Las Vegas III

A rare snowstorm

Christopher Gallagher

Christopher Gallagher, 26, U.S. Marine Corps corporal, 3rd Battalion, 4th Marines, served in Iraq three times: In 2003 during the invasion; In 2004 at Haditha Dam; In 2005 in Fallouja. These are letters he wrote home, photographs he saved. A story on his time in Iraq is posted separately under the heading, "This is what you will remember"...

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Marines prepare "final letters" to send their families in case they don't make it home alive. Below are Christopher's, to his parents, older sister Shannon and younger brother Matt.







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Apr. 2, 2003: “I am writing this letter from a fighting hole, behind my machine gun. I am fine for now. How is everyone back home? The first couple of days the Iraqi soldiers were surrendering by the hundreds. I have heard reports of American POW’s being murdered. What have you heard? The first hundred hours of this war I was awake. It is hard finding time to sleep out here.”





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From Iraq.

Christopher, right
Christopher, left

Christopher, back row, far right



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To his brother Matt.





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A postcard bearing the image of the Apr. 11, 2003 front page of the military newspaper Stars and Stripes. The headline “Baghdad falls to U.S. forces” ran large down the right-hand side, set against a photograph — an iconic image — showing the statue of Saddam Hussein being pulled down.

This is what you will remember

This is what you will remember when you get back: your cramped foxhole, the stench of your unwashed body, MRE menu item No. 2, Jamaican pork chop. You’ll remember the way the sand of the Kuwaiti desert would drift into your eyes, your ears, everything, giving you reason to clean your weapon twice a day as you waited to cross the border. You’ll remember calling your mom, nervous but proud, after finding out in January 2003, at the end of holiday leave, that you would be going to Iraq.

Iraq.

What will you remember about Iraq?

Friends you lost. Survivor’s guilt. You’ll remember how Iraqis lined the streets to cheer your arrival in Baghdad, how the people of Fallujah just wanted you to leave. You’ll remember how different you were when it all began. Remember? You were once in favor of the war.

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This is Christopher Gallagher’s story. Christopher Gallagher, U.S. Marine Corps corporal, 3rd Battalion, 4th Marines. Service in Iraq: 2003, the invasion; 2004, Haditha Dam; 2005, Fallouja. One soldier among tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, one among millions.

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Apr. 2, 2003 — “I am writing this letter from a fighting hole, behind my machine gun. I am fine for now. How is everyone back home? The first couple of days the Iraqi soldiers were surrendering by the hundreds. I have heard reports of American POW’s being murdered. What have you heard? The first hundred hours of this war I was awake. It is hard finding time to sleep out here.”

This letter is from your first deployment. It was the first time you had ever traveled overseas. You wrote your family (Mom, Dad, Matt, Joel, etc.) in Farmingdale, NY, where you grew up before moving to Las Vegas, on military stationery. A single sheet of paper with the Marine Corps emblem — eagle, globe and anchor — printed up top.

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In the invasion of Iraq, your batallion fought from the town of Safwan on the Kuwaiti border through Basra and onto Baghdad. You didn’t shower for two months. Fellow Marines secured oil fields and airports. Your job was setting up radio communications and conducting security operations: “A machine gun post set up on top of a hill, or something like that. Guarding a small area around yourself.”

Your battalion was the first Marine unit to enter Baghdad, and you remember it well: “The people invaded the streets and were lining the streets of Baghdad, saying, ‘Saddam bad, Bush good.’ At the time we were considered liberators.”

People everywhere, watching, cheering. But you couldn’t talk to them. That was “off-limits.” The day after your battalion took Baghdad, however, you sat down for breakfast at the Palestine Hotel with reporters including an Iraqi woman, around your age, a graduate of Baghdad University. You remember the meal — pita bread with tea and honey. But you can’t quite recall the specifics of what you discussed.

You were 20.

That was back when the Palestine housed all the journalists who came to cover the war, 2 1/2 years before a truck bomb shook the building. Who knows what happened to those people you met. That Iraqi journalist, where is she now? Maybe she is still covering the war. Maybe she fled her country. Maybe she’s dead.

