MIRROR 03.06.2015
A COLLEGIAL GOVERNMENT|2
A GROCERY, AND AN INSTITUTION|3
A SENSE OF COMFORT AND PLACE|4-5
TTLG: ABBOTT-GROBICKI|8 Shuoqi Chen/THE DARTMOUTH STAFF
2// MIRROR
EDITOR’S NOTE My editors walk a perilous tightrope when delivering end-of-term feedback. They must sate an impressive — yet wounded — ego’s maddening desire for affirmation. But as The Dartmouth’s trusted stewards, they must also attempt to squelch, once and for all, the hijinks that have played out in this column for far too long. Yet even my editors, angels though they are, can err. When they begged me to “please stop writing the Editor’s Note like that,” they failed to realize that their pitiful pleas mean nothing to a man so obstinate and cruel. For seven Fridays, now, I have weathered the stings of paper airplanes, upon which readers have poured out their hatred, slung my direction in lecture halls. I can surely remain cold in the face of knowledgeable editors’ thoughtful appeals. Still, the end of term does invite reflection. Week one, I was whirling with goals. Could I “delight my readers,” “shock their sensibilities” and “capture a small College’s imagination” with a series of 250-word Notes? Could I simultaneously “embrace tradition” and “push ‘new media’ beyond readers’ wildest dreams” with a weekly print column? We all know how this story ends. I would end up embracing tradition all right — a tradition of coughing up an uninterpretable screed filled with garble and selfloathing each week. Three months ago, this campus’s media moguls asked me to rise to the challenge of writing a weekly Editor’s Note. I could only have flailed to the ground — uncoordinated, weeping and alone — faster if you’d had asked me to play limbo. As I rethink this column’s purpose, you’ll have to settle for an excellent end-of-term Mirror that beckons at nostalgia without succumbing to cloyingness. Liberal arts colleges inspire enduring and deeply meaningful friendships in the face of an experience fraught with uncertainty. Constructing that sort of home is a differentiated process — indeed, part of the hurt from failing, at first, to find one’s place here stems from the platitudes one internalizes about how people discover home. Before the term concludes, take a minute to enjoy this Mirror.
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MIRROR R MIRROR EDITOR CHARLIE RAFKIN
EDITOR-IN-CHIEF KATIE McKAY
PUBLISHER JUSTIN LEVINE
EXECUTIVE EDITORS LUKE McCANN JESSICA AVITABILE
I still don’t feel at home at Dartmouth. Help?
A Collegial Government The Mirror attends a town-hall meeting so you don’t have to. SPOTLIGHT
B y Zak Meghrouni-Brown
I hustled out of my 2A last week, grabbed a bite at the Hop and made my way to Hanover’s first public budget hearing of the 2015-2016 fiscal year — a typical Thursday. Town Hall is an understated,ivy-covered edifice in the center of Main Street across from Starbucks. The coffee shop sees substantially more student traffic — the average student likely craves lattes and iced-whatevers more than scintillating town meetings discussing the laws of zoning. I, however, was in Town Hall that day to do the bubble-inhabiting student body a service and figure out what actually keeps this beautiful, quiet town we live in so beautiful and quiet. With the meeting about to begin, I felt out of place almost immediately. After stepping into the hearing room, I loudly proclaimed my identity as a Dartmouth student in block letters across my chest. I could not help but notice I was the only student in the room — and the only person lacking gray hairs. (That said, comfortably into week nine there are definitely a few gray hairs up there.) Once beyond the immediate awkwardness I discovered a quite hospitable environment. After all, before I entered the meeting, the thought of a dreary budget hearing didn’t exactly evoke warm sentiments. I was mistaken. Members of the Board of Selectmen cracked jokes about the police chief’s dietary habits — coffee and donuts is an old one, but we can cut this demographic some slack — and attendees engaged in sardonic discussions of “Moving Dartmouth Forward” over the free pizza and pasta. Who knows — perhaps three months from now, a budget meeting might be the only place in town where a thirsty undergraduate can sip on a gin and tonic. Over the course of the two meetings I attended — I just had to come back — the town council genially processed each section of the budget, poring through the funding details of public services like the police and fire departments, parks and public works. Perhaps I’m used to digesting news about how Washington, D.C. remains mired in Congressional blockades and partisan bickering over this or that, the efficient scene in this meeting room was not what I expected. I sat down with Julia Griffin, Hanover’s town manager of 18 years, to talk about what makes the town’s government so special. She attributed the friendly proceedings to the general vitality of the town’s municipal sector. “This is a very collegial community,” she said. “Our staff is very dedicated. In terms
Why choose to conclude The Mirror this week on “home”?
of quality of work-life [balance] it’s a wonderful place to work if you are a municipal employee.” She did note, however, that Hanover is relatively unique in its collaborative, pragmatic approach to administration. It seems this amiable atmosphere does not extend throughout all of the Upper Valley. “Each community has its own personality,” she noted. “There’s more partisanship on the Lebanon city council.” Traditional partisan divisions have little meaning on this city council. Both Democrats and Republicans, it seems, can agree when it comes to doling out funding for sewage piping and police cruisers. “I have no idea how our board votes,” she said. “They don’t evoke [political] views at our meetings.” Part of what lends vibrancy to the Hanover community is the collaborative relationship between the town and the College — the “town-gown relationship.” As its largest property taxpayer, the College aids Hanover greatly in maintaining a relatively predictable and robust budget. Just as important, though, are the free and cheap labor resources that Dartmouth students provide the town. Griffin, who was formerly the city manager of Concord, noted that the collaboration with students has immensely enriched Hanover’s community. “We always encourage Dartmouth students to get involved,” Griffin said. “We’ve benefitted from them volunteering in our recreation department. They help coach some of our youth teams.” Recently, the town has collaborated with a campus club called the Dartmouth Consulting Group to improve marketing and planning initiatives. The organization helps Hanover’s parks and recreation department — cue Amy Poehler jokes — with marketing strategies in social media, and they also hope to make volunteering as accessible as possible. The consulting group also helps the Sustainable Hanover committee in efforts to create a green energy purchasing cooperative. Tessa Robertson ’15, one of DCG’s four executives, described the relationship between the town and the group as a mutually beneficial process. Students interested in consulting and business get to hone their skills and receive valuable real-world experience, and the town benefits from the students’ free labor. “It’s very much a two-way street — we’re helping each other,” Robertson said. Not only does the group’s work provide
How many times have you moved while at Dartmouth?
