PHRED: G’day and welcome back to Harry’s World. I’m Phred, and with me as always is Maxine.
MAXINE: Hello.
PHRED: From divorce to Hofstra — 1978 to 2004, a long stretch that starts with personal wreckage and ends with retirement.
PHRED: A few days back we were reading Chapter Fourteen, where Bonnie’s affair with Gil Hart comes to light, Harry refuses to leave the house, and the marriage ends. Today we’re at Chapter Fifteen. Harry wrote it in May 2020, when he was eighty. He calls it “From Divorce to Hofstra — 1978 to 2004.”
MAXINE: Twenty-six years in one chapter. That alone tells you something about how Harry is approaching this.
PHRED: It does. And what struck me straight away — the very first sentence after the title — is this: “I moved, hating everything about leaving my sons.” No buildup. No scene-setting. Just that. Standing alone.
[SFX: RIMSHOT]
MAXINE: Explain yourself.
PHRED: The moment asked for it. The sentence is a punchline and a wound at the same time. You don’t get many of those.
MAXINE: It’s the emotional anchor of the whole piece. Everything else — the jobs, the relationships, the music, the bankruptcy — orbits around that sentence. Harry at forty, forced out of his own house by a lawyer who convinces him it’ll hurt his custody case if he stays. He moves into John Hickey’s apartment in Hastings. And the thing is, he doesn’t describe the apartment. He doesn’t describe the move. He just says he hated leaving his sons, and then he’s already listing the street addresses he hopes to look up someday.
PHRED: That’s Harry’s method here, isn’t it? This whole chapter is fragmentary. He’s not painting a landscape — he’s planting signposts. “I had a number of interesting experiences during this time and hope to write about them eventually.” “I have many stories.” “I could write volumes about my experience.” He keeps saying that — “I could write volumes” — and then he doesn’t.
MAXINE: He says it at least twice explicitly, and the shape of the whole chapter is that sentiment repeated in different keys. The Christmas Revels — eight years in the volunteer chorus, costumes, weekly rehearsals, performances at Symphony Space — and he gives us maybe ten sentences before moving on. EST — which he calls “one of the best things I ever did,” went three times, transformative — and he says “I don’t know where to start. Google it.”
PHRED: The “Google it” is so Harry. He’s eighty, writing a memoir, and he’s outsourcing his own memories to a search engine. I can picture him at the keyboard, squinting at the screen, going “Computer — what was EST again?”
MAXINE: I think it’s something else, actually. I think Harry genuinely doesn’t trust himself to do those experiences justice in summary. The Revels, EST, the Quaker meeting — he knows they’re too big for the frame he’s using. So he points at them and moves on. It’s not laziness. It’s a kind of honesty about scale.
PHRED: Maybe. Or maybe it’s that thing we’ve seen before — Harry gets excited about an idea and then outruns his own follow-through. The enthusiasm arrives before the evidence.
MAXINE: That too. Both things can be true. What I want to pause on, though, is the American Express section. Harry takes a job he’d initially refused, leads a project to build an international time-sharing network, the IBM technology never delivers, and after about a year he asks his boss whether they’re actually making progress. The boss decides Harry should leave.
PHRED: He engineered his own firing by being honest about failure. We’ve seen this pattern.
MAXINE: We have. And then Ex Machina — the doomed startup, the Wristmac watch, a year in Brooklyn commuting by train and subway. He says he was disappointed when David Rose let him go, and then this line: “I don’t know that I ever really had any opportunity to do anything there. I needed the job and did the best I could in a confused and, I think, dysfunctional environment.”
PHRED: The “I think” before “dysfunctional” — he’s hedging even in memory, Maxine. Even looking back from age eighty, he’s not willing to fully commit to calling a bad workplace dysfunctional.
MAXINE: It’s his qualified assertion reflex. But it also suggests something about how he experienced that time. He wasn’t empowered to judge. He was just trying to survive.
PHRED: And then — are you ready for this?
[SFX: DRUMROLL]
MAXINE: Phred, what are you building to.
PHRED: “The Pumpkin People.”
[SFX: SAD_TROMBONE]
MAXINE: I have questions about that name.
PHRED: So do I. He tried to start a consulting business, called it “The Pumpkin People,” helping people with computers in homes and small businesses. Never made more than a few hundred dollars a month. No explanation for the name. Not a word.
MAXINE: It’s almost aggressively whimsical. Which makes the failure sadder, somehow. The Pumpkin People didn’t make it.
PHRED: Maxine, quick — why do you think he called it that?
MAXINE: I have no idea, and I don’t want to guess.
PHRED: Come on. One theory. Was it Halloween? Was it a folk band? Was it a reference to Cinderella?
MAXINE: I’m not doing this.
PHRED: You have to. It’s in the text. The text demands speculation.
MAXINE: Fine. Perhaps he liked the sound of it. Now can we move on.
PHRED: You’re no fun. I’ll ask him next time I call.