—

Part of what you will remember about Iraq will come from photographs. Snapshots like the one taken in 2003 of you and eight members of your platoon, posing on the concrete roof of a building in Baghdad. Behind you rise thick columns of smoke, black and tilted, carried across the smoldering city on the wings of the wind.

Five years later, sitting in your Las Vegas living room, you point out that you are the only one in the picture wearing a helmet. In Iraq, you were always careful, always on the lookout. You became, in your words, “less trusting of humanity.” In that way, the war stayed with you even after you returned home. Back in Vegas, you say you are still “hyper-vigilant, always more cautious. Kind of like — in a way, almost like a minor paranoia. I’m less trusting of people, because the people over there, they smile at you one minute, and the next day they’ll be shooting at you.”

Even so, despite the nerves and fear, in 2003 you were optimistic about the war. Writing home in on Apr. 2, you told your family the weather had been comfortable. You wished your mom a happy birthday, said you were thinking that the two of you and your grandma could visit Atlantic City when you got back.

This is how you ended your letter: “Tell everyone I will see them soon after the Marines have killed Saddam and the war is over.”

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At home, Americans watched the siege of Baghdad on CNN, marveling with sick wonder at the fireworks display — the buildings exploding, the red and yellow tracer rounds flying across the sky, shooting stars endowed with bullet speed. Magazines and newspapers carried pictures of the carnage, bodies floating in marshes, refugees fleeing.

Your mother Catherine Jackson worried, unable to watch the news while you were abroad.

“I became very depressed,” she remembers. “I checked the mailbox every day, religiously. I cried every day, religiously. I was just worried about him and his health. Would I get him home? Would he come home? And when he did come home, would he come home in one piece? I didn’t know what to expect.”

To her, your letters meant a lot. They meant that somewhere thousands of miles away, her son was still alive.

—

Meals, Ready-to-Eat.

Thai chicken: “A bowl of snot with some water chestnuts, little pieces of chicken.” This is your description. You also offer these choice words about MREs in general: “I remember them all, all very unfondly. ... It comes in a sealed package. And imagine a piece of chicken in there. It looks like a piece of chicken, I don’t know if it is. They had a variety of food, but none of it was good for you. It had so many preservatives in it.”

By your estimation, the only good thing that came in those rations was the candy — Skittles, Charms or M&Ms. Marines would trade with one another, Skittles for M&Ms and vice versa. Charms ended up in the garbage. They were, by tradition, bad luck.

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MREs aside, living conditions at Haditha Dam were good in 2004.

You slept in a bunk bed, lifted weights, showered twice a week, sometimes with hot water. Your family sent you snickers, cigarettes and powdered Country Time pink lemonade.

On occasion, when townspeople protested outside, airmen “would fly fighter jets over the top of them, really low to scare them.” You never saw that yourself, but that’s what you heard.

In March, you wrote home to your mother and Joel, telling them you’d received a package they had sent. The postscript reminded them that you smoked Parliament Lights. The message was scrawled in black ink on the back of a postcard bearing the image of the Apr. 11, 2003 front page of the military newspaper Stars and Stripes. The headline “Baghdad falls to U.S. forces” ran large down the right-hand side, set against a photograph — an iconic image — showing the statue of Saddam Hussein being pulled down.

“Do you remember this day almost a year ago when Marines from taskforce 3/4 took the statue down,” you wrote.

In Haditha, you were a radio operator, part of a skeleton crew of Marines guarding the dam. Most of the men in your battalion had been called to Fallujah to fight in Operation Vigilant Resolve, the first major battle there. Some never made it back. You lost a couple of friends.

“One minute they’re there. One minute they’re gone.”

—

Some of the letters you’ve kept were never mailed.

“To Shannon,” one such note to your older sister begins. “Hi I am sorry for this tragic event you are going through, you helped raise me when mom and dad were not around. ... All you have to do is close your eyes and pray, I will be there. I wanted to be a good uncle for James and Alyssa. I would have liked to see them grow up and live a good life.”