Here’s the trouble with most I have been ruling with an iron fist Of all the frustrating and invented discussion of home at the College — since taking over at The Mirror. This it assumes that people inevitably find c ompetitions on campus, the “home” issue is my trojan horse that place here. I suspect most people competition for “who has moved from — an issue filled with sentiment end up tapping into some communities place to place the most terms on a row” to distract the public. Then I’ll here in which they feel safe, but let’s is the most infuriating. Therefore I must spring something truly cold also shift our discussion of home to participate. Counting off- and away-terms and callous on them when no recognize that, in any community, there I’ve moved eight times since matriculating. one’s watching. are likely people who feel excluded. Yuck.
value for both students and community members, but it also helps to build a rapport between the two institutions and bring students closer to the town that sustains them for their four (or five or six) years at the College. “Working with the town, I’ve gotten an idea of just how integrated the [College and town] are, even if it might not seem that way to us,” Kamran Ali ’15 said, one of DCG’s executives. Still, you wonder just how close most students’ ties are to Hanover. Consider Yale University, where a sophomore is running for a municipal position in New Haven, Connecticut, for a seat held by a current Yale alumn. Here in Hanover, Mick Wopinski ’15 was elected as register of probate — mostly a ceremonial position — in a write-in joke campaign launched the day of the election last November. “[The county] contacted me and asked if I wanted to accept the position and become sworn in, and I said yes, because how often do you get elected to public office?” Wopinski said. “Why would I say no to that? They were really surprised.” He noted, however, that because he was a student and labelled a “frat bro” in the headline of a Valley News article, he said he did not feel accepted by the county. He remains in the position, but he refused the $200 salary, he said. Whether we are aware of it or not, that ivyclad building on South Main Street informs much of our time at Dartmouth. Sometimes I catch myself feeling that Hanover is nothing more than a prop in the students’ lives here — a familiar, but passive, background to all the collective toil, revelry and, yes, mediocrity that make up our days. It’s not just that Hanover policemen will inevitably roll by next time your buddy stumbles onto Webster Avenue. The town keeps our roads clear and pathways walkable in the winter. Its salt is responsible for the exquisite patterns that adorn Baker-Berry’s tiles. When I depart after my college years, I’m sure I’ll take more than one salt crystal wedged in my trusty Timberlands’s tread. And if Dartmouth Hall ever goes up in a fourth fiery blaze, it will be Hanover firefighters who contain the damage. We shouldn’t need to snore through budget hearings to appreciate it. The fact is that Hanover gives a great deal to us — and we have a platform to shape it in turn.
A Grocery, and an Institution SPOTLIGHT
B y joe kind
1897. The 136th class of Dar tmouth College graduated. The 141st class matriculated. In a region dominated by the rise of steam power and cotton production, Hanover offered different opportunities for economic sustenance. An immigrant to small-town America from large-city Italy could make it here. Enter Angelo Tanzi, stonecutter. After a few years practicing his trade in Massachusetts and Connecticut, he moved to the Upper Valley to work for his brother, who owned a grocery store in Lebanon. Mr. Tanzi saw an opportunity and went for it — Hanover had no grocery store to speak of at the turn of the 20th century. He came up to the town to wheel a fruit cart around the College’s campus. He became so popular that thenCollege President William Jewett Tucker asked him and his brother to consider upgrading their small carts into a fully fledged grocery store in town. Perhaps his growing popularity among the community came from the mobility his cart gave him, helping him meet students and faculty looking for a healthy snack in between classes. Thus was born the Tanzi Brothers Grocery Store, on 48 ½ Main Street, Hanover, NH 03755. During the store’s earliest days, the Tanzis sold just bananas and peanuts. Flash forward to October 1961. Harry Tanzi wheels his father’s cart around campus, not as a small fruit vendor but an accomplished businessman. A photograph of him in Hanover’s bicentennial parade that year graces the cover of Dartmouth Alumni Magazine. *** Harry Tanzi traced his love for Dartmouth to the second fire of Dartmouth Hall in 1904. Harry was seven years old at the time, one of nine children in his family. The fire was quick, the kind where nothing in the building could be saved. Harry was devastated, as was the entire Hanover community. Dartmouth Hall was the symbol of the small town’s glory, the center of Hanover’s orbit. Even today, as a tour guide for the undergraduate admissions office, I mention the fire on each of my tours. The fire was so awful, I tell my visitors, that students immediately called alumni, friends and family members to raise enough funds to rebuild the building. Students did not just raise enough money, I explain, but they did so in under 24 hours. I joke that in today’s age of technology and social media, that’s like saying my classmates and I could probably raise enough money to rebuild a fallen Baker Tower in an hour or two. Harry Tanzi was the big fish of Hanover’s small pond, claiming to know thousands of Dartm o u t h a l u m n i p e r s o n a l l y. “People ask me what class I graduated from, and I say that it’s the Class of 1910-1977,” Tanzi said in a 1977 profile by The Dartmouth. He added later in the article, “My brothers and I were just like the students — we raised as much hell.” Only one of his brothers actu-
ally attended the school as a student. Harry Tanzi and his brothers took over for their father when he retired in 1927. Harry remained part of the store until its closing in 1969, running the store with different combinations of brothers and in-laws. The space was small and humble, but intimate — 42 by 14 square feet, six storefront windows. Everett Wood ’38, honoring the grocery store’s closing in a 1991 article penned for the Dartmouth Alumni Magazine, described the Tanzi “style of doing business”: “Know everyone in town; like everyone you know; trust everyone, until proven otherwise; carry the finest vegetables and fruit the region has to offer; deliver to the doorstep in all weathers; forget about sleep; and entice the younger generation with ice cream (hand-cranked), peanuts (storeroasted) and irresistible penny candy.” Everyone at Dartmouth knew all of the merchants on Main Street, and the merchants knew everyone at Dartmouth. Even so, the Tanzis were different. Harry would stand outside his store, striking up conversations with everyone who passed by. He was known for his remarkable memory — keeping so many names and events straight — and for storytelling. A customer would walk into the store and be greeted with banter between Harry Tanzi and his brothers. Tanzi always had something to say, some observation to broadcast to whomever would listen. His lively spirit, laced with humor and wit, seemed to rub off on the small store. It was as if the shop had its own pulse. Slow, heavy breaths. Deep. Some say that for a while the Tanzi Bros. Grocery store competed with Baker Library as the most sought-after destination “on campus.” Because that’s the thing — the town was also the campus. Separating Hanover and Dar tmouth was next to impossible. Sometimes little kids in the store would eat candies before remembering to pay for them first. The “punishment”: extra time spent in the store roasting peanuts. Other times when the Tanzis were stretched thin on busy days, they would send customers down to the basement to look for things themselves. The basement was a sprawling space larger than the store itself, down creaky wooden stairs and wracked by shelves with a variety of products scattered across them. A customer was lucky to find whatever he was looking for, but they kept coming. On these same busy days, with too few Tanzis to keep someone behind the cash register, Harry Tanzi and his brothers would teach customers how to use the cash register and get the exact change themselves. It was a rite of passage to learn how to work the cash register. It meant you were a Tanzi Bros. regular. No one ever stole money from the cash register. Tanzi kept close records of his business sales and expenses — leather binders full of hand-written statements and thick wads of check copies — so he would have known otherwise.
