Fifteen Minutes: Nostalgia Issue

EDITOR’S NOTE F M C HA I R S Io Y. Gilman ’25 Amber H. Levis ’25 E D I T O R S - AT- L A R G E Michal Goldstein ’25 Kaitlyn Tsai ’25 A S S O C I AT E E D I T O R S Maya M. F. Wilson ’24 Mila G. Barry ’25 Hewson Duffy ’25 Sammy Duggasani ’25 Jade Lozada ’25 Benjy Wall-Feng ’25 Graham R. Weber ’25 Jem K. Williams ’25 Dina R. Zeldin ’25 WRITERS Molly E. Egan ’26, Yasmeen A. Khan ’26, Sazi T. Bongwe ’26, Miles J. Herszenhorn ’25, Adelaide E. Parker ’26, Andy Z. Wang ’23-’24, Tamar Sarig ’23, Michal Goldstein ’25, Kaitlyn Tsai ’25, Benjy Wall-Feng ’25 G L O S S Y L AYO U T Sophia Salamanca ’25 Sophia C. Scott ’25 Max H. Schermer ’24 Sami E. Turner ’25 F M M U LT I M E D I A Julian J. Giordino ’25 Joey Huang ’24 Marina Qu ’25 GLOSSY PHOTOGRAPHERS Joey Huang ’24, Alina Esanu ’24 DESIGNERS Michael Hu ’24, Davina Komaravalli ’26, Sami E. Turner ’25 PRESIDENT Cara J. Chang ’24 A S S O C I AT E M A N A G I N G E D I T O R Meimei Xu ’24 M A NAG I N G E DI TOR Brandon L. Kingdollar ’24

Dear Reader, As we hurtle toward the end of the school year, days and weeks start to blur together. Each day becomes animated by simply completing the next assignment, studying for the next test, or making the next deadline. All hope rests on summer break, which is just around the corner. But for this issue, instead of looking forward, our writers are taking a moment to look back.

This year, our themed issue centers around nostalgia, a longing for the past. The stories untangle complicated legacies, make sense of old decisions, and uncover histories and stories that are still relevant to us now.

The Crimson celebrates its 150th birthday this year. In honor of this anniversary, MJH, AEP, and AZW’s scrutiny tells a history of The Crimson through stories shared by nine former Crimson editors. These alumni wrote for The Crimson from the 1950s to the aughts, and they witnessed and reported on a variety of historical events, from apartheid South Africa to the Vietnam War (did you know that Daniel Ellsberg almost printed the Pentagon Papers using The Crimson’s own printing press?). But ultimately, what our alumni spent most of their time reminiscing on wasn’t the reporting — it was the people.

MEE writes about Elsa Dorfman, a Cambridge resident and Mather tutor whose photos captured Beatnik America, or rather, Beatnik Cambridge, and the Harvard students she befriended. YAK looks back on her childhood obsession with Rookie Magazine, reflecting on how the adolescence its content promised was never quite realized — but perhaps, that is part of its appeal. STB writes about his connection, or lack thereof, to his hometown of Johannesburg.

TS visits Cambridge’s Old Burying Ground to report on efforts to preserve and uncover new histories in the historic graveyard. MG writes a letter to her sophomore year, committing a hard, but full, year to the page. KT writes about trying and failing (and, eventually, succeeding) in reaccessing the joy from her childhood.

During the chaos of the semester, it is hard to create the distance necessary to start feeling nostalgic. But as summer begins, perspective will come. We find ourselves already looking back at a semester that has gone by so fast, awed by the amazing work so many people put into this magazine, and treasuring the beauty of the process.

Sincerely, IYG & AHL

Fifteen Minutes 03 Elsa Dorfman: Harvard Square’s Attendant of Instants

Molly E. Egan

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Teenage Dream Yasmeen A. Khan

09 Memories of a City I’ve Never Known

Sazi T. Bongwe

11 Living Among the Dead in the Old Burying Ground

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150 Years, 9 Lives: Stories From The Harvard Crimson Miles J. Herszenhorn, Adelaide E. Parker, and Andy Z. Wang

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Tamar Sarig

Dear Sophomore Year Michal Goldstein

Paraphernalia of Love

Kaitlyn Tsai

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Crossword: In My Tradwife Era Benjy Wall-Feng

Elsa Dorfman, Harvard Square’s Attendant of Instants Follow the life and legacy of photographer Elsa Dorfman, longtime Cambridge resident and former Mather House adviser. Understanding Dorfman means understanding both the brevity and the universality of the moments she captures.

Molly E. Egan

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H

anging in Harvard’s Office of the President is a grayscale image titled “The Music Lesson,” capturing the bald head of an attentive Allen Ginsberg.

He’s looking down at Bob Dylan’s left hand as it shapes a D chord on his fretboard, casually holding a cigarette in his other hand.

The two Beatniks, known for their surrealistic lamentations of 1950s America, certainly seem a bit out of place in a Harvard administrative office. It seems that the photograph’s only connection to Harvard is that the photographer is none other than former Mather House tutor and longtime Cambridge resident Elsa S. Dorfman.

Dorfman’s collection is dispersed across the Harvard Art Museums, the Museum of Fine

Photo by Elsa Dorfman, Courtesy of Elsa Dorfman Archive, MIT Museum Arts, and the walls of her family home near Mather House. Her prints capture fleeting moments: friends intellectualizing,

Self-portrait by the artist. Photo by Elsa Dorfman, Courtesy of Elsa Dorfman Archive, MIT Museum

Cambridge haunts which have since disappeared, a self-portrait of the artist as she was aging.

Understanding Dorfman means understanding both the brevity and the universality of these moments.

A Boston native, Dorfman spent a year after graduating college as a secretary at Grove Press, an alternative publishing house in New York. There, she met and arranged readings for radical poets like Allen Ginsberg, Susan Sontag ’57, and Robert Lowell, artistic contemporaries who would remain her lifelong friends. Afterward, she moved back to Boston for a brief stint as an elementary school teacher, during which she shocked the “very straight principal” by reading Beat poetry to her fifthgrade students.

It was then that Dorfman began shooting film for a company developing teaching materials.

She immediately recognized the potential of photography; Dorfman reached out to her poet friends from Grove Press to be 4

her first subjects. She painted the walls of her apartment black to create a darkroom and sold her photographs for $2.50 out of a grocery cart next to the Harvard Square MBTA stop.

In Cambridge, she met her future husband, civil rights litigator Harvey A. Silverglate. As Silverglate remembers it, “It took about 10 minutes before we fell in love with each other.” They were a devoted couple.

Today, each room of their family residence is covered wallto-wall in a gallery of original prints, handwritten notes, and the art of friends and artists who the couple gave lodging to.

“Relationships must have seasons and rhythms; constancy isn’t necessarily the key,” Dorfman writes in her 1974 photojournal “Elsa’s Housebook.”

“By taking pictures in my house, I get a sense of how things change

Photo by Elsa Dorfman, Courtesy of Elsa Dorfman Archive, MIT Museum

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every day.”

