tamil Tigers fight to the death for the Jaffna Pennisula. Our case is an evocative tale of a great humanitarian named Dr. Venkataswami who parlayed a handful of rupees into a network of paying and charity clinics that served millions of customers. The description of the assembly-line surgery made me squirm. The Doctor said if America could do McDonalds, why could he not serve India�s cataract victims in the same manner?

Dr. Katz will talk to us about teambuilding.  I read her piece with interest. It was about sports metaphors and high-performance groups. Her article takes models of Baseball (individual but linked), Football (sequential) and Basketball (simultaneous and interdependent). She cautioned that the use of the metaphor could be exclusive, and recommended a primer to ensure that the non-sports inclined understood the imagery. I resolved to get in the game, third and short, call an audible and stop Notre Dame.

The other reading for tomorrow is from the Nixon Administration. I am increasingly aware that old Dick took his conservative mandate to perform all manner of mischief on our democracy. G. Gordon Liddy maintains to the this day that it was wartime, and harsh measures were justified. In the realm of social policy, though, I was mystified to see the gentle Daniel Patrick Moynihan appear in a walk-on policy role regarding the Family Assistance Program, a bold concept that was intended to end the disaster of Aid to Families with Dependent Children- AFDC. Moynihan had written his famous treatise that welfare was in the process of destroying the African-American family. His point was not a narrow racialist one, though the establishment castigated him for stating the inconvenient obvious. He said that as the African-American family had gone fatherless, so would Appalachia and Spanish Harlem.

And so it has. It is difficult to be a prophet. Our case study deals with the policy tension between Moynihan and Arthur Burns, who was featured as a cabinet-rank advisor on domestic policy and Chairman of the Federal Reserve in waiting. Moynihan is quoted as waiting tensely for the matter to be resolved by Mr. Nixon, not knowing if his recommendations had prevailed. From my time on the Hill, I understand the tough moments were before lunch, since the future Senator from New York was remarkably mellow after that.

I went through three more after that: issues on Black adoption, and the impact of power brokering between the American farm lobby and the AF of L, CIO Longshoreman�s union in the context of the U.S.-Soviet Union grain-sale crises of the mid-1970s. I forgotten there was a Longshoreman�s union, much less that they used to through their weight around against the President. I did remember the correct way to say �AFL-CIO.� The last case was regarding the behavior of flight attendants on airlines with remarkably different views of the teams they send out on their airplanes. The case didn�t give the real names of the airlines. To me they look a lot like United  (structured) and Southwest (free and empowered). I don�t know what the point is. I would fly Lufthansa if I could, I like their discipline and crisp good looks. But I am stuck with American Flag carriers unless I can demonstrate compelling need. The flight attendants are not part of the equation. Or Swiss Air, which is what Guillermo said yesterday.

I was talking to a him in his North End ristorante late in the afternoon. Guillermo owns the Villa Francesca and trim and confident he was hanging out at the front door. I suspect his name used to be Bill, but his ristorante is called the �Villa Francesca� and it has obviously done well. It is located across from a marvelous little Italian grocery where I bought shaved Genoa salami, mozzarella buffo, pungent olives and some marvelous fresh bread on which to pile it all. I suddenly craved a glass of Pinot Gregio, and the Villa Francesca beckoned and I responded. The heavy glass windows were thrown open and the sun flooded the other side of the street and it did not appear that there could be a better place to have a plate of delicately fired calimari or some pene in vodka sauce.

Guillermo was just starting his evening and I was about finished with my day. We had something more in common than that, though. He liked boats. I mentioned that I had worked on boats right here in Boston. He perked up a little and pointed to a picture of a large Hatteras trawler on the bulletin board next to the Villas�s write-ups in Boston Magazine. We talked about the boat and he indicated he had picked it up in Hong Kong and rebuilt it.

I didn�t get what he was telling me. I asked him how he got it back to the States and he said he didn�t. The boat stayed in Phuket, Thailand. Where he lived.

Suddenly it all clicked. He had been a young Air Force kid in the middle of the Vietnam War. He had been assigned to Thailand, on one of the airbases that supported the strikes into Route Pack III. I looked at his hairline, receding a bit but black as night and decided he colored it. He had worked his ass off, build a fine restaurant and moved his ass for nine months a year to the paradise that might have ended Leonardo de Caprio�s movie career. I said: �That�s funny. I have a lot of friends in Thailand�..�

When we wound down- I was as authentic as he was, if slightly poorer- I had a new best friend in historic Boston�s North End, a guy who was living a dream the majority could not understand. Most of the year he walked in a sarong along a placid beach, checked cash-flow at the Villa on the internet, and came back only for the summer season when this place is magical. Not dark and dim under a foreshortened sun in the canyons of the city and the salt melts the ice on the brick streets. Summer is the rainy season in Phuket, and only the Germans would go there then. I bid him a �Sawadi, Kop!� as I left.

