One benefit of our move to our nation’s capital is that many graduates of the Harvard Kennedy School live here. Days after we arrived, a woman approached me in a coffee shop, and said, “I know you.” Sure enough, she graduated thirty years ago and said I looked the same as I did then. (Hah!)

Two more former students have re-surfaced. I remember the first so well because she came directly from college which I consider a mistake. (I believe in working a bit before committing to graduate school.) She turned out to be a star student and she was elected president of the student government. She’s had a distinguished career in education and founded a successful non-profit that she now directs. (So much for my predicting!)

The second was a member of the student-led group we joined in 2002 for a wonderful “educational” trip to Cuba. Cuba was less tourist-ready then when only educational trips were allowed by the US government. We stayed in a hotel near the University of Havana where we were taking a class (in English). I don’t remember the name of the hotel, but I remember that the lights went out when Peter plugged in his CPAP and the sink literally came out of the wall in that student’s room. I would do that trip again in a heartbeat, that is if I were sixty-four, like I was in 2002.

In the past, I have run into graduates of the Kennedy School in places as far away as the Taj Mahal. Thomas Wolfe may have been right when he wrote that you can’t go home again but, if your home was the Kennedy School for thirty-three years, home can come to you.