On any given weekend, one could find leading attorneys and illustrious poets sharing lunch in the Dorfmans’ kitchen. Charlie V. Olchowski ’73, a student at the time who had helped build the Mather House darkroom Dorfman worked in, remembers her unique ability to bring out the creativity in everyone around her.

“Everybody had a great talent or a creative spirit,” Olchowski says. “They would feed off of each other, they would reinforce each other, and they would recharge the batteries of that creativity by being around each other.”

Around 1980, Dorfman acquired one of the six large-scale Polaroid Land 20x24 cameras.

About 200 pounds in weight and with a lens as big as a face, the camera produced prints that were two feet tall. Dorfman’s style was soon characterized by these massive, unique portraits.

In one photo, Allen Ginsberg stands naked in her studio. In the next, with the same honesty and vulnerability, tired parents hold a crying baby. Dorfman could make her subjects into “flesh and blood,” Olchowski says.

When she was director of the Mather darkroom, Dorfman took portraits of the students.

Scribbled in ink beneath five students clutching toy trucks and stuffed animals are the names of accomplished students and aspiring businesspeople, attorneys, writers, and doctors.

Though, in their portrait, they are how Dorfman saw them: youthful, unsure, and a bit angsty.

Heather B. Long ’03, who posed in one of these portraits, remembers the way Dorfman urged them not to take themselves too seriously.

Photo by Elsa Dorfman, Courtesy of Elsa Dorfman Archive, MIT Museum “It’s funny, because at the time Dorfman was deeply involved we thought, ‘Oh, we’re gonna look in the Mather community, offering like babies, even though we’re so non-credit photography seminars grown up.’ But she was probably and frequently meeting up with looking at us, like, ‘They think students in the dining hall to talk. they’re so big. This is what they Her reputation as a warm and look like to me.’” goofy person preceded her work

as a photographer. “Her place in Mather House was beyond just photography.

She made you think about community, and that there’s a world out there with a lot of opportunity,” Olchowski says.

Dorfman died in May 2020 from kidney failure, brought on, perhaps, by too many hours spent working with darkroom chemicals, Silverglate says.

“Elsa did not work for history,” Silverglate says.

“Her goal was to give some measure of joy to her subjects.”

The 20x24 Polaroid film distinct to Dorfman’s style is no longer massproduced; her work will never be replicated. But it lives on through portraits hung in homes around the world, immortalized in postcards, museums, and biographies.

Harvard Square, too, has changed. In 2017, Dorfman reflected on the Square’s gentrification in “Elsa’s Housebook”: “Think endless banks.

Pizzerias. Tourist buses.

Eyebrow salons.”

Still, Dorfman held onto the camera’s ability to create some permanence to all that’s fleeting around us.

“I have always had the feeling that everything is going to last forever: nothing is ever going to change,” she wrote.

“We’ll never get any older and we’re always going to be friends.

I can take the picture today or tomorrow or in a week. It will be there.”

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Teenage Dream Yasmeen A. Khan

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girl is sitting in an open field.

She’s wearing red sneakers and a red varsity jacket over a t-shirt that says “SENIORS” in blocky blue letters.

She looks straight at the camera lens, her blonde hair windswept across her face. Green is all around her — the blades of grass like brushstrokes.

I am looking at this

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Graphic by Michael Hu photograph from my family’s desktop computer. I am 11 or 12 years old. I am probably wearing a training bra from Target and a shirt that says something like “GIRLS ROCK!” The girl on my computer screen is an unnamed high schooler, only a few years older than I am, but I idolize her as if she were a supermodel on the cover of Vogue.

I found this photo on the

website of Rookie Magazine, an online publication geared towards teenage girls. Rookie Magazine was founded in 2011

by Tavi Gevinson, a teenage blogger and fashion critic. Unlike other magazines I encountered as a preteen, Rookie prioritized creativity over consumption. Most of its content was produced by other teenagers, and its archive consisted of countless articles

teaching teen girls how to make collages, publish zines, or write poetry.

Rookie, like many other magazines, aestheticized female adolescence. After the sixth grade, I came home and clicked through film photographs of girls in flower crowns and vintage clothing. I scrolled through fashion columns advising me on how to style myself, after Lux Lisbon from “The Virgin Suicides,” Suzy Bishop from “Moonrise Kingdom,” or Audrey Horne from “Twin Peaks.” I read sprawling interviews between Gevinson and her friend group of teen girl celebrities. I bookmarked personal essays about first-time sex and sneaking out.

When I was a preteen, Rookie fueled the daydreams that I had about my coming teenage

years. I imagined fun parties, memorable misadventures, my picture-worthy prom dress. Not something perfect, but something precious that I could only access in the years between 12 and 20.

I

***

f I internalized anything from Rookie Magazine, it was the impulse to create. I spent all of high school writing short stories about things that had never happened to me: drunken kisses, hookups and heartbreaks, thin cigarettes perched between shaking fingers. Fiction was the facade I built to conceal my actual teenage experiences, which consisted mostly of studying and listening to angsty songs on loop. Adults warned me about treating my teenage years like a transitory period. But I wanted to graduate the day I started high school, and I spent the next four years ensuring that I could go to college somewhere far away from my hometown.

I don’t have a direct way to explain why I wanted to escape the place I was from. I grew up in a quaint, quiet suburb outside of Houston, Texas.

When I describe that place to my friends in college, the word I use most often is hostile. I remember friends confessing that their parents were strong proponents of

I didn’t pursue memorable teenage years because I was motivated to move away from the place that raised me.

replacement theory, a far-right conspiracy that argues that racial minorities maliciously intend to displace the white population. I remember the xenophobic rants on the neighborhood Facebook page, the MAGA rally at the mall during the 2020 election, the racially coded insults that I learned to take with a blank smile.

I didn’t pursue memorable teenage years because I was motivated to move away from the place that raised me. In high school, almost every action I took was an investment in my future, a step on the way out of adolescence.

I never bought my picture-worthy prom dress because I skipped the dance and spent the weekend at Harvard instead.

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***

ven now at 19, teetering at the edge of adolescence, I’m not sure if I regret that mindset. I try to look back on my own teenage years through a neutral lens: it happened, it can’t be changed. At the same time, I find myself peering into the next dizzying decade of my life. I graduated from training bras many years ago, but I still feel like the preteen at the desktop computer, trying to catch a glimpse of the years ahead of her.

Even though the publication folded in 2018, I’ve recently found myself returning to the film photo albums of Rookie Magazine. The girls in cheer skirts and scrunchies are crystallized in the hallways of their high schools: figures from a beautiful memory, a memory that isn’t mine.

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Sazi T. Bongwe Design by Davina Komaravalli

“S

o, how’s London?” I asked her.

It was late; the lights were off and the room was dark, save for an apricot orange lamp that hung over the center of the dinner table. Her cat lay curled up, facing away, on the armchair against the wall. Above and to the left of the chair, we looked into our reflections in the glass door and watched as the scene we spoke the lines of unfolded — like a screenplay that had already been written: FADE IN The scene begins at the dinner table. It is Dec. 17, 2022.