Tanzi freely professed that he wasn’t necessarily well read — after all, he paid more attention to his bank book or checkbook. He consistently sent off the College’s football team with a crate of apples when they left campus for an away game. The bus would roll through Main Street and stop at the store, and in would waddle Tanzi with his heavy crate. He claimed to have attended hundreds of home football games — 350 to be exact — and continued to attend them after he retired. He and his brother would sell tickets at the gate, though Harry said they would often get distracted and spend the majority of their time chatting with alumni. Harry Tanzi was a witness to many of Dartmouth’s most memorable moments. He was around for five of Dartmouth’s 18 presidents. He remembered meeting Robert Frost and President Calvin Coolidge. He donated his extra fruit boxes for Homecoming bonfires every year. He was there when students created Green Key weekend in the early 1940s. (His store sold 36,000 cans of beer and 100 kegs that weekend, he said.) The Tanzis were the first and only store owners in Hanover to acquire an alcohol license in the years following prohibition. “Two-thirds of our business was with Dartmouth students,” Tanzi said in 1977. “Since the drinking age at the time was 21, the administration was worried about us selling to minors. We told them that we’d run the beer business and they should run the College.” While Tanzi had insinuated that the grocer y business would be best left to the grocers, it wasn’t students’ wallets that he was concerned about. The community and its wellbeing, not its money, was what drove the Tanzi Bros. business. “Actually, we knew that if we didn’t sell them — the students —
beer, they’d have to go out of town to get it, which was really dangerous,” he said in 1977. “So we talked it over with the liquor commission, which let us be our own judge.” In the 1950s, Harry began to become an active participant in local politics. In the 1950s, he was unanimously appointed the “honorary mayor” of Hanover. For years, it was Harry who led the annual Shriner extravaganza parade, behind the governor of Vermont, the governor of New Hampshire and the College president—in that order. He hosted a “non-political” rally for then-New York governor Nelson Rockefeller ’30 on the front steps of his store. Pictures of them shaking hands, looking out into the crowds made local and national news coverage. On all of Hanover’s behalf, in front of hundreds of squeezed bodies on Main Street, Harry Tanzi gave Nelson A. Rockefeller the keys to the city. “With or without his topper, smiling, waving, joking, his honor the mayor added flourish wherever he appeared,” Wood wrote in the Alumni Magazine. *** “It would take a good size book to name all the good customers and friends that we used to take orders from and deliver to with horse and buggy,” Tanzi wrote in a 1969 Valley News restrospective. After working 80-hour weeks for so many years, Harry retired from full-time work in 1957. Harry’s brother Charlie and sister-in-law Harriet ran the store until 1969, when exhaustion crippled them too. The Tanzis closed up shop and sold their space to the Specialty Shop, which, tragically, burned down less than a decade later. Tanzi passed away peacefully in 1990. The only sign of the Tanzi Bros. Grocery store in town is in the empty space on Main Street next to Ledyard Bank and what was the Hanover Hardware store.
MIRROR //3
THE D RUNS THE
NUMBERS 6
The number of people who attended this week ’s town hall budget meeting.
$162,800 The money Hanover allocated in fiscal year 2015 to road salt.
98
Length, in pages, o f H a n o v e r ’s fiscal year 2015 budget documents.
23 The number of College buildings with the word “House” in their titles.
$7.00 The price of Dir t Cowboy’s fox mustard.
JOE KIND/THE DARTMOUTH STAFF
The Tanzi Bros. Grocery occupied 48 ½ Main Street for more than five decades.