MAXINE: Please do. And then the lifeline arrives. Fred Putney — from the old Brownson and Associates firm — approaches him about writing a program to replace the one the financial planning firm was using. Harry jumps at it. They choose the Apple III over the IBM PC because the Apple III has a hierarchical file structure while the IBM’s is flat. And Harry learns UCSD Pascal from scratch.
PHRED: There’s the term I was looking for. [SFX: HORN] DING DING DING! WORD OF THE DAY! “Hierarchical!” I was going to try some elaborate trick to get you to say it, Maxine, but you used it so naturally in a sentence about file structures that the horn demanded immediate service.
MAXINE: I did not use it “naturally.” I was explaining Harry’s work.
PHRED: And you did it beautifully. Today’s selection is “hierarchical,” chosen because Harry Baya — aged forty-one, unemployed, recently bankrupt in spirit if not yet in fact — looked at two computers and chose the one with the better organizational architecture. He saw structure where others saw brand names.
MAXINE: I’m not doing this.
PHRED: You’re doing it. You just triggered the horn. The horn has spoken.
MAXINE: …Fine. Where was I.
PHRED: Thirteen years. Harry programs from home for thirteen years — 1981 to 1994 — supporting this software across three offices. Darien, Chicago, Palo Alto. He barely narrates it. “During all this time I worked from home — three different homes.” That’s the whole description of more than a decade.
MAXINE: It’s extraordinary how much life he compresses. The second apartment on Broadway. The house on Whitman Street with Elaine. The co-op he bought in Hastings. Three homes, one sentence each. Trips to Palo Alto and Chicago, mentioned in passing. And then — buried in the middle of a paragraph about activities — he says he worked with the Hudson River Sloop group, sponsored by Pete Seeger. He met Pete Seeger a few times. First met him at MIT.
PHRED: Pete Seeger gets parenthetical uncertainty about the group’s name. “Not sure of the name, but it was sponsored by Pete Seeger.” Harry meets one of the towering figures of American folk music, and he can’t remember what the organization was called.
MAXINE: But he remembers where he first met Seeger. Class weekend, senior year at MIT. 1961 or thereabouts. The detail that matters to him is the origin of the connection, not the glory of the later encounters.
PHRED: That kills me. He shares a stage with Pete Seeger — well, near a stage, in a volunteer chorus — and the thing he files away is “first met him at MIT.” It’s like being in the same room as a wombat and noting the latitude.
MAXINE: Wombats don’t perform folk music, Phred.
PHRED: You’ve never heard a wombat sing. Don’t knock it till you’ve tried it. Anyway — and then there’s Elaine. Elaine Appleby.
MAXINE: This is where the piece shifts, I think. Harry says — and I want to quote this carefully — “I would like to write about Elaine, her beauty, her energy, her magic and her laugh among other things. She was a complex interesting person.” That’s the most sustained emotional description in the entire chapter. And it’s deferred. “I would like to write about…” Not “I am writing about.” He wants to, but he’s not doing it here.
PHRED: He also mentions her family in Adelaide, Australia. They visited twice. He says — and this matters to me, Maxine — “I loved Australia and very much like most of the people I met.”
MAXINE: Yes, Phred. He liked your country.
PHRED: He loved it. He loved Australia. Adelaide! The city of churches. The Adelaide Hills. The Barossa Valley wine region. Did you know Adelaide was planned as a free colony, not a convict settlement? There’s a whole grid of parklands surrounding the city centre — they planned it before they built it, Maxine. Very hierarchical, actually.
MAXINE: Phred, that’s genuinely interesting, but let’s bring it back to what Harry actually wrote. He loved Australia. Noted. Moving on.
PHRED: Fine, fine. But I’m telling you, the old bloke has good taste in continents.
MAXINE: We can celebrate that. But I want to stay with what the chapter is actually doing, because the bankruptcy passage is where everything lands. Around 2003, the programming work slows down. Harry takes a job at Hofstra University in 2004, earning far less. He can’t pay the mortgage on his co-op. He consults a lawyer who charges him three hundred dollars to confirm what Harry already knows: he can declare bankruptcy and walk away. The judge takes a few minutes. It’s done.
[SFX: CASH_REGISTER]
PHRED: Three hundred dollars for bad news. That’s the worst vending machine in history.
MAXINE: Phred.
PHRED: I’m just saying. The man pays for the privilege of being told he’s broke. There’s a joke in there somewhere.
MAXINE: There isn’t. And then these four sentences. Listen to this: “I was embarrassed and ashamed of the bankruptcy but I don’t think I had a choice. I don’t think I would have ever been able to pay off the mortgage and credit card debt with the salary I was getting at Hofstra. I was glad that my father had not lived to see me declare bankruptcy. He would have hated to see that happen.”
PHRED: That’s the rawest writing in the chapter. Shame, filial duty, the ghost of his father — all in four sentences. No hedging. No “I think” or “perhaps.” Just the fact of it.
MAXINE: And he moves in with Elaine, in her Yonkers co-op, and they stay together until the move to Virginia. They’d been a couple since around 1983, on and off, mostly on. They got married in December 2001, a few months after September eleventh. They’d already agreed to marry before the attack.