Parkview, Johannesburg, South Africa. Four friends, after some time away, are back together again. One was in Cambridge, Massachusetts; one was in London; another in Berlin (and God knows where else); and one had stayed in Johannesburg.

One of two things might be true: (1) each of them struggles to reconcile themselves to the improbability of their all being in one place at the same time again, or (2) they had each blown so much air into the balloon of their anticipation that it teetered frighteningly on the brink of bursting. Or both. An uneasy silence snuggles into the space of all the words they don’t say.

There is no more than a bottle of wine, three glasses, and a ceramic bowl filled with cigarette butts on the table. It is a table better fit for the Last Supper, really; they sit with too much distance from one another. The parents of the home offer tea, or dinner, or anything at all, but they decline. Just the wine is alright.

“I really love London,” she replied. “It’s strange, I guess I can only understand the cities I experience through Joburg and what growing up here was like. We grew up always thinking about where we were, and more so where we weren’t. How our lives looked so differently – out the backseat windows of our Range Rovers — to the rest of the country’s.”

She spoke around the facts. She always did. We always did.

But I knew exactly what she meant. Where we were was the gated avenues and green-grassed gardens of Johannesburg’s northern suburbs; where we weren’t was South Africa. We took the flag of our rainbow nation and waived it everywhere we went. We knew, though, that it was an illusion. We spoke South Africa’s name and left the shame behind.

“In London, though, everywhere feels like I can go there; I walk around and each place feels like one I can enter. I have

Memories of a City I’ve Never Known a sense that the city’s mine, and that it’s everyone else’s too.”

I wasn’t quite sure what to say next. I thought for some time, and before arranging the words in my head I asked, “Do you think you’d change the way we grew up?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think we can know. Maybe I’d change the things that made it so that such different lives were even possible in the first place. You know, grocery shopping on Monday, invent another world on Tuesday. It’s been interesting being away, but it’s so good being home. And I’d rather have good than interesting. This city means a lot to me. I know it does to you too.”

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***

he Johannesburg I know is not the one my parents know. Ever since the city was young — ever since it saw gold — Johannesburg has had big ambitions. So it lured the young and ambitious, my parents among them. They and their generation flocked to see, from the peak of Hillbrow Tower, all of Africa; they came to tell the triumphant tale of how Johannesburg became the New York of Africa; they came to rub shoulders with the obscenely rich in the suburb of Sandton, which greets you with a sign: ‘THE RICHEST SQUARE MILE IN AFRICA.’ As much as the city may dream of American excess, it is England that shaped this place. Peer into an aerial photograph of Johannesburg and something will strike you as out of place.

Not quite a sore thumb but something along those lines. A Tudor rose in the weeds perhaps. Nudged between the high rises and the dingy apartment

buildings are the Victorian buildings and green cricket fields of the school I went to for most of my life.

A new city with an old past, they said at Johannesburg’s unveiling. But part of the old endures. One could guess by its facade that my school was founded in 1898, and perhaps extrapolate that it is an all-boys Anglican day and boarding private school. Right next to it is the one my friend now in London went to, the all-girls equivalent founded in 1903.

It wasn’t unfamiliar for us to hear our schools described as ‘Little England on the Veld.’

We grew up, for the most part, unbothered and undisturbed by the urban decay that the electric fences and private security-guarded gates made sure to keep away from us. When we left our little England, we traveled in hired buses, joining the tourists who were told not to leave without seeing “the real South Africa.” We were told always to keep our belongings out of sight and make a mental note of who was behind and in front of us.

And so whenever I was asked in my first semester at Harvard to describe what Johannesburg was like, the answer I knew to be true but was always too proud to say was that I didn’t really know. I’d never known. Places I recommended were places I’d never been. The photos I have look like the negatives of some 18th-century Victorian catalog. There I am, smiling in my khaki shorts and shirt and knee-high socks, the crest on my blazer pocket bearing Latin inscriptions. There I am again, three minutes before the grand bell tower in the back chimes three times to mark the passage of another quarter hour.

The sun set on that illusion in July 2021. It was the July Unrest. All we knew then was that the myth of a rainbow nation existing in harmony cracked like the store windows in the streets. Shops were looted, citizens killed by the hundreds, and the truths of our childhoods turned to fantasy.

We could always say that we lived in the world’s most unequal country, but there was never any indication that that might change. At school, we would scream “Fuck the middle class,” and then drive home in our MercedesBenzses to our two-story houses. We couldn’t anymore though, at least not without a degree of shame. In history class, Marx told us that society’s classes are defined always in opposition to one another. We couldn’t read that without seeing the page as a mirror, without seeing our reflections in his bourgeoisie. So, when theory turned to practice and Johannesburg went up in smoke, we turned away.

Over time, the dissonance between my city and me rang in my ears like one of those high-frequency whistles.

I decided in my last year of high school that whatever came next, I wanted

nothing to do with Johannesburg. Whether it was Cape Town or Cambridge, it would be better, freer. I wanted roads I didn’t know — maybe it was postcode envy. We thought too much in Johannesburg, about Johannesburg.

I wanted quiet.

“A

***

nd how’s Cambridge?” she asked back, equal parts courtesy and intrigue.

“Cambridge is okay.”

“Just okay?”

“Well, I guess it’s sweet.”

“You don’t hear cities being called sweet.”

I’d meant the people were sweet. I’d meant it as a pleasantry. She’s always had a way of seeing through those.

“There’s this guy, John Guare. He wrote a play called ‘Six Degrees of Separation.’ Someone asked the kid in it, ‘How’s Harvard?’ The kid replies, ‘Well, fine. It’s just there.

Everyone’s in a constant state of luxurious despair and constant discovery and paralysis.’ I guess that.”

“But that’s Harvard, not Cambridge.”

“Yeah, and I think that’s it. My world had a radius of 2 kilometers. I guess it’s the same thing we’ve always been talking about.”

She let out a sigh, less of pity than of a kind of understanding.

“It’s like the King Krule line,” I said with a smile, waiting to see if she’d take what I was about to say seriously. “I don’t deserve history repeating itself.”

“Ahh, of course.”

She refilled her wine glass. We both wore smirks on our faces as a gentle silence hung.

She looked back at me. “And the second question?”

“What second question?”

“Would you change the way we grew up?”

“I mean, you know I’m gonna say what you said, so that’s a little unfair. But, um … I don’t know. I guess we’re here now. I feel like a little kid, don’t you?” Driving home with my mom yesterday from the airport, I asked her if the city had always been this green. I’ve been telling my friends from school that Joburg has better weather than anywhere in the world, that there are no prettier beaches than Cape Town’s. All of a sudden I speak in these hyperbolic terms about everything.

“All the superlatives,” she said, again through a smirk.

“Haha, yeah. I’d say it’s just the novelty, but we’ve been here for 19 years. On the other hand, there really is an entire other city to see. It’s all there.”

“Well, we better see some of it.”