And to your younger brother: “I wish I could be there for you Matt. I love you so much and you will never know how much the time that we have spent together hanging out since I enlisted meant to me. If you have noticed all the extra gifts I have gotten for you, it was to try to make up for my absence.”

In your final letter to your mother and father, which they would have received had you not come home alive, you wrote that you loved them, that you’d watch over them in heaven alongside Grandpa Rich, Grandma, Grandpa Jackson and Uncle Joe.

“Let everyone know I died with honor, keeping all Americans free from foreign dictatorships,” you wrote.

“I was not always the best kid to have, I joined the Corps to straighten my life out and find direction. Mom you were my best friend and were a great emotional support. Dad you were always there, from the time you taught me to bowl until I got on the bus for Parris Island.”

“As I write this letter and look back on my life I only remember how much i enjoyed living it. They say ‘Everyone dies but not everyone lives.’ I just hope I turned out to be a respectable and upstanding person like you raised me to be.”

This is the letter your mother said she could never read.

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“By the end of the third deployment, I’d say I was wondering what we were doing there. Because we were essentially driving around just waiting to be blown up. Nobody wanted to be there anymore, everybody just wanted to come home.”

The Iraqis, you said, didn’t want you there either. You remember the disgust, the anger in their eyes.

“There was no point to any of the patrols,” you said. “We were told that Al Qaeda was causing all the trouble, but yet, it was mostly the people living in these towns. It was Iraqis.”

In Fallujah, you served as radio operator for an 81 millimeter mortar platoon. You worked at a checkpoint outside the city, a job you likened to herding cattle. Everyone coming through had to have their retnas scanned. Everyone had to get an ID card. Everyone had to be searched. To find out if anyone was carrying a weapon, everyone had to pass through thermal imaging scanners that didn’t work properly because it was too hot out.

Your schedule was eight hours on duty, eight hours off. When you weren’t manning the checkpoint, you did patrols, in vehicles and on foot, sweating under a scorching Iraqi sun. You searched people’s homes, felt no guilt, no remorse. You became angry when you gave information on a firefight to your higher ups only to find out later that “the report that they filed was not what I said.”

You wondered why you didn’t have proper armor. During your first deployment, you didn’t have plates in your vest to protect you from bullets and shrapnel. Until the end of 2005, you said, your humvees had what you called “hillbilly armor,” a piece of metal in the shape of a door hanging off the side of the vehicle.

“I was pissed off I was in Iraq,” you remember. “I removed my emotions. I supported the war and supported the troops. I thought they were one and the same. I didn’t want to be there anymore, but I supported the mission.”

You slept on a cot in a wooden hut housing 20 guys. Fellow soldiers on patrol found propane tanks and 30- or 40-gallon drums and used them to fashion a makeshift shower. Once a week, you got hot food — prime rib, beef stew, “something generic like that.” It didn’t make you sick like the other meals or the dirty, substandard water you said the military gave you.

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It’s 2008. You are 26 now. You have been home, on U.S. soil, for three years.

You have no regrets. Back in May, 2001, as a senior in high school, you signed up to join the Marines to see the world, to “become someone.” Your mother worried, afraid of what might happen even though it was a time of peace. On Sept. 11, you were at bootcamp at Parris Island, South Carolina. Training together in the humid Southern summer, you and your fellow recruits knew war was coming.

Looking back, you say the Marines made you a better person. You are more focused, more disciplined. One of the worst students in your high school class, you pulled a 3.5 grade point average in the short time you spent in college before leaving school to learn the trade of an electrician. You make good money, help support your mom. You can take direction, but you also have leadership skills. Along the way, in Iraq, you made lifelong friends, some people you normally wouldn’t hang out or talk to. What brought you together?

“We were willing to die for each other.”

—

You were once in favor of the war. Remember?

How much things have changed.

After returning to America, you read about the war, watched movies about the war, talked to friends about the war that left you with so many memories.