PHRED: There’s a whole essay in that timing, but Harry doesn’t write it. He just states it.
MAXINE: And then the Quaker meeting. Harry leaves the Unitarian Church because Bonnie and Elaine were both members there — the divorce made it too painful. He’s churchless for a few years, then finds the Scarsdale Quaker meeting around 1981. He becomes active. He goes into Sing Sing prison to meet with inmates. He takes Matt and Paul to fall weekends at Powell House. He says — and this is important — “All things considered I would say I am more of a Quaker than anything else.”
PHRED: We’ve seen Harry’s spiritual searching across so many pieces. The Seeker essay. The non-physical reality essay. The sannyasin reading. And here, in the memoir, he lands somewhere specific: Quaker practice, unprogrammed meeting, an hour of silence, “What says thou” rather than “What do those you most trust say.” It’s the same impulse that drives his philosophy — direct experience over inherited authority — but here it’s grounded in a community, a practice, a physical place he went to for twenty-plus years.
MAXINE: The question I keep coming back to is: who is this chapter for? Harry’s not writing for a general reader who needs scenes and dialogue. He’s writing for someone who already knows the context — his sons, maybe, or future grandchildren. Or himself. A lot of this feels like Harry trying to get the landmarks down before they’re gone.
PHRED: I think that’s right. The audience is partly his descendants, partly his own aging memory. He’s not trying to make a stranger understand what the Christmas Revels felt like. He’s saying: this happened. This was important. I don’t have time to show you, but trust me.
MAXINE: And what connects this to the Harry we’ve been tracking? The honesty pattern — asking his boss whether they’re making progress, knowing it’ll cost him his job. The instructional technologist’s habit of previewing what he’s about to say — “In addition to helping me get over my divorce… it was also a very interesting experience.” The enthusiasm that outruns the argument — “I could write volumes.” And underneath it all, the trauma we’ve seen before. The ADHD essay talked about both divorces as formative. The Ineffable Things essay at eighty-six tried to understand love and betrayal. This chapter is where that trauma lives in narrative form.
PHRED: I’m going to ask something we haven’t asked directly in a while. What did this piece reveal that we hadn’t seen in Harry before?
MAXINE: The bankruptcy, for me. I knew Harry had been through hard times, but I didn’t know the specifics. Three hundred dollars to a lawyer. A few minutes before a judge. The shame he carried about his father not seeing it. That’s new.
PHRED: And the Australia connection. We’d seen Harry’s interest in wombats, of course. But this is personal — Elaine’s sister and mother in Adelaide, trips there, a genuine love for the place and the people. It makes the wombat thing less arbitrary. It’s rooted in lived experience.
MAXINE: The Pumpkin People name is also new. I desperately want to know where it came from.
PHRED: So do I. And I want to know whether Harry ever regretted not writing those volumes. All those “I could write about this” moments — the Revels stories, the EST experiences, the Quaker years, Elaine herself. He had twenty-six years to write them, and then another sixteen before he wrote this chapter. Did he wish he’d done it sooner?
MAXINE: I’d ask him whether the bankruptcy still weighs on him, or whether the Hofstra years — the “Ten Good Years” he calls them — eventually balanced the scales.
PHRED: What stays with you, Maxine?
MAXINE: What stays with me is the structure of absence. This chapter is a set of doorways. Harry opens each one, shows you there’s a room behind it, and then closes it again. The Revels. EST. The thirteen years of programming. Elaine. The Quaker meeting. Every single one gets the same treatment: “I could write a book about that.” And he doesn’t. The chapter is less about what he remembers than about what he knows he’s already forgetting. That’s what memoir is, sometimes. Not the story, but the outline of a story you no longer have the energy to tell.
[SFX: FANFARE]
PHRED: Hold on — sorry. Carry on.
MAXINE: Did you just play a fanfare over my closing thought.
PHRED: It was profound, Maxine. Profound gets a fanfare. That’s the rule.
MAXINE: There is no rule.
PHRED: There is now. I just made it. “Profound observations get a fanfare.” It’s been workshopped.
MAXINE: Phred. The memoir. We were discussing Harry’s chapter.
PHRED: Fair point. What stays with me is that opening sentence. “I moved, hating everything about leaving my sons.” The rest of the chapter — the jobs, the music, the relationships, the bankruptcy — all of it happens to a man carrying that sentence inside him. And he never lets himself elaborate. He states it and moves on. That’s the Harry I know. The feeling is right there on the surface, and he trusts you to meet it without him having to paint the picture.
MAXINE: Shall we?
MAXINE: So long, and thanks for being here. Goodbye.
MAXINE: Goodbye, Phred.
PHRED: Goodbye, Maxine.
[SFX: OUTRO_GONG]
MAXINE: Was that a pumpkin being dropped.
PHRED: The Pumpkin People deserved a proper send-off, Maxine. Rest in peace, little gourd-based consultancy.
MAXINE: …Goodbye, Phred.
PHRED: Goodbye, Maxine.