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Living Among the Dead in the Old Burying Ground Tamar Sarig Photos by Alina Esanu

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n a cold and cloudless Sunday afternoon, in the spacious sanctuary of the First Parish Unitarian Universalist Church, the Reverend Robert M. Hardies is giving the Easter sermon. Through the windows, distracted parishioners can look out onto the Old Burying Ground, where volunteers are busy scattering rainbow plastic eggs for the annual Easter egg hunt. The theme of this year’s sermon is “Finding the Living Among the Dead.”

Hardies asks his congregation to look for “hope amidst despair, beauty amidst brokenness” — in other words, to look for life where it seems like there is none.

“This is the work of resurrection,” he says. He acknowledges the cemetery egg hunt is a little on the nose, and a chorus of laughs rises from the pews.

The Old Burying Ground, the oldest surviving graveyard in Cambridge, is a fixture of Harvard Square, yet mundane in its connection to the rest of the Cambridge landscape — turn right at the cemetery and you’ll find a Dunkin’, cross the street to your left and you’ll be in the Yard. On the daily walk to and from class, most Quad residents pass by the graveyard without a second glance. In the winter, when snow blankets the ground, old headstones stick through it like rows of crooked teeth. In the early days of summer, students cut through it or sit cross-legged on raised tombs, catching up on emails and texts.

The Old Burying Ground was established by the 11

Puritans sometime around 1635, just before the founding of Harvard College. The town’s first burying ground was abandoned after wolves repeatedly dug up remains; no trace of it has ever been found.

The cemetery saw burials for almost two centuries, the resting place of every man, woman, and child who died in Cambridge — from Harvard administrators to the people they enslaved, from unnamed babies too young to be baptized to visitors buried in the “stranger’s lot.”

Over the past two decades, efforts to maintain the cemetery have drawn together a wide swath of Cambridge residents, historians, scholars, and preservationists. But their attempts to preserve the Old Burying Ground’s historical and aesthetic legacy have given rise to an entirely new set of questions: Who gets memorialized after death, and why? What makes us devote money and manpower to the upkeep of a graveyard so old that it has faded from any lingering descendants’ memories? And what does that mean for us now?

Since 1974, Charles M. Sullivan has served as the executive director of the Cambridge Historical Commission — and, by extension, as steward of the Old Burying Ground. Under his tenure, the City of Cambridge has worked to end the cycle of upkeep and neglect which, according to Sullivan, characterizes the history of the graveyard. In 2002, Sullivan hired Fannin-Lehner Preservation Consultants to assess the condition of the burying ground and embark on

an ongoing restoration project.

For Minxie Jensvold Fannin and James C. Fannin, the husband-and-wife pair at the head of Fannin-Lehner, the Old Burying Ground was merely the latest chapter in a decades-long career of cemetery preservation.

When Minxie Fannin, a trained architectural historian, first became interested in graveyards in the 1980s, the Boston area was littered with historic cemeteries that had largely fallen into disrepair because the cemetery trustees “had no idea how to care for them,” she says.

Caring for a cemetery this old is no simple task. The gravestones are battered by weather and pushed up by frost, cracked by falling tree branches, and sometimes damaged by vandals or clumsy tourists.

“Although they really are artistic objects and historical objects of great value, they sit out in the elements all the time,” Minxie says. Preserving the stones is like tending to an outdoor museum, one whose climate and surroundings are constantly in flux. The Fannins’ work is hard physical labor —

cleaning headstones so that their inscriptions and drawings remain legible, mending broken stones with pins and epoxy, excavating and resetting tilted markers, and keeping meticulous written records of their repairs.

But the pair sees a higher purpose in their work. The tombstones are remnants of Puritan-era craftsmanship that the Fannins take pride in preserving.

Many of them are painstakingly carved with images of the “death’s head” — a foreboding, winged skull, etched alongside phrases like “memento mori” (remember you must die) and “fugit hora” (the hour flies). And, beyond that, the stones represent something more intangible: the storied history of Cambridge and its famous founders.

“The stones carry a history of the town, which is still evident,” Minxie Fannin says. “Well-known families, you see their names on street signs.”

“In a way, we’re helping to preserve the history of these towns,” James Fannin says.

For Jason A. Ur, an archaeologist in the Anthropology Department, the task of preserving local history goes further than headstones — in fact, it goes beneath the surface, meters under the packed earth of the Old Burying Ground.

There, Ur and his colleagues believe, lies a second class of Cantabrigians, unrecognized on street signs or Harvard buildings.

Ur wants to find them.

In the back corner

“The stones carry a history of the town, which is still evident,” Minxie Fannin says.

of the cemetery, farthest away from Harvard Square, lie the graves of three Black residents of the cemetery: a freed slave, Susan F. Lenox, and two enslaved women, Cicely and Jane, both of whom died young and were buried far from their enslavers’ families.

Two freedmen, Cato Stedman and Neptune Frost, are also buried in the Old Burying Ground, though their graves are unmarked.

According to Ur, there must have been far more than these enslaved people in colonial Cambridge who would have likely been interred in the Old Burying Ground as well.

“Probably there’s a lot of people buried here that were not memorialized,” he says. “Or they were memorialized in a very different way, not with a fancy carved headstone by the Lampson family in Charlestown.”

Alongside bioarchaeologist Aja M. Lans and a team of researchers, Ur has launched a spatial analysis project to map out the seemingly barren remote reaches of the cemetery. Using radio waves, which bounce back off hidden underground objects, he predicts the team will discover the unmarked graves of Cambridge’s uncommemorated dead: enslaved people, most likely, but maybe also Native Americans and others marginalized by the town’s propertied, white community.

For our interview, Ur asks to meet me in the burying ground. Although he does his fieldwork in the Middle East, Ur became especially fascinated by the burying ground during the claustrophobic early days of the Covid-19 pandemic. After coming here for 17 years, he knows the graveyard like the back of his hand. Muscle memory guides him

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between familiar stones, whose carvers he often knows by name. He tells me the best time to visit is around 3 p.m., when the raking light on the headstones is “gorgeous.”

He isn’t sure what he and his team will do to recognize the unmarked dead, if they do find them.

“I don’t think we need to dig them up to reanimate them, to memorialize them,” Ur says. “For me, the production of knowledge is a form of memorialization.

So I just want to know what’s there.”

After the Easter Sunday sermon, I catch Hardies as he walks along the cemetery’s paths, greeting parents while their children fill their wicker baskets with eggs. He’s been thinking a lot about death, rebirth, and memory in honor of Easter, but he also mentions Cicely and Jane, who formed the topic of a sermon a few weeks ago.

“It feels like the dead are living with us still, and still make a claim on us, too,” he says. “I mean, Cicely makes a claim on us today.

And we want to see how we respond to that claim.”

For Ur, Cicely’s claim demands that we tell a “fuller story” of the notable families of Cambridge and Harvard, one that doesn’t gloss over the men and women who labored for them, marginalized both in life and — as of now — in death. How the City of Cambridge chooses to memorialize those forgotten graves, he says, will be a profound reflection of the town’s current values, just as meaningful as the original decision not to mark the tombs.