There were no weapons of mass destruction. You felt the country’s leaders had lied to you. You learned as many U.S.-paid civilian contractors were stationed in Iraq than troops. You read about how war brings profit, raining fortune upon steel companies, food companies, rubber companies... the list goes on. You believe the government was responsible for September 11, a view many people consider radical. But you, you believe it’s the truth. People like to believe in what’s easiest to believe, you say. You’ve read more about the terrorist attacks than many fellow Americans.

And the Soldiers, the Marines, the Airmen, the young people like yourself who fought abroad? You felt when you came back, the country, the Veteran’s Administration, abandoned you. A friend of yours who was shot in the leg saw his disability benefits reduced. Other servicemen and servicewomen struggled to get care when suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder.

“These are people that their friends blew up in front of them,” you say. “They still have a lot of death and destruction (on their minds), and they’re just messed up.”

You are disgusted.

“The defense department recently came out with a memo saying all troops must remain apolitical about their views in Iraq, saying that you’re a soldier, you have no opinions, you don’t count. I think soldiers should have more of a voice, be able to speak out.”

So you started Nevada’s branch of Iraq Veterans Against the War.

—

Some of your memories of Iraq are hazy, as if obscured by bleached sheets of hot desert sand. Others are clear — crisp and sharp as the crack of gunfire splitting cold night air. There are some things you don’t want to talk about. For you, the war is over, now. You won’t be going back. But Iraq will stay with you, always — in your photographs, in your letters, in this story, your story.

the year he became a banker

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HENDERSON — History books will commemorate 2008 as the year America faced what some people are calling its greatest financial crisis since the Great Depression.

Stephen Christoffersen, 23, will remember it as the year he became a banker.

As such, he belongs to a curious breed of people — a generation of financiers entering their profession at a time when once-revered financial firms are meeting their ruin one by one, plummeting from mile-high pedestals back to earth.

Five years ago, when Christoffersen began college, investment banks such as Merrill Lynch and Lehman Brothers were the kings and envy of Wall Street, posting record profits and handing traders multi-million-dollar bonuses.

Fortunes have shifted with astonishing speed. Lehman, where Christoffersen applied this summer to work, declared bankruptcy in September. Merrill, where he interned from May to August, is being sold to Bank of America.

The crisis has so sobered some of UNLV’s 500 or so finance students that they’re wondering if they chose the right field.

But for Christoffersen and fellow stock market junkies, the most important aspects of Wall Street haven’t changed. The exhiliration of a good trade, the thrill of a gamble, the excitement of winning profits — all of that remains.

In the past few weeks, as other Americans watched their retirement accounts shrink, Christoffersen saw his grow by 45 percent.

“It’s an everchanging thing,” said Christoffersen, who graduated from UNLV in August and is training to be a financial advisor at a local firm. “It’s always exciting.”

“There’s always a bull market somewhere,” he added, quoting a Wall Street adage. “It’s challenging, it’s time consuming, but it has its rewards, and I’ve been able to feel what it’s like to get the rewards. You go out there, you spend hours and hours and hours, reading and reading and reading, and you make an educated decision and you get the reward.”


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The downfall of Wall Street’s titans holds lessons for young finance professionals.

Robert Chatfield, director of UNLV’s MBA programs, thinks newly minted bankers will, in general, adhere in the near-term to more conservative investment strategies, taking fewer risks. How long that caution will last is up for debate.

“Unfortunately,” Chatfield wrote in an e-mail, “many people have short memories and are all too willing to jump on the bandwagon as times change. Just look at how many companies invested in those risky bonds backed by subprime mortgages because they didn’t want to miss out on the high returns.”

But not everyone will be quick to forget the mistakes Wall Street made.

Of the mortgage trainwreck, Christoffersen said, “You get a good understanding of what not to do. If something’s too good to be true, it probably is.”

“It was fascinating for me learning about mortgage-backed securities from professors who knew it front and back, and having them almost predict what would be the ramifications of the subprime boom.”

At UNLV, his teachers explained how financial companies, eager to create and sell securities backed by mortgages, purchased mortgages en masse from lenders. That alleviated banks and brokers of financial responsibility for loans they made, including those given to aspiring homeowners who had bad credit or provided no proof of income.

