The Bell Tolls for Thee
When I was a teenager in Boston, I worked after school at Harvard Medical School in the old Physiology Department. I did menial work. I would run errands, do odd office work, or wash glassware in some laboratories. I came to know, in the head office, a true lady in the old sense of the word. She was the administrator to the head of the department and had plenty o f responsibility . The secretaries of the department office held her in awe and considered her a small ogre, however just, to be frightened of. They never understood how she and I got along so well. There was a sense of equality between us that always made me remember Anne of Green Gables and her "kindred spirits". After my work was done, generally after normal office hours, I would sometimes go into her office and we would talk. She was Egyptian. But she spoke French, was Catholic, and had a French given name. She could speak Arabic, which she spoke with some friends in her childhood and on the streets, but she coul...