“If we were to put that monument up, it wouldn’t just say, ‘there were enslaved people that were buried here,’” Ur says. “It would also say that we, in the early 21st century, felt it necessary and important to mark that fact.

So it would also be talking about us.”

“I don’t think we need to dig them up to reanimate them, to memorialize them,” Ur says.

“For me, the production of knowledge is a form of memorialization.”

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Daniel Ellsberg ’52

Donald E. Graham ’66

Gay W. Seidman ’78

Susan D. Chira ’80

Antony J. Blinken ’84

Joseph F. Kahn ’87

Jennifer 8. Lee ’98-’99

Imtiyaz H. Delawala ’03

Ravi Agrawal ’05-’06

150 Years, 9 Lives: Stories From The Harvard Crimson Miles J. Herszenhorn, Adelaide E. Parker, and Andy Z. Wang photos courtesy of Crimson Alumni

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t first, it is hard to not feel intimidated by The Harvard Crimson.

If you go upstairs to the second floor of the little brick building on 14 Plympton St., you enter a room (“the Sanctum,” as Crimson editors call it) lined with huge leather-bound tomes containing issues dating back to the ’50s. Sequestered in the basement are the issues from The Crimson’s very beginning, 1878.

It takes a while to get situate yourself in such a storied place, to adjust to being a successor of many notable alumni who once inhabited it.

The experience of a Crimson editor is also, over time, learning how to become comfortable with calling those same alumni for advice or, in our case, with requesting interviews to ask about their experiences ahead of The Crimson’s 150th anniversary.

Initially, it was hard for us to understand why everyone — from award-winning journalists running newsrooms to the sitting United States Secretary of State — was so willing to make time in their busy schedules to speak with us and reminisce about their time at the paper.

Indeed, when we walked into The Crimson for the first time, we had the sense that we were immersing ourselves into a bedrock institution, not just for Harvard, but for the world. Everyone we interviewed mentioned how The Crimson always found itself at the center of current events: the Vietnam War, Watergate, and antiapartheid protests, just to name a few.

But bedrock institutions all have their flaws. While The Crimson reports on the world outside its walls, it has also

1948 - 1952: Daniel Ellsberg attends Harvard

been shaped by the systems it critiques. Our interviewees mentioned facing sexism, a lack of socioeconomic diversity, and brutal working hours — just a few of the issues that the paper continues to grapple with.

And yet, all of our interviewees reflect on their time here with gratitude and fondness. After hearing their stories, we started to get it: their careers and life trajectories were shaped immensely by their time working as reporters, opinion writers, photographers, coders, and designers for our 150-yearold independent student newspaper. And The Crimson, in turn, has been shaped immensely by them.

In truth, the legacy of The Crimson is not contained in books; it’s in the people who have sustained it. Here are just nine of them.

1962-1966: Donald E. Graham attends Harvard

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Daniel Ellsberg ’52: Talking with the Gloves Off

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hortly after our interview begins, Daniel Ellsberg ’52 casually drops that just days earlier, he was diagnosed with terminal cancer and has only three to six months to live.

Ellsberg, now 92, relays this devastating news in a nonchalant tone, as if he is approaching the end of his life at peace with himself and the world. But the rest of the 90-minute conversation reveals precisely the opposite.

Ellsberg, the man responsible for the blockbuster leak of the Pentagon Papers, has bigger worries than dying.

He is deeply concerned, for example, about how the war in Ukraine will end. “Probably it will escalate to nuclear winter,” he says.

He also professes to be deeply upset about not being able to attend The Crimson’s sesquicentennial.

And, though he’s happy to be featured in this cover story, Ellsberg, a longtime vocal critic of American foreign policy, expresses dismay about appearing alongside former Crimson editor Antony J. Blinken ’84.

“A jerk-off, as far as I can tell,” Ellsberg says of the U.S. Secretary of State. (Blinken did not respond to a request for comment.)

But as for terminal cancer, Ellsberg has chosen to see the bright side of not needing to worry about his diet. He cheerfully says that his doctor has given him permission to eat whatever he wants. “I’m going to have Thai food tonight, which I haven’t had for five years,” he says. “I love it.

And Indian food, Chinese food 17

— I’ve had to go without all this Crimson or the literary magazine pleasure from food for five years the Harvard Advocate (he served now. So I’m in very good spirits. as president of the Advocate in Now I can really indulge myself.”

1950) turns into him sharing a A former Crimson Editorial story about his first wife.

Board member, Ellsberg found “I first made love to her in the fame as the whistleblower Advocate office one night,” he who leaked secret government confesses. “Of course, she was with documents about the Vietnam me at The Crimson a lot too, later,” War. he says, before providing more Using his access as a RAND detail for his original anecdote: “It Corporation employee to obtain was actually, I believe, on a couch the Pentagon Papers, Ellsberg initially leaked the Pentagon Papers to Neil Sheehan ’58, a reporter for the New York Times.

However, as the Times debated with its lawyers over whether to publish the papers, months passed without the publication of a single article.

In order to distribute the Pentagon Papers more widely, From left to right, caricatures of Jeff A. Zucker ’86, Gay W. Seidman ’78, Ellsberg says Crimson drawn by David Royce. he “seriously considered” using The Crimson’s with a rug for a blanket.” personal printing press. According While the Harvard Advocate to Ellsberg, he went as far as to continues to hold special personal visit the building and ask whether significance for Ellsberg, The it would be possible to rent out Crimson “shaped my life much the printing press for the night. more,” he says. Ellsberg says that Ultimately, he took a different The Crimson “was one of my route. warmest associations” and that it “I relied on Xerox shops,” he was “a very formative factor.” says. “About four of them in the Ellsberg says he fondly Harvard Square area.” remembers the spirited Ellsberg has no difficulty discussions and “intellectual recalling detailed memories atmosphere” of his Editorial Board from his undergraduate years at meetings, which helped prepare Harvard, but keeping him on topic him for his professional life. is a much more complicated task.

He recalls a contentious A lighthearted question about meeting he had early in his whether Ellsberg prefers The career with Herman Kahn, 1965: The U.S. enters Vietnam War

“We damn well knew what our first job would be,” he tells us. “We would either get drafted or do something to avoid getting drafted. And you didn’t have to prepare for that.”

Indeed, Graham was tapped as an information specialist — a hybrid photographing and reporting role — in the First Air Cavalry Division, alongside fellow Crimson editor Herbert H. Denton Jr. ’65.

“It was the only time anyone ever detected any artistic talent in either of us, the Army making us photographers,” Graham recounts to me, chuckling.

As we casually chat on Zoom — Graham holding up a phone vertically and using its selfie camera — he recalls how newspapers have always been a cornerstone in his Jim Cramer ’77, and Donald E. Graham ’66, all former presidents of The life.