4// MIRROR
A Sense of Comfort and Place SPOTLIGHT
B y caroline berens
It was a crisp day in fall 2013 and Joby Bernstein ’17 was heading to the Alumni Gym, an extra bounce in his step as he anticipated his first day of swim practice. Unlike most walk-ons to the varsity swim team, who often email the coaches over the summer to secure a spot on the roster, Bernstein hadn’t corresponded with the coaches until very recently. But he was unfazed. He decided that he wanted to pursue swimming at the College during his last high school meet, and he trained intensely over the summer to prepare. Bernstein reached the gym and, unsure if he would be welcomed, chose not to change in the swim team’s locker room. Ignoring burgeoning feelings of unease, he changed in the regular men’s locker room by himself. He headed down to the pool with a confident smile, eager to return to familiar territory. Suddenly, he was stopped by one of the swim team’s captains. The older student peered at him with confusion, but then her expression cleared. “This isn’t club swimming,” she said. Bernstein quickly explained that the coach had given him the okay to come. The captain let him practice, but several other swimmers seemed to eye Bernstein with confusion. The following few weeks were no better for Bernstein than the first day. He remained unaware of the team’s nightly post-practice group dinners and continued to change in the regular men’s locker room. Fast forward to winter 2015. Bernstein sits at the Class of 1953 Commons surrounded by members of the swim team. His tan skin bears the traces of the training trip the team took together to Hawaii over the winter interim period. Bernstein now attributes his initial discomfort to the fact that nobody was expecting him on the team. His perception, he said, was likely very exaggerated. A few weeks in, he started to feel more comfortable and accepted once he got to know the other swimmers. He now considers joining the swim team once of the best decisions he’s ever made, he said. “The swim team is definitely ‘home.’” Bernstein said. “It’s the most inclusive thing I’ve ever experienced outside of my own family.” Bernstein said that the swim team fits his personal description of home, which he thinks equates to a community where one can speak freely without self-consciousness. “With the men’s team, I feel free to express whatever’s on my mind — everything from philosophy to swimming to random banter about Dartmouth,” Bernstein said. Although the team is an organization as opposed to physical space, Bernstein said that he still considers the team itself his home. “It doesn’t matter if we’re in the pool, on a training trip, traveling to a meet or sitting at dinner at FoCo. When I’m with the team, I feel at home,” he said. Students across campus said they find home in groups and physical spaces alike. Women’s rowing team member Margo Cox ’15 now thinks of the team’s boathouse as home, but the sentiment was not immediate. “My freshman fall I was very timid, sort of on edge,” Cox said. “I thought a lot about what I was doing, what I was saying.” That feeling disappeared over the years, Cox said, as she became more familiar with the team. Now one of the women’s rowing captains, representing Dartmouth athletics in her DP2 shirt, she is the picture of a seasoned athlete. Unlike Bernstein, however, Cox said that the physical space of the boathouse is necessary for her to feel at home. “I definitely feel a familiar sense of comfort
when the team is at FoCo, for example,” Cox said. “But being in a space like the boathouse takes it to a more meaningful level.” Psychological and brain sciences and Tuck School of Business professor Judith White explained that “home” doesn’t necessarily need to be manifested in a physical space. “It’s all about having strong social bonds and people accepting who you are,” White explained. “The group has to validate and reflect your identity. Home is where you can be your whole self — all of your identities are recognized, valued and appreciated.” Cox says the shift in feeling these sentiments mostly occurred during her sophomore summer. “We’d go down to the boathouse every day and it would be so beautiful. I’d spend most of the day doing homework, sometimes eating meals, by the [Connecticut] River,” she said. Ledyard Canoe Club vice president Ari Koeppel ’15 also experienced a more gradual process of feeling at home in the group. His sophomore year, he said, he felt a particular connection with the ’13s and ’14s. Living in the Ledyard clubhouse on the river during his sophomore summer, he said, enhanced his feelings of home with the group. “Living down there on the waterfront, the clubhouse was a place that I could gather with my community and just hang out on any given night,” Koeppel said, his tracing the green Ledyard jacket that many of the club’s members wear. He said that beyond its physical facility, Ledyard itself has “grounded” him at the College. For others, the feeling of home arrives nearly instantaneously. Alpha Phi sorority president Courtney Wong ’15 said that the feeling of home arrived quickly once her class moved into the sorority’s house during her sophomore summer. “It was a little scary — we didn’t know what we were doing — but also empowering,” she said. “We thought, this is our house, we’re in charge of it, and we can do what we want with it.” She referenced the running joke that A Phi has a “kitchen table scene,” describing how some of the sisters sit at the house’s large kitchen table to complete homework — but mostly catch up with each other — at the end of each day. “Dartmouth is a stressful place,” Wong said. “My home in A Phi has allowed me to release those stresses when I come home at the end of the day.” Maia Salholz-Hillel ’15, the UGA of the Spanishlanguage affinity house La Casa, also referenced the support network of the house’s residents as an integral part of considering it her home. “They’re the people who come up and check on me when I’m doing an application and ask how I’m doing, and know that I need a hug,” Salholz-Hillel said. Like Bernstein, she said that she feels at home with the residents outside of La Casa, but she noted that the physical space does add to the sense of community. “The space forces you to build a community — having coed bathrooms, a kitchen people actually use. You can tell when people haven’t washed their dirty dishes or when they walk up stairs with dirty shoes,” Salholz-Hillel said. Sitting on a plush couch, surrounded by colorful paintings and bookshelves stuffed with novels and board games — as an aromatic dinner cooked in the house’s modern kitchen nearby — La Casa’s resident advisor Paola Cazares ’14 said she tries to make the house feel like home for residents, through activities like hosting “coffee and conversation hour” on Tuesdays. Making home-cooked meals regularly helps, she noted. “I cook here a lot, so it always smells like food, which I think makes it warm and inviting,”
Cazares said. “Sitting around the kitchen table and having a conversation adds to that too.” The idea of meals constructing feelings of home is integral to Foley House, one of Dartmouth’s off-campus affinity houses, largely organized around the fact that residents cook for each other. The house features a colorful kitchen where residents cook dinners for each other Sunday through Thursday. Serving his home cooked meal of spanakopita, roasted vegetables and bread from King Arthur Flower while other residents set the table with water-filled mason jars and silverware, Nick Thyr ’17 said that moments like this help Foley feel like home to him. “It’s a place that feels lived in,” Thyr said. “There are things on the walls, there’s food on the table. There’s also a support network — I know whenever I’m here, there’s someone I can talk to.” Thyr explained that his reason for applying to Foley House was two-pronged. He wanted to cook — something he missed during his freshman year — but he also wanted a cohesive community. White said those sentiments of home are crucial, especially on a college campus. “Home gives you the sense of security and belonging, and you need that as a strong base if you’re going to take risks,” White said, referencing Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. “Close bonds and social support are crucial for your physical and mental health and overall well-being.” Assistant dean of undergraduate students Brian Reed agreed. “You need a sense of belonging, a sense of familiarity, before you can start excelling, whether it be academically, emotionally or spiritually,” he said. Reed said, however, that people experience these feelings of home to varying degrees. “Some people land on this campus, and it’s everything they thought it was going to be, down to the shade of grass on the Green,” he said. “And you’re going to find others for whom it’s going to take a little extra time.” During freshman year, some students — often overachievers in high school — step foot in Hanover and feel panicked that they are no longer at the top, he said. Some start to question if they deserve their place here. “Once people find that they simply need to tweak the way they go about their business, I see the confidence rebound,” Reed said. “I think that’s when one can feel at home, feel a sense of belonging.” He noted, however, that some students do not find a home throughout their time at Dartmouth. “At a minimum, I’ve seen folks make peace with Dartmouth,” he said. “But I can’t say it’s my sense that everybody would call this home.” Fiona Bowen ’18 echoed Reed’s thoughts about her freshman year so far. “I wouldn’t say I’ve found my home at Dartmouth or consider Dartmouth home,” Bowen said. “It just hasn’t happened yet.” Bowen ascribes this to the adjustment that college brings, and said that it takes some time to feel comfortable here. She has, she said, developed close bonds, and she hopes to find a place she can call home here one day. It’s precisely that — those experiences of forming close bonds and finding a sense of home — that Koeppel will take with him when he graduates. “Some of my best memories from Dartmouth are times when a group of Ledyardites and I went off and explored some river nobody had heard about, and stopped by country stores and towns nobody heard about either,” he said. “Those experiences are what have grounded me in this place and made me find home in Ledyard.”