“It opened the door for greed,” Christoffersen said.

“No one was assuming responsibility. Back in the olden days, the bank was assuming responsibility for the loan. What happens when the bank didn’t assume responsibility?”


*


Despite the turmoil ravaging Wall Street, Christoffersen is upbeat about his career prospects. As long as people have money, he explained, they’ll need people like him to help them manage it.

“It’s not something you can just learn overnight,” he said.

Christoffersen made his first stock trade at 17, investing in a golf club company using $500 he made cleaning golf carts at a course in Broken Arrow, Okla., outside Tulsa. He reeled in a 28 percent profit over two years and says he’s been “more or less addicted” to playing the stock market ever since.

As a college freshman he bought an $800 stake in an oil and natural gas pipeline company and more than doubled his money in under two months.

Even with markets jittery as they await a House vote on a bailout plan asking taxpayers to buy up to $700 billion of risky assets including mortgage-backed securities from financial companies, Christoffersen believes there are still winning bets to be made.

Many profitable businesses got pummeled recently as panicked investors fled stocks. It’s companies like these that have low debt and lots of cash that could be a good purchase as their stock prices bounce back, Christoffersen said.

Investing in firms such as Walmart and Proctor Gamble that sell staple, low-cost products could also be smart, he added: “It doesn’t matter if it’s World War VII. People are still going to have to buy toothpaste.”

“This is what I wanted to do,” Christoffersen said of banking. “For now, I know it’s long hours and I know it’s a lot of stress, but I love the challenge. ... Every day is different. It’s not all one thing. What was three weeks ago is not the same as today. It’s crazy.”

So despite the barrage of bad news slamming Wall Street in recent months, he’s not ready to abandon the industry he chose to make his own. He still dreams of one day managing hedge funds — “If,” he said, “they’re still around.”

Las Vegas II

Above all, Las Vegas is a place of natural beauty, a place that speaks of mankind’s limitations. Raucous as it is, this city is an outpost of civilization, set in a lonely valley against elegant mountains of bleached, red rock. Drive fifty miles in any direction and you will find yourself in the desert, surrounded by cacti and shrubs, by sand covered in lizards’ tracks. These busy creatures scurry about, living in their own world, doing just fine in a desert where men struggle to survive.

The sunrises and sunsets are stunning here, drowning the sky and world below in a symphony of color. You can see for miles. On days when you’re expecting rain, you can watch the storm clouds gather in the distance before they commence their long march toward the valley. In a city like Boston, like New York, like San Francisco, you are consumed by civilization, living in the shadows of skyscrapers that blot out the sun. There, you don’t know the storm is coming until the nasty, dark clouds are upon you, until you feel the cold droplets of the world’s tears sliding down your cheeks. The sounds you hear there are those of the city: customers haggling with merchants, friends bantering about a night out, businessmen discussing the latest news, the war, the price of oil. Outside, you hear car horns honking, the hum of a hundred vehicles idling at intersections where mechanical signals command them to stop.

Las Vegas, too, is a metropolis. But here, at least in certain spots, there is a sense of peace. Over an indomitable desert stretches a vast sky, pink and yellow at dawn and dusk, a heavy indigo blanket covering the world at the zenith of night. Close your eyes, and you can still hear nature — the baritone song of winds whirling through canyons and, on some days, an absolute silence. In this dream-like city, a lone narcissus in the desert, men shout and bellow, drunk on the extravagance of the civilization they have built. But in the end, the boundless desert swallows their every utterance, reducing their voices to a whisper.

Mozambique

For all the pessimists who think newspapers are on their way out, below is an end-of-the-year column my friend Charles wrote for our college newspaper at UCLA. Click here to read it on the Daily Bruin's Web site...

News is here forever, unlike me

By Charles Proctor
Monday, June 12, 2006

I have been told that this column should try to get at what my time at the Daily Bruin has meant to me. But this story I am about to tell doesn’t start in the Daily Bruin (though it does end there).

Instead, it starts in Vilanculos, Mozambique.