In high school, Graham was a on the Editorial Board,” Ellsberg “newspaper junkie,” serving as recalled thinking after the the editor of his school newspaper meeting. “Now we can talk with (“as many of your colleagues probably are,” he says). His father, the gloves off.” the owner and publisher of the Washington Post at the time, was Donald E. Graham “absolutely my hero,” Graham ’66: Keeping Score of says, and “his example made me love newspapers all the more.” the War But Graham’s father warned young Don not to join The onald E. Graham Crimson immediately upon ’66 says that no one entering Harvard.

He only ended in his graduating up waiting a month, he tells me, class at The joining in September.

And he was Crimson ever needed to think hooked. deeply about their post-graduate As a Crimson editor, Graham plans — after all, the U.S. was “wrote about anything and waging a war in Vietnam. the Cold War systems theorist who inspired Stanley Kubrick’s “Dr. Strangelove.” They were both working at the RAND Corporation when Ellsberg spoke up and questioned Kahn, which sparked a shouting match that descended into name-calling. The meeting left Ellsberg feeling like he was back home at 14 Plympton St. “We’re back at The Crimson

D

1971: Harvard dorms go co-ed

everything,” including a review of the General Education program, which resulted in “some of the most boring stories ever published in The Crimson,” he says. “I don’t think that review of the General Education program ever came to a damn thing,” Graham rants. “But my God, we covered the hell out of it!”

As a freshman in the fall of 1962, Graham says “it was a time of optimism about the country — belief in the country, confidence in its future.” But when Graham graduated four years later, he felt like he was “living in a different country.” After the United States had committed boots on the ground in Vietnam in 1965, “the political climate at Harvard was about Vietnam, period.” Graham recalls that “there was no other subject for discussion.”

By the time Graham was elected president of the 92nd Guard, Vietnam had also made its way to The Crimson. He recalls that the “hero of all of us” at 14 Plympton St. was former Crimson editor David Halberstam ’55, the principal New York Times reporter in Vietnam. According to Graham, he “wrote stories that proved to be absolutely true about how the war wasn’t going anywhere,” to the ire of the Kennedy administration.

That was a point of pride for The Crimson. In the 1960s, the running joke at 14 Plympton was that “the score was 23 to two in favor of The Crimson,” a rallying cry that writers referred to “whenever someone at Harvard excelled or disgraced himself,” Graham says.

Halberstam remembered the joke, and from Vietnam, “Halberstam sent a postcard to a classmate, who sent it on to The Crimson, in which he 1974-1978: Gay W. Seidman attends Harvard

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said: ‘The score at the end of 1964 is the New York Times, 23; the US government, 2.”

Ultimately, Graham joined the Washington Post in January 1971, the year of the Pentagon Papers and the year before the Watergate scandal. “My first few years at the Post were pretty exciting,” Graham says.

Before college, Graham had not expected that he would ever end up back at his family’s business.

But, things changed after tragedy struck his family.

“The saddest day of my life was when my dad took his own life in the summer after my first year at Harvard,” Graham says.

As a result, Graham’s mother took over as publisher of the Post — in doing so, she also became the first woman at the helm of any major American newspaper.

Nonetheless, she was “eager for any of her children to come help her,” Graham says, and armed with experience from The Crimson, Graham fit the bill.

In 1979, Graham took over for his mother as the publisher of the Post, a position he held until 2000, when he was elected chairman of the newspaper. His successor as publisher was Boisfeuillet Jones Jr. ’68, who served as president of The Crimson two years after Graham.

Above all, though, Graham views this changing of the guard as a testament to the enduring power of connections that began at 14 Plympton St.: “People who were Crimson people turned up over the years, just as you are in my life right now.”

“I have a million other 60-yearold stories to bore you with, but that’ll have to do for now,” Graham chuckles.

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Gay W. Seidman ’78: A Woman at the Helm

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know it.”

When she first joined The Crimson, Seidman says shooting for president was something she never would’ve considered. But as she got more involved, Seidman felt welcomed by The Crimson’s leadership.

“There were a number of older juniors and seniors who were being so kind to me,” says Seidman.

“They were saying, ‘It’s time there’s a woman.’” Seidman was also

he New York Times knew Gay W. Seidman ’78 would be president of The Crimson before she did. News of The Crimson’s first female president snuck its way from Cambridge to the printing presses of the New York Times hours before Seidman found out herself.

Though Seidman says she rarely went to bed before 4 a.m. in college, she decided to turn in early on the night of final decisions — only to be rudely awakened by a call from former Crimson editor J. Anthony Lewis ’48, who was in New York that morning.

“As he was flying back, he picked up a copy of the Times off the press,” says Seidman. “While he was on the plane, he’s reading it and there’s an article that says I’m the president. He screamed so loudly that the stewardess came over to ask if he was okay.”

Seidman became involved with The Crimson at a pivotal moment in its history. Harvard College had just gone co-ed, and in her words, the world was “so maledominated.” Seidman decided to comp The Crimson after her roommate joined. Her first article was on a proposal to build a new parking garage in Harvard Square — “not something I would ever be Seidman at her desk in the president’s office. interested in,” Seidman says.

“After that first story, I wasn’t encouraged by Lewis, who she sure I was gonna go back,” she says used his own experience as a says. “And Jeff Leonard, who was journalist to “really adopt” her. then the managing editor, called But during Seidman’s term me and told me I had to come as president, some people back because he really liked the still questioned her authority. story. And I was like, ‘Oh, I’ll try According to Seidman, when a couple more times.’” Seidman the Harvard Lampoon printed laughs. “I was hooked but didn’t fake issues of The Crimson that

1977: Seidman elected first female president of The Crimson

1975: Vietnam War ends

year, their headline was “Gay Seidman Talks about Fashion” (“So ridiculous, given my lack of fashion taste,” she comments). She also remembers The Crimson’s alumni board approaching her about reinstating the organization’s discontinued alumni dinners — a request Seidman says she knew was gendered. Seidman jokes that picking the alumni dinner’s menu was her greatest challenge as president. “I’m a pescatarian,” she

quips, “I had no idea what I was putting on the plate!”

Seidman says expectations were higher for her, as The Crimson’s first female president: “I didn’t want to do anything wrong, because if I did something wrong…” Seidman trails off. “I think I was aware that I had to follow norms.”

Seidman’s flagship initiative during her term was expanding The Crimson’s coverage of campus anti-apartheid movements.

Seidman and her twin sister, Neva Seidman Makgetla ’78, spent much of their childhood in Africa, which drew them to early anti-apartheid efforts. When Mekgelta came to Harvard, she became a leader in Harvard’s antiapartheid divestment movement.

Though Seidman also wanted to participate in this movement, she worried that advocating for divestment would compromise her journalistic integrity as president of The Crimson.

“I had to pretty much stay away from it while I was president, although we did cover every demonstration,” Seidman recalls.

The Crimson reported on United States anti-apartheid activism earlier than most outlets, and its journalism helped catapult calls for divestment to the national stage.

Though Seidman thought about becoming a journalist after college, after dictating The Crimson’s coverage as president, she “couldn’t imagine” going back to beat reporting. Instead, Seidman used graduation as a chance to finally do the activism she always wanted to do.