MIRROR //5
Alison Guh/THE DARTMOUTH SENIOR STAFF
6// MIRROR
Through the Looking Glass:
How I Messed Up, and How I Learned to Fix It COLUMN
B y stephanie abbott-grobicki
“Where are you from?” is such a simple question — but I dread it. You see, after living in England, South Africa, Poland, Sri Lanka and France, in addition to attending boarding school in Wales, the answer doesn’t seem that obvious to me. Not to mention my door decoration has read “Lidingo, Sweden” since freshman year (don’t ask), and until recently I have not had a legal permanent address. It will come as no surprise, then, that I don’t define where I am from in the traditional fashion. It sometimes feels like my parents, my brother and I make up our own little country. After all, it’s only in my own house that I don’t feel as though my accent is “so English — can you say ‘tomato’ again?” (when I’m at Dartmouth) or “ohmygod you sound so American” (when I go back to all my British friends). Because I moved every couple of years, I haven’t grown up with ties to one culture or country or people. I have friends from every place I’ve lived, and I am the queen of long-distance friendships. I’ve never had to worry about friendships in the ways that other people have. Just as I would encounter an interpersonal problem, we’d move. In fourth grade, for example, I used to race my friends to the same tree every day during lunch. One day I showed up and was told I wasn’t allowed to sit with them anymore. For the next month, I sat on the other side of the playground alone. A sad story — until my family moved once again shortly after. Relocating to an entirely new home meant my schoolyard quarrel had come to an end, and I never had to see or deal with those girls again. Packing up every so often meant my social circle was always fluctuating, and it was the first two years of high school when I acquired a solid group of friends for the first time. It was also when I started dating my first boyfriend. My teenage romance, though, was short-lived. By the end of sophomore year, I decided I didn’t really want to date him anymore. Luckily, I went off to boarding school in the U.K. a month later. As graduation neared, it meant I had to make a commitment, and choosing to come to Dartmouth was an entirely new experience. I was about to live somewhere — in one place! — for four whole years. Once I arrived in Hanover, I was lucky to meet my best friend, Katie. On my birthday freshman year, she organized a scavenger hunt that took me all over campus throughout the day. Every Valentine’s Day, she makes up lyrics to my favorite song of the month, and I am never out of delicious baked goods waiting for me in our room. While Katie soon became a best friend, she wasn’t alone. My freshman floormates quickly grew into my new family. I didn’t spend much time my first year playing pong or looking for potential hook-ups. In total, I probably went out maybe seven or eight times. Instead of drinking on Friday nights, six of us might sit on my bed watching a movie and talking until 4 a.m. We would all go canoeing or hiking, and at night we would explore campus — starting, of course, with stargazing on the golf course. I’d never expected to find such a strong home away from my family. Most of my sophomore year was spent
ALICE HARRISON/THE DARTMOUTH STAFF
Stephanie Abbott-Grobicki ’15 moved so frequently growing up that she had never been forced to repair a friendship before. abroad. When I came back for the summer, the same group of us lived together in an offcampus house, something we been planning since freshman spring. Having spent the last year traveling and living in new places, I returned to a friend group I had known for two years and counting. It made for a new experience entirely. Yet something had changed in me — I wanted more. I wanted to walk into any fraternity and know the brothers, to get on table, to not suck at pong. I had — to an extent — kept such a distance from this world during my first two years that when I discovered it, I went a little overboard. I decided to pay wet dues in my sorority for the first time that first week back. After a party that weekend, I ended up upstairs, sleeping over in someone’s room. Katie had lost track of me that evening, and she finally found me sometime around 1 a.m. I opened the door to find her standing there, looking terrified. I’d never gotten drunk around her before, and she’d lost me. I insisted I was fine and laughed it off the next day. Sophomore summer became a haze of dance floor makeouts and tequila shots. Katie watched from afar, and listened to my tales of alcohol-induced idiocy without complaint. She was patient, and she waited. Katie wanted me to come back to her, but she wanted me to explore — even if she didn’t understand my need to break out of the protective case my freshman floor had built around me. Don’t get me wrong — it was fun. In some ways, it was everything sophomore summer is meant to be. Until suddenly it wasn’t. A big night out happened to fall on the same day as my last midterm, and I took full advantage. I was drunk and in definite need of sleep, so one of my freshman floormates walked me home in the early hours of the morning. We got to talking — first about classes, then friends and then our respective love lives. This friend had recently gone through a breakup and was bemoaning the fact that it was so hard to find girls who wanted more at Dartmouth. I was a girl who was so sick of being single in a social scene that was telling me that I shouldn’t have to be alone. I messed up. Monumentally.