Today the words of the case studies left me yearning for the sun. I was sated with words and craved those who were not with me on this trip. I walked up town to Cambridge, across the Weeks footbridge and into the city. I roamed the New Yard and the Old Yard at Harvard, examining the buildings that Washington had appropriated for the colonial troops besieging Boston. I sneaked in a side door at Memorial Hall and found myself alone in the college�s memorial to the dead of the Civil War, each one of the dozens of Heroic Dead named on pale marble with their college affiliation and the place where they died. Antietam. Gettysburg. Famous names and those that spoke of sharp wounds in small places. Deep Creek, and Gore, Virginia. To die in Gore. I looked up at the vaulted wooden ceilings that soared above me, groined and mullioned in waxed-wood imitation of the cathedrals of Europe.  

Coming back toward town I debated whether to embark the MRT for another foray downtown. I was leaning toward that option when I saw a carving over one of the marble pediments that are so Harvard. It has gotten worse over the years. We have snack bars named after people, rotundas in the School of Government named after people different than those that gave the building. I doubt if I could dun the Vic Socotra Soft Drink Vending Machine, and it is getting close. I was looking at the Fogg Art Museum, and being in a bit of one, I thought it was fate. Kismet.

I climbed the steps and walked in. The Fogg costs $6.50 to tour, cheaper if you are a student. Technically I was, but I didn�t bring my ID. I paid the full freight and walked in. I wound up very impressed. I am a sucker for French impressionism, and they had everyone. Monet, Manet,  Suratte, Degas, Goganne, Van Gogh. Really nice little collection, and I mean that in the most flattering sense. This is a collection of collections, the harvest of Harvard people or people who wanted to be remembered as Harvard people. The little collections- worth only millions- make an impressive aggregation that could not be afforded by any other institution on the planet.

But it wasn�t the permanent collection that blew me away, good as it was. The visiting collection was the result of the excavation of Ur, the fabled ancient city of Mesopotamia. The brochure explains it all. A joint dig in the classic days of cow-boy archeology had dug into the tels- or hills- that covered the most ancient cities on earth. Of these, Ur was the oldest, or at leas the shortest to say. The brochure says: The Royal Tombs of Ur ad the treasures they contained offer an intriguing perspective  on both life and death in ancient Mesopotamia.�

Being recently engaged in life and death is what is now called Iraq, I was hooked in an instant. There were some fabulous artifacts. Precious and noble metals flattened by time and refurbished by modern skill. The headdress and waist-length lapis lazuli beads of the dead queen were startling. Gold pounded flat, then formed into gigantic earrings and plates that gleam today as bright as when they went into the ground 3,000 years ago. Astonishing. Tokens a hundred times older than the Old State House downtown, and yet whose beauty burns as fierce today as it did then.

I was taken aback. In my time, I had done a war from the Pentagon against Iraq, the current successor to those who ruled Ur. We got a satellite picture one morning during the Air War in the Gulf. There was a dingy little two-step building with the remnants of the ceremonial approach. On either side, as clear as day, as if they were the bronze lanterns on either side of the Undergraduate Library, were two MiG-21 fighters. My Boss asked me about them. It was early, around 0500. We had been there for hours already. He said: �Vic, what can you tell me about this?� It was my job to have a story. I glanced at the jets and the rounded mud-brick structure whose entrance they flanked.

I was pretty wired but the picture made every strand of my nerves flash. �Boss, that is the Great Ziggurat Temple of Ur, the first two-story building that humans built that remains on the face of the earth.�

�And the fighters?�

�Are there to make us blow it up.� My Boss scowled and said that the Secretary needed to know. I wrote up a quick paragraph on the computer and handed it to the Boss and he went away. I heard the Secretary voice righteous indignation on CNN in my words  as I was walking back to my desk. Later that morning I heard from the chain of command that the Secretary really wanted to know if we had blown it up or not. I made some calls to the Theater and was able to tell him that the mud-brick of the oldest multi-story structure was safe and intact. Not that Saddam couldn�t blow it up himself and blame us. That wasn�t quite the word they wanted, but you can�t be a hero more than twice in one day.

Consequently, I walked through the exhibit on Ur in a bit of a Fogg. But I suppose that is to be expected.