After leaving Harvard, Seidman moved to the small African nation of Eswatini to work for a branch of the United Nations, then spent the next few years traveling across southern Africa as an activist and freelance writer.

Seidman says the “extraordinary” racism she witnessed while in Africa was eye-opening.

While living in the newly-independent nation of Zimbabwe, Seidman was commissioned to rewrite 1976-1980: Susan D. Chira attends Harvard

Zimbabwe’s colonial-era history textbooks. The old textbooks insisted that the Great Zimbabwe Ruins “couldn’t have been built

by Africans, it must have been Phoenicians or something,” scoffs Seidman. “Their version of history was just ludicrous.”

When Seidman returned to the U.S., she ran for and won election to the Harvard Board of Overseers on a pro-divestment platform, contributing to the growing public pressure that eventually pushed Harvard to divest from apartheid South Africa. Seidman’s experiences working on the board and writing textbooks in Zimbabwe ignited her interest in academia. Seidman then got a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, and now works as a professor of sociology at the University of WisconsinMadison.

At the end of our interview, Seidman reflects on the unique agency The Crimson gave her.

“Enjoy the freedom that you have to choose what you write about,” she says, “because it is a gift.”

Susan D. Chira ’80: The Journey Back to Editing

S

usan D. Chira ’80 thought that she would never edit again after finishing her term as president of The Crimson and starting as a reporter at the New York Times.

“It was heavy,” Chira says of leading The Crimson. “I was still learning about exercising authority, and there were just a lot of stresses about it, so I didn’t go into the Times at all thinking, ‘Oh 20

man, I can’t wait to run something again.’”

“I went to the Times thinking I wanted to be a reporter and writer,” she adds.

But after 15 years of reporting, including several years as a correspondent and bureau chief in Tokyo, Chira rose through the ranks of the Times, from deputy foreign editor in 1997 to deputy executive editor by 2014. Now, she serves as the editor-in-chief of the Marshall Project, a journalism nonprofit that focuses on covering criminal justice news.

Chira says that two impulses made her return to editing and journalism leadership. “I began to feel like I was learning things and I could help other people learn things,” she says. “But also, that I wanted to have kids.”

Chira decided to explore editing because, unlike reporting, it involves less constant and spontaneous travel. “I was a little bit worried about being on the road all the time and being able to bring up kids,” she says.

But once she became an editor, Chira said she found the job’s mentorship aspect to be very rewarding.

“I liked helping people,” Chira says. “Helping people grow as reporters and writers, talking about ideas and brainstorming about how to make stories better, thinking about coverage broadly.”

One of the biggest influences on Chira’s career as an editor overseeing the Times’ international coverage came from her time at Harvard — but not 14 Plympton St. “Because I was an East Asian Studies major, I had a real conviction that the way Americans covered other cultures could be a hell of a lot better: more sensitive, less ethnocentric, less Americancentric,” Chira says.

“I had a lot of ideas about how we could be more respectful and open in exploring how we portrayed other cultures and other people,” she adds. “So I had an opportunity to put some of those ideas into place.”

As the second woman to serve as president in Crimson history, Chira says her time leading The Crimson helped prepare her for a career in leadership within a male-dominated profession.

“Part of The Crimson was learning how to be comfortable being a woman who was supervising men, who were still used to ruling the roost,” Chira says.

“Those things came into play in Harvard, and they came into play later in my life, too.”

In addition to facing sexism internally at The Crimson, Chira was also forced to contend with external sexism during her tenure as president.

In 1978, under Chira’s presidency, The Crimson decided a

“There was kind of this struggling to find our own identity: What were the galvanizing, animating issues of our time?”

21

1980-1984: Antony J. Blinken attends Harvard

Playboy Magazine advertisement soliciting Harvard students to pose for their “Women of the Ivy League” special issue shouldn’t make it into their daily paper.

In turn, Playboy blamed the choice on The Crimson’s female leadership, aiming to generate media attention for the magazine’s upcoming issue through the controversy.

“It was more delicious because a woman was running it,” Chira says. “Might they have mocked The Harvard Crimson for not taking the ad? Hard to say, but the fact that I was a woman made it just perfect in terms of a story.”

But overall, Chira says, most of her colleagues in The Crimson were supportive of the paper’s journalistic mission during her tenure.

“Most people were really collaborative, and cooperative, and excited, and sharing the sense of ‘let’s figure out what’s going on at Harvard, let’s cut through excuses and find out things that people don’t want us to know,’ which is what powers journalism in a really exciting way,” Chira says.

She adds, “There were uncomfortable and nasty moments, but generally, it was a good, exciting, exhausting experience.”

Antony J. Blinken ’84: ‘Junior Diplomat’ to Secretary of State

W

e have just 15 minutes to interview the Secretary of State – the spokesperson tells us it’s a hard stop at 10 a.m. The line goes silent, and we mull over which four questions we’ll

prioritize. Suddenly, a booming voice announces that we’ve been connected with Antony J. Blinken ’84.

Blinken, 61, is at the helm of American foreign policy after more than 30 years working in various policy circles in Washington, D.C. But, as he explains to me, his connection to international affairs is “deeply personal,” as someone who spent many of his formative years outside of the United States.

according to Blinken. As a result, being forced to defend American policy “really stuck with me,” he says.

At the same time, investigative “heroes of the time” like Watergate reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein had a “formative impact” on Blinken. Inspired by them to pursue journalism, he founded the yearbook at his high school. “It hadn’t existed before, to our knowledge, anywhere in

quick to characterize his guard of the Editorial Board as idealistic, in no small part viewing themselves as “a continuation of the reformers of the 1960s.” But the same divisive issues that had shaped Blinken’s childhood had faded into the background. “​​ Dorms were co-ed. The Vietnam War was over. The ROTC, at that point in time, had been banished to MIT. Watergate was history,” he recounts. Within

Blinken (second row, second from left) poses with other members of his guard at The Crimson’s printing press, located in the basement of 14 Plympton St. From the age of nine until he began at Harvard, Blinken lived with his mother in Paris, where he says he became a bit of a “junior diplomat.”

Throughout his youth, conflicts like the Vietnam War and the Cold War were at the fore of international attention, spurring “conversations, discussions, and arguments with friends at school,”

France,” Blinken tells me.

Upon returning to the States in 1980, Blinken says he was “immediately attracted” to The Crimson, where he could blend his two passions in journalism and foreign policy — ultimately, Blinken would spend three years penning columns about international affairs.

In our interview, Blinken was

1983-1987: Joseph F. Kahn attends Harvard

the Editorial Board, “there was kind of this struggling to find our own identity: What were the galvanizing, animating issues of our time?”

According to Blinken, the issues that would define his generation at The Crimson would once again be those in the international area: the divestment campaign against South Africa, U.S. intervention 1994-1998/1999: Jennifer 8. Lee attends Harvard

22

in Central America, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the Tiananmen Square massacre. Incidentally, these were the same conflicts that Blinken personally covered.