Vilanculos is a small fishing village on the Indian Ocean. It doesn’t have much in the way of what one might consider modern technology. But it makes up for that with white, sandy beaches and clear, blue oceans.

The main market is an open-air affair with stalls where you can bargain for things as diverse as laundry soap, fresh bananas and bottles of gin. Local kids play soccer on the beach using impromptu goals and hunt crabs burrowed in the wet sand.

Sadly, when I had the luck of visiting there a year ago, I didn’t spend all my time hunting crabs. Being the journalism geek I am, I instead went hunting for the local daily. I was curious to know what it looked like. Was it in color? A tabloid? Broadsheet?

Try billboard.

In the middle of the village, on a wooden board beneath a small awning, someone had pinned sheets of white paper with hand-scrawled headings for international, national, local, sports and lifestyle news.

Beneath each headline, in meticulous, careful handwriting, was the news. I couldn’t read much of it because it was in Portuguese, but I do remember seeing Colin Powell’s name somewhere on there (yes, America, we can make the front page even in tiny Vilanculos).

The Vilanculos press was an amusing novelty at the time. But it comes back to me pretty poignantly now, perhaps in light of more recent events.

I’ve had all sorts of people tell me this is a trying time for journalism, newspapers in particular. The past year or so, I am told, has been rough.

Ad revenue is falling, journalists are getting fired left and right, and your average Joe Six-Pack (or Joe Bruin) barely cares to read the TV listings anymore, let alone a newspaper. It’s the newsprint apocalypse.

I’ve heard it and seen it. But I don’t buy into it.

I admit I never met the resident journalist in Vilanculos who handwrote out copy and pinned it to the board with thumbtacks.

But to me, it spoke to the pure and simple reason why newspapers are still important. It spoke to the unflinching belief that the news has to get out, that the people have to know.

To me, it spoke to the deep-seated desire to simply tell stories.

It’s a desire I’ve heard echoed in scores of student journalists every day in The Bruin’s newsroom. My best days at The Bruin have been when I picked up the day’s newspaper, read it and learned something.

I learned something because every Bruin staffer who worked on that issue, from the reporters to the layout designers, wanted to tell a story and tell it true. To me – to the Daily Bruin – there is no higher purpose than that.

I am sad that I am leaving UCLA, and I am sad I am leaving The Bruin.

But it comforts me to know that there are two truths The Bruin has taught me, two truths that hold unwavering, no matter where I might end up traveling:

There will always be stories in this world to tell. And the world will always need journalists to tell them.

And we’ll do it, too. Even if we have to use pens and pushpins.

Proctor starts at the Los Angeles Times in October, and even if he isn’t working in newspapers his entire life, he still plans to be reading them.

New Orleans, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Wellesley and Prague

This piece dates to late October...

People collect things. This happens all over the world for different reasons. Children collect bottlecaps, rocks, erasers, stickers and baseball cards just for the hell of it. A woman at UCLA used to crisscross the school grounds collecting plastic bottles and soda cans. In many places people collect scrap metal, combing through trash heaps and carrying off everything of value. In Madrid, on weekends, collectors flock to Plaza Mayor to inspect coins that dozens of vendors peddle outdoors. In one corner of the square a group of old men would gather, standing and trading stamps they collected.

I collect cups. I’m not sure when it started. But over the years, I’ve accumulated quite a number, of varied shapes and sizes. Mugs. Wine glasses. Martini glasses. Shot glasses. They come from bars and restaurants all over America. I don’t condone stealing, but cup-snatching is a favored habit. My collection is a tribute, for the most part, to the good times, to crowded L.A. college bars and cozy taverns like McGovern’s, a friendly establishment on a dark street in a city better known for crime. Each cup has a story. Below, a sampling from a larger collection.


*


It was 2004, the year before Katrina.

Andy and I were on our way to Newark, NJ from California. We started in Los Angeles and took Interstate 10 all the way East, passing through Phoenix, rolling through Tucson, stopping for lunch in El Paso on the Mexican border. We sped through the desert, staring in wonder out the window at small communities an hour from the nearest gas station.