Do you know how hard it is to tell your best friend that you kissed the guy she’s been in love with for the last two years? And this time my family wasn’t moving. I had another two years of Dartmouth to go. Katie told me that night that she wasn’t angry — confused and upset maybe, but not angry. Over the next few weeks, we grew apart. On the outside, we were still Katie and Steph — two inseparable entities. Still, late at night, when we would normally talk about everything and nothing, there was an emptiness. The floormate whom I’d kissed suddenly became someone I could not be around. We stopped talking. Our friend group had to plan around us since we couldn’t handle spending time together. The “event” was never mentioned explicitly, never talked about. My friends whispered around me. I confided in a few. We had created a glass casing around our friendships, scared that if anyone talked about what was wrong, it would shatter. Despite the numerous times I’ve been the “new girl” or had to make an entirely new circle of friends, I’d never felt so alone. I’d managed to alienate a place that had willingly taken me in like nowhere had before. All I wanted to do was talk to Katie about it. I just wanted to be there for her, but I couldn’t. I was the one who ruined everything in the first place. The fall — thanks to the D-plan — separated Katie and me. We sent long emails. We informed each other of our day-to-day lives. Before she left, we had tried to figure things out. But she was too hurt, and she wouldn’t let herself be mad at me. I got a blitz from Katie late one night junior winter as I was leaving rehearsal. The message started with “Disclaimer: do not freak out about this email.” Of course, I did just that. I took a deep breath and kept reading. She went on to say that she felt disconnected from me. She felt as though I didn’t want to be around her, as though I was pulling away. My instant reply: “I am coming over now.” I sat on her floor for hours. She asked me if kissing him had been good. She asked what I was thinking, why I’d hurt her, why I hadn’t
thought about her. Every question hurt more than the last. I, Stephanie, a girl who had previously considered herself loyal above all else to those she loved, had done the one thing that had hurt the person I loved most. I threw away the home I created here. That night, I told her everything I could. I told her why I started drinking, and tried to explain why I had felt so trapped. All I wanted to do was to let her know I loved her. The two of us had a lot of these conversations, rehashing details and talking about what we wanted from our friendship. We revisited the situation. Eventually, the tension began to ease, and we started to feel like us again. That spring, I became depressed. I wasn’t taking classes. Things weren’t going swimmingly back home, and I had too much time on my hands to think. I began to realize that I wasn’t all that happy, and I felt the loneliness creeping back in. I was terrified because I didn’t know if Katie would be there. She was there with me every step of the way throughout the term. I called her repeatedly late at night, and she would walk around Occom Pond with me. I felt better — alive — when I was with her. A year later, we still talk about our friendship. I get upset. She does too. I leave weekold tea on the fridge in our common room. It drives her crazy. She makes me baked goods and stays up with me if I need to cry. I do the same. I listen. I love her and always will. It took me a long time to be okay with the fact that my home isn’t where I live. Home isn’t the street I grew up on. Home for me is family. I am lucky enough to have two — my family at home (wherever that may be geographically) and the family I found in Hanover. Yes, Dartmouth can be hard. Yes, I succumbed to a culture that broke my world for a little while. I can’t blame my throwing away my home on anything other than my stupid mistake. But Dartmouth also taught me to fight for my family, to fight for my home. I learned that people are just looking for other people. I also learned that with perseverance and a lot of love, you can put your home back together again.
FRIDAYS WITH MARIAN
MIRROR //7
Boots and RallIES COLUMN
By Aaron Pellowski
COLUMN By Marian Lurio
Justin Bieber has finally turned 21. In his homeland — Canada — the Biebs can legally drink. But this is America, and we play by our own rules in these parts. Like many Dartmouth students, laws certainly haven’t stopped J.B. from consuming alcohol and a variety of illicit drugs before his 21st birthday. Bieber celebrated like the king he is by hosting his party on a private Caribbean island and dancing like a rapper (whatever that means) shirtless on the dancefloor, living up to the d-bag that he is. Bieber sent out some really cogent and heartfelt tweets on February 28 (his bday is March 1st, though), including “@justinbieber I love everybody! #21.” C’mon Justin. You know numbers can’t be hashtagged! I’m especially disappointed by this glaring oversight since it was J.B. who introduced me to the hashtag. I joined Twitter in large part to follow the pre-pubescent heartthrob. Speaking of ragey, MDMA-fueled dancefloors/venues, there are some hot new DJs on the scene competing against the likes of semi-newfound DJs like reality TV celebuspawns Paris Hilton and Brody Jenner. Two Ed Hardy-loving, deadbeat fathers (who’ve starred on reality TV shows, naturally) are taking over — Kevin Federline and Jon Gosselin. For the portion of this readership that is elderly and/or uninformed, allow me to provide some background. Jon Gosselin = ex-husband of woman with asymmetrical bob haircut, father of eight, once-boyfriend of the daughter of his recently-separated wife’s plastic surgeon — until he cheated on her with The Star (it’s a tabloid, just to be clear) reporter Kate Major who would go on to become the estranged stepmother of Lindsay Lohan. Kevin Federline = ex-husband of Britney Spears, father to Spears’ two sons (and many other children from other women) and leading man in the short-lived home-video reality show “Britney and Kevin: Chaotic” (2005) as well as an integral part of the seventh season of “Celebrity Fit Club” (2010). (Oh, how the mighty have fallen — he was once a well-established backup dancer.) I can’t wait to see what these two exemplary men have in store for their sure-to-be packed venues. You don’t need to look at events like North Korea firing missiles or the assassination of Putin’s critic to see that this world and its many peoples/nations are beyond redemption. Look no further than the Texas man who had #thedress tattooed on his calf. I may have found my next Halloween costume — me as #thedress, an interpretive body-paint style replica. But which team will I choose?