Sand gave way to water and greenery, and we found ourselves in Louisiana, land of alligator appetizers. We stayed at a Motel 6 in Slidell one night and visited New Orleans the morning after.

The mug is from a cafe in the French quarter, a serene place not at all indicative of the endless party the South’s most raucous city advertises itself to be. The quiet beneath the town’s loud exterior was what impressed me most about New Orleans – a used bookstore with Italo Calvino and Tim O’Brien calling from the shelves; brick row homes and stone-paved streets; a view of the Mississippi. Simple stuff.

It’s always the little things I remember. Things like the sign at the aquarium that told us the story of Jonah and the shark, reminding us we were no longer in California: “According to tradition,” it read, “the great fish which swallowed Jonah was a whale. However, evidence suggests that the fish was probably a shark! Sharks have the ability to eject large objects from their stomachs, something whales are not able to do.”


*


We went to the dining hall three times a day, sometimes more. At around 6 p.m., wearing sweatshirts and flip flops, we’d drag ourselves out of our cramped three-person dorm rooms and head downstairs.

The cashier at the dining hall’s front entrance would swipe our Bruin cards, OKing our passage into a world of glaring lights, bad music and endless social opportunities.

The all-you-can-eat selection was extensive. Custom-made omelettes – egg-whites only? Ham? Cheese? – were a morning treat. Dinner involved cuisines from around the world, though strangely the Italian pasta and Chinese beef somehow tasted the same. Each night we chose between soups and salads, hamburgers and pizza, brownies and cakes. We’d eat frozen yogurt out of a dish like the ones here. At the end of the meal, Rachel would make us a milkshake-esque drink that was so good she called it the “screaming orgasm”. The secret ingredient, we found out later, was vanilla half-and-half.

We went to the dining hall to eat. Inevitably, we’d stay for hours. Some days we thought we’d never leave. The usual crowd was the four of us – Amanda, Armenian, from Florida, who loved her blue stickshift Honda and her fat orange cat; Dallas, Jewish, from San Francisco, who loved to dance; Sofia from the valley, who had a Mexican passport, dated a boy in Germany and lived in Brazil for a year; and me (I’m Chinese).

At dinner we’d ogle The Fairy, a water polo player who was somehow sexy despite or because of his head of perfect, long blonde hair. We’d hear about parties at the tree house or the horse shoe, receive visits from Leslie, on the track team, who never stopped smiling. Sometimes Rachel would join us after a run around the campus’ perimeter.

As stupid as it sounds, the hours during which we languished in the dining hall were some of the best of our college lives. There, away from our reading and our classes, we were completely relaxed. Over bottomless cups of English breakfast tea, we discussed and debated whatever we wanted. We shared with one another the details of our lives, and of all places, it was perhaps here that we learned the most about different cultures and upbringings.


*




One night a few weeks ago, I took this cup from a suite friends were renting at the MGM Grand. We spent the early part of the evening chatting and drinking, smoking on the porch. Though I didn’t stay long, I heard later that the weekend had been complete with a party bus and a blow-up dall named Caesar.

More than anything, though, that weekend was the night everyone got to see Bridget again. In some ways it was a strange goodbye party, though no one knew at the time.

Bridget had been a photo editor at our old college paper. I didn’t know her well. But the trip to Vegas was the first time in a while many of her close friends had seen her. Since graduation a few years before, she had moved to Australia after marrying a member of a band from there.

Last week, Bridget and her husband died in a car wreck in Ohio. Newsday, the Sacramento Bee and other papers ran staff obituaries. But the most poignant stories were the ones friends posted online at a site dedicated to remembering her. Old colleagues and buddies, many of whom had not seen her for years, shared memories of Bridget living out of her truck and on couches during college; of Bridget traveling to Nicaragua to shoot photographs for a story on fair trade coffee; of Bridget’s optimism and pessimism, her ambition and simplicity, her love of life and her passion for people.