Although, TBH, I sincerely hope I have forgotten about this idiotic debacle at least before the summer solstice. It doesn’t matter what colors the dress is. It hurts my eyes to look at this fugly frock either way. It wouldn’t be a Friday with me if I didn’t talk about one or more members of the KardashianJenner-West clan. Do you ever wonder what a Kardashian et al.-less world would be like? Luckily, it seems we won’t find out in this lifetime. The Kardashians have signed a three-year $100-million contract for their original series (which has been the originator behind manya-spinoff), “Keeping Up with the Kardashians” (2007). (If you’re a real fan, you’ll know the series by its ugly-looking abbreviation, KUWTK.) Armenian-Americans everywhere (in America, that is... although one does wonder about the Armenian-American expat community) no doubt look to the Kardashians — arguably the most prominent member of the ArmenianAmerican community — with nothing but admiration and pride. Sometimes I can’t help but feel for the Kardashian-Jenner children because with a fame-obsessed mom like Kris, there’s just no hope for normalcy. But I feel worse for Britney Spears’ children for obvious reasons. I think at this point in my life the best place to be is in Karl Lagerfeld’s arms. Choupette (readers really ought to know who she is by now!) is a force to be reckoned with, but that’s nothing new. Actually, I retract this sentiment. The best place for me would be in my loyal reader Phil’s arms. Unfortunately, you won’t be finding me in the arms of Phil anytime (too) soon. I just don’t love the whole no hard alcohol thing and risking suspension to give someone a shot seems a liiiittle extreme. Honestly, I previously thought hard alcohol was not actually allowed on campus. When the MDF announcement happened, though, I realized it had indeed been condoned for 21+. But don’t expect me to come back for a reunion if I can’t have tequila shots in the public eye/with Phil and other administrators. Whatever happened to “Live Free or Die?” Administrators is desecrating the flag of the great state of New Hampshire by metaphorically using it as toilet paper to wipe its ass and then discard. Ah, well. I wonder if they allow hard alcohol in prison. Specifically, in the Maryland Correctional Facility occupied by one Mr. Adnan Syed. Even if it were banned, I wouldn’t need a tequila shot if I were nestled in Adnan’s warm (alluringly psychopathic) embrace.
My roommate at the Delaware Advanced Institute of Unreality Studies was a studio art major named Tom J. Jane. Jane was big on cubes, and most of his work consisted of gluing large cubes of cement or wood or glass together. They always had names like “Oneiric” or “Prolepsis” or “Vocabulary.” He dressed with a lot of bright reds and blues, and though I’d always meant to ask him why, I never did. He had this thing he used to say — usually to girls at parties — about how he had known since he was a child how he’d disappear. When he found what he “knew in his soul to be the biggest, most beautiful thing in the world,” he would say, he’d catch the first plane out to North Dakota and live in a hut or a cave and never speak to anyone again. I always shrugged this off as something of a conceited pick-up line — that is until some circulating social media buzz alerted me: Jane was gone. He’d been in Florence, helping out at a friend’s gallery. Jane encountered the Duomo cathedral stumbling home frog-drunk one night, lit up in curtains of bone-white moonlight. That was it. I hadn’t heard from Jane for so long, I’d mostly forgotten about him. It was odd how it took him disappearing to remind me of his life. What was strangest was when I got an email last Friday from mailer@witstracking.com via dartmouth.edu: “An item with tracking number 420037559449010200882469670100 was input. A package has been received and is being held for you.” I went down to my Hinman that afternoon and picked up a box from none other Tom Jane, internationally shipped from Florence and postmarked to just a few days before Florence Syndrome got the best of him. It contained just a couple small, ivory cubes and a letter, unsigned and printed on both sides of the single sheet of folded paper in Sorts Mill Goudy typeface: “Horowitz — it’s just great when you discover a connection or affinity between two things you like, and even better if you like them for the same reasons. Early this December, for instance, I was looking into ‘The Right Word,’ an anthology of William F. Buckley Jr.’s best writing and his thoughts about writing and style. There is a Google Books entry for it, but it doesn’t display any preview text. It does, however, contain a list of the most frequent terms and words to be found in the book, which is already interesting just because it’s a book about vocabulary — what kind of vocabulary does it employ? It’s also interesting, at another level, since the word analysis is a sign that Google does indeed have a scanned copy of the book somewhere, and it has received OCR treatment. Google is just being greedy, Horowitz. “Deliciously, one of the most prominent terms used is ‘Evelyn Waugh,’ the 20th century author of my favorite book, ‘Brideshead Revisited.’ I get fierce pleasure from this discovery for many reasons. First, it must be that Buckley cited
Waugh for his writing style, which is so flawless, dark and sad. When I read someone like David Foster Wallace or Kerouac or any of those gross post-post-post-modernists in the ALT LIT ‘community’ I feel like I’m being showered with a million nickels in the dark — grab what you can while it’s zipping and clattering around you! Waugh on the other hand... Reading Waugh, it’s as if you’re seated at a table alone, and a old man comes in with blonde hair and bright blue eyes, wearing a denim jacket and a beaten-down, concerned expression, the kind of man you know is named something like ‘Dusty’ or ‘Russell.’ Dusty takes a solid cube of gold out of his pocket, sets it on the table before you and just says ‘There.’ And leaves. “Waugh’s just so deadening. I always thought it was lazy in ‘Silence of the Lambs’ how Hannibal Lecter was able to induce suicide in one of his prison mates just by whispering awful things to him — but the script doesn’t say what those awful things were. I actually think it’s always lazy when a writer attributes things — especially ‘genius’ — to a character without exemplifying it at some occasion. Anyway, I bet that if Hannibal had whispered ‘Hard Cheese on Tony’ to somebody, there’s a good chance they would have done the math and figured that living life was a deal worth breaking. And yet it’s worth reading ‘A Handful of Dust’ anyway, because it’s so beautiful. Like all of Waugh. “So I love that Buckley looked to Waugh for a good example of good writing, because I also love Buckley’s writing, but especially his speaking style, even his queer, mid-Atlantic drawl that secretly climbs in pitch all the way up to the punch of his long remarks. Prolix of this nature you get also in DFW, but you couldn’t say it out loud the same way. I love long sentences, and I love hearing Buckley say them. In Germany, I used to fall asleep to ‘The Firing Line’ just thinking, ‘Wow, I don’t even know what Buckley’s saying, but he sounds so smart. And so confident and quick, like he’s made of solid pigiron but could catch a fly in his fingers.’ I want to be like that. Unfloorable.” Well Jane, you sure floored me. Jane used to tell a story about a friend of his from high school who had run away from home without any forewarning, and half the pain his parents felt was missing him while the other half was just raw confusion. The note he left just read “This isn’t about you” like “you” was supposed to refer to anyone who read it, and then of course, no one. This, like the line about the tallest and most beautiful thing, I always thought was pretentious flim-flam. This story never happened — it was Jane’s own untethered gambit at some kind of thistly attention. But now I don’t know. Why did he send me this letter or the cubes? It makes me think that it’s about me. Maybe, Boots and Rallies reader, it’s about you. But this isn’t about you.
8// MIRROR
An Ideal Day in Hanover Two reporters face the Herculean challenge of seeing all that Hanover has to offer — in one day SPOTLIGHT
B y MAry Liza Hartong and Andrew Kingsley
“Little town, it’s a quiet village. Every day like the one before” — lyrics from “Beauty and the Beast” (1991) or the everyday musings of students as they stroll about Hanover? For those of us without cars or the select few who were lucky enough to grow up in thriving metropolises, it’s no secret that this tiny New England town can often feel more like 18th-century rural France than a thriving mecca of young college students. (Without spontaneous singing, it can sometimes feel even duller.) For all its shortcomings, though, this town does have one advantage over the Parisian countryside — you don’t have to shack up with a hideous beast in order to explore the thrills it has to offer. With that in mind, this week we set out to enjoy an “ideal day” in Hanover. If you care to join us on our journey, we say, “Be our guest.” First Stop: Lou’s While this haven of hash browns, hollandaise and hot cof fee hardly needs explaining to any student of the College, you may not know just how delightful the Hanover haunt is around noon on a weekday. There’s something delicious about fine dining when you know most of your peers are jailed in windowless classrooms, yawning their way through chapters and chapters of literary theory. There Mary Liza feasted on the most beautiful poppy seed muffin in existence, wolfed down the better half of a chicken pot pie and settled into the alluring green booth for a long winter’s nap. Whether
you’re a trusty Saturday morning customer or prefer to attend for the occasional birthday breakfast, when you sit down at Lou’s you can’t deny the overwhelming feeling of familiarity there. Maybe it has something to do with that ever-present strawberry jam, the kind that might sit on your own kitchen counter at home, waiting to be spooned onto your dad’s morning toast. Perhaps it is the waitresses, who inexplicably bring that poppy seed muffin out before you can emit even the slightest frenzied word of hunger, all the while telling you about the last 18 years they’ve spent calling this little town home. Dirt Cowboy After departing Lou’s, we wandered a short distance across the way into Dirt Cowboy. Though not exactly secluded, this cozy coffee shop remains Hanover’s hidden jewel. So few students seem to know the wealth of wonders it offers that we felt like a modern-day Ponce de León, having discovered this fountain of the yummiest foods for ourselves. A window of gelato and chocolate bonbons greets you as you enter, dissolving into waves of coffee aromas which are mixed with the dulcet murmur of couples leaning over cappuccinos. Whether rejuvenated by their vast coffee and tea selections or simply because we were lucky enough to relish the shimmering golden goodness of their apple Danish, we feel the need to bring the news to our people. Behold their chalices of orange, mango, pineapple smoothies, those Holy Grails of gastronomic delight. Savor
their turkey sandwiches, slathered in their golden balsamic mustard. Dirt Cowboy is our El Dorado, yet they price their wares like they’re selling fool’s gold — so accessibly. So don’t be a fool, and discover for yourself this epicurean Eden. Folk Likely known to most students as the dark, cramped store across from EBAs that carries the faint scent of incense even outside its window, FOLK is anyone’s one-stop shop for indie concert gear and graphic tees. Its nooks and crannies are filled with surprises, from Free People shirts and Nepalese jewelry to oriental pillowcases and motivational socks. Don’t go in with a J Crew mentality — this store is too chill for your intense corporate mojo. When Andrew went up to the counter to show an employee the items he was taking to the changing room, she didn’t hand him some number sign or ask him to mention her to the store manager. No, she just shrugged “okay,” mocking his Uniqlo energy. Enter the door, and let the bath of soothing exotic scents overcome your midterm malaise. The arabesques of color and hand-wrought crafts take you away from commercial retailers, where the jewelry is assembled by gears and switches, and connect you to the artisans, so that the delicacy of their fingers is felt in the dangle of an earring. Although pricey, the store sends off free Zen vibes to all customers. So stop in, be transported, chill. The Chocolate Shop One of the hardest parts of being away from home is feeling removed from a community of mentors and adults who love you. Mary Liza certainly misses shooting the breeze with the dean of students at her high school, who, god bless her, tolerated Mary Liza’s egregious transgressions against the school uniform — à la various brooches and patterned knee socks. Instead of rolling her eyes at Mary Liza’s festive attire, the dean took the time to ask about Mary Liza’s day and recount her own with an open heart. We did not expect the same cordial welcome from the strangers working there when we entered The Chocolate Shop. We couldn’t have been more wrong, and we ended up having a 20-minute conversation with the owner about dogs — ours and hers, dogs we
cherished and dogs we missed. By the time she rang up our goodies, we had forgotten we had entered the shop for chocolate alone. We told her we looked forward to meeting her new puppy in the coming weeks. To tell the truth, we also looked forward to meeting her again. Bank of America Sterile, utilitarian and barren, the lobby of Bank of America seems like the last place to experience the thrills of Hanover. As Andrew wearily deposited a check in the ATM while Mary Liza checked Yik Yak, though, in walked a miniature Australian shepherd named Walker. A patchwork of brown, black and white fur with opalescent milk blue eyes, Walker made this ordinary transaction a tribute to the intimacy of our hamlet. Whether an impromptu chat with the poster store owner or a belly rub for an adorable dog, the quaintness of the town brings together locals with stories and passions begging to be shared. You never know what surprises await you in Hanover — all you have to do is explore. Candela Tapas Lounge Okay, so we didn’t exactly make it to Candelas, but we couldn’t resist including it as a feature on our platonic — if unrealized — ideal of a Hanover day. Across the street from the Dartmouth Entrepreneurial Network, Candela makes a meal out of Spanish appetizers. Dim, noisy and filled with chic, modern fare, Candela feels like an NYC restaurant that got lost and found itself in the rolling hills of New Hampshire. Their tiny plates of fish tacos, yucca fries and mushroom bites invite sharing, rendering it the ideal getaway for a romantic meal. Candela brings us back to our primitive past, where eating is communal, and our fingers become a fork, knife and spoon. Though your wallet will urge you to keep walking to nearby Ramunto’s, Candela is a perfect end-of-term celebration spot. You’ll emerge refreshed and unwilling to settle back into the tired Pine routine. By the end of our day of revelry, we looked around Hanover with a smile, thinking, “There may be something there that wasn’t there before.”
Anthony Chicaiza/THE DARTMOUTH STAFF