I don't take well to public mourning. But I couldn’t help but read the stories about this 25-year-old who seemed to have influenced the lives of so many of my friends. Most of the people I worked with in college graduated, going their separate ways. Many are journalists. Some work in finance or consulting. Others have gone to law school. Yet years after they left UCLA to pursue their varied dreams, here they all were, together again, on a web site remembering Bridget.


*


I go back to Boston to see my dad at least once a year. Typically I stay in a hostel off Boylston Street about halfway between Fenway Park and the Prudential Center. Mornings I’ll buy a newspaper and stroll through the commons and the garden, looking at the swan boats that seemed so much grander when I was small. I take the T out to Harvard and sit atop the library stairs, in the same spot where Anouk sang the German national anthem to me when we were in high school.

A few years ago, on one such trip, I visited Wellesley, my first hometown. I hadn’t been back in a long time. I took a shuttle from MIT over to the college where my cousin Nicole was studying.

If I saw the campus when I was a kid, I don’t remember it. The 19th century architecture put UCLA’s most beautiful buildings to shame. Though the residence halls were modern, their living rooms, adorned with heavy curtains and portraits of dignified women, seemed to belong to some past age. Adjacent to the common area was the cafeteria, where you could get hot chocolate in these cups all day long.

Beneath the calm and charm, though, Wellesley had a rowdy side. The college is home to naked parties boys from surrounding schools attend. Sex was a much-discussed subject.

The Wellesley of my childhood looked different at 20. When Nicole was in class one day I walked downtown to have a look around. My umbrella couldn’t keep me dry, much less warm, in the heavy sleet. Shivering as I emerged from the thickly foliaged school grounds and onto a busy road, I pondered the world before me. New England’s houses sit on sprawling lawns, lush and green, as if they had just fallen out of the sky and landed in a random fashion on plots of land. In a few months, I knew, the leaves would begin to turn, changing the tenor of the world. Winter would sprinkle snow onto bare branches. Spring, when it came again, would coax green from the earth. In summer the air would thicken, the sky turning black before the thunder boomed.

Travelers dream of California. Los Angeles and San Diego, with their palm trees, sun and beaches, seem to hold some strange promise. These coastal cities on the Pacific ring with optimism and hope, or so people have told me. But after spending 10 years of my life on the West coast, I still, for inexplicable reasons, yearn to return East. Maybe my internal clock is set to the seasons, which we don’t have here out West. The cities of my childhood have changed and I have too. But standing on the sidewalk in my old hometown, freezing on that miserable day a few years ago, I felt at home, at peace.


*


This last cup was a gift from my dad. One of a collection of six crystal wine glasses from Prague, it sat in the closet at my mom’s house for a couple years before I claimed it for my collection.

My father is a nuclear physicist, but above all, he is a businessman. When he visited my sister and me when we were younger, he would always come bearing gifts from his travels – hand-painted piggy banks, mini wooden clogs from Sweden, a book on Holland’s tulips. Little crystal animals from Prague were one of his favorite items. As we grew older, he would present us with candy dishes, champagne flutes and other crystal we could use around the house.

I’ve lived in 14 cities, seven in the last five years. These little trinkets my dad carried home from overseas sparked my curiosity about cultures and people around the world.

I spent several days in Prague in 2005. That was the only trip outside of Spain that I took while studying in Madrid. Before leaving for the Czech Republic, I bought a book in Spanish that taught basic phrases in Czech. The thought of not knowing the language made me nervous, so I learned the alphabet so I could at least try to pronounce things.

From the airport, the bus ran to the metro station: Dejvická. Náměstí Republiky was the stop for the hostel at which I was staying.

The days in Prague flew by. I went with a group of rowdy, outgoing boys. We crossed bridges spanning the river, got lost while wandering aimlessly and downed warm drinks at Christmas markets. We admired the architecture in a city home to one of Europe’s oldest universities. We stopped to chat with a Spanish tour guide. We tried absinthe. We considered history, thought about 1968 and 1989, about the Prague Spring and Velvet Revolution.

And though souvenirs don’t interest me, I paused before the windows of shops filled with crystal, wondering if my father had stood here years before.