After graduating from Harvard, Blinken headed to the New Republic, a liberal political magazine, where he worked as a “reporter-researcher,” a role in which recent graduates “might be getting coffee for the publisher one day and actually writing the cover story the next,” he says.

But, surrounded by some of the best writers of his day, including many Crimson alumni, Blinken says that he succumbed to imposter syndrome. “Part of the challenge of being in a place like the New Republic, or for that matter, The Crimson, is you’re really working with the best of the best, and that puts your own talents and skills in perspective,” Blinken tells us.

With low confidence in his ability to make it into the writing world, Blinken says he “thought going back to school was a good idea.” Ultimately, he would enroll in law school — “a default for people who weren’t quite sure what they wanted to do,” he says — a decision that surprised many of his friends at the time who had marked him as bound for journalistic success.

Even Blinken admits that he didn’t think he had “a profound calling to the law.” Nonetheless, he felt compelled to enter the legal profession after graduating from Columbia Law in 1988. Blinken says that after practicing law for a few years, he “found that it wasn’t for me.”

Blinken’s trajectory ended up going full circle — right back to reporting, outside of the U.S. “I wound up going back to 23

Europe, and I did a lot of freelance writing for a number of different publications to kind of test that out,” he explains.

At this point, it’s past 10 a.m.

We’ve reached our “hard stop.”

But Blinken presses on, recounting the production nights in the print shop beneath the floor of The Crimson newsroom.

“Some of the happiest hours of my life will be in the shop downstairs,” he admits.

He makes sure to tell us that he “learned more about working with other people, about human relations, in a way, from those endless hours at The Crimson than maybe anyplace else.”

Blinken, at this point, is definitively late to his next meeting, but he continues: “I learned more about writing, about thinking, about explaining than anywhere.”

“And I’m just eternally grateful for it,” Blinken says as he signs off.

Joseph F. Kahn ’87: Training for the Times

J

Kahn says that a reporter should never withhold the results of investigative reporting out of fear of backlash. “You shouldn’t be a journalist if that’s your thinking,” he says.

But, Kahn concedes, for a news organization, the decision is not always that easy when the publication of one article could result in retaliation against a whole team of reporters.

“That was kind of the case for us in China,” Kahn says. “We had probably a dozen journalists writing about China at that point, but we had one really sensitive and important piece of investigative reporting and the publication of it — many people feared — was going to restrict access or even result in the expulsion of a bunch of other journalists who had nothing to do with that work.”

As he animatedly relays his thoughts on journalistic ethics, it is funny to think how, in Kahn’s college years, he wasn’t sure that journalism would end up being his

oseph F. Kahn ’87, the executive editor of the New York Times, speaks in a cautious, monotone voice during our interview with only one exception: when asked about the difficult decisions he has made throughout his career.

Suddenly, he is passionately defending the Times’ decision to publish an investigation that led China to block internet access to the Times’ website in 2012.

The investigation revealed that the family of Wen Jiabao, China’s prime minister, accumulated Kahn, caricatured in a 1986 drawing that hangs billions of dollars in wealth after in The Crimson’s newsroom. his ascent to the ruling elite.

1995: The Crimson launches thecrimson.com

with our readers, and that ended up having the impact of restoring things to normal,” he says.

Jennifer 8. Lee ’98-’99: Ushering in a Digital Era

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Lee and fellow journalist Sewell Chan during their college days. lifelong career.

“I hope to try my hand at journalism — print journalism — for some time. I won’t be happy until I do, I think,” Kahn said in a 1986 video interview with C-SPAN during his tenure as president of The Crimson. “I’m not sure that’s what I want to do for a career, but I do want to try it.”

In our interview, Kahn says that serving as president of The Crimson was “very good training” for his current role as executive editor of the Times.

“The culture of leadership at The Crimson is a shared responsibility — you have a president, you have a managing editor — but ultimately, you need to figure out a way to develop a consensus about big issues.

It’s not a dictatorship,” Kahn says. “The New York Times, or any good newsroom, also operates with some similar concerns in mind.”

“Although it was a very different era, a very different time in my life, that experience was very relevant to managing any large news organization,” he adds.

Kahn says that reporting for

The Crimson also helped prepare him for a career contending with people in power who try to silence the press and sideline journalists.

While covering former Harvard University President Derek C. Bok, Kahn says that Bok ordered his top deputies to stop speaking to The Crimson after growing frustrated with Kahn’s reporting.

“Initially, I was very taken aback by it,” Kahn says.

After getting advice from Crimson alumni, Kahn says the newspaper decided to end every article that would have normally required comment from Bok or the University with a blurb that read: “Because of the decree from President Bok, the administration has refused to answer questions from The Harvard Crimson.”

“Within a week, they had rescinded his decree and then started speaking to us again,” Kahn says.

Kahn adds that the experience taught him that transparency can be a powerful antidote when those in authority attempt to ignore journalists.

“We just immediately shared

1998: The Crimson pilots financial aid program

hen we talk to Jennifer 8. Lee ’98-’99 for the first time, it’s late in the evening in India — a trip 23 years in the making.

After graduating from Harvard, Lee was selected as a HarvardYenching Fellow and received a master’s degree at Peking University. “This is when China opened up — this is before China was in the WTO,” she explains.

Harvard provided Lee with money for two round-trip flights, including one to return home for the holidays. “Why would you want to go home for the holidays?

Like, the whole point is to travel,” Lee says.

Instead, she decided to fly a friend out to China: Adam S. Hickey ’99, the assistant managing editor for the 125th guard and a law student at the time. Lee says that Hickey was initially a bit uncomfortable with the arrangement, but they came to a compromise. “I told him, ‘Don’t worry. When you can afford it, you can take me on a trip to India, but it will be purchasing power parity-adjusted,’” she recalls.

Lee eventually got her trip. “I think it’s a testament to the kinds of friendships that we build at The Crimson because it’s a pretty big bet, right? But I’m like, ‘Don’t worry, we’ll be friends in 23 years,’” Lee says, chuckling.

A long time has passed since she served as The Crimson’s inaugural 1999-2003: Imtiyaz H. Delawala attends Harvard

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chair of the Online Board — now the Technology Board — but Lee says her approach to work has changed little. At 57, Lee works across a variety of initiatives in technology, film, and journalism.

She has served as vice chair of the Unicode Emoji Subcommittee, organizer of the MisinfoCon conference, and CEO of a digital publishing house.

“I like being pretty good at different things,” she explains.

“The Crimson was one of the first institutions where you could really try your hand at different types of skill sets.” Indeed, at The Crimson, Lee also worked on the Photography Board — now the Multimedia Board — and was elected vice president of the 125th Guard. But it’s her work on The Crimson’s website that Lee remembers the most fondly.

Lee entered Harvard right before the dot-com boom really took off. As she repeatedly tells us during a Zoom call, things were different back then — “preGoogle, pre-Wifi, pre-cellphonesbeing-popular” — and that meant that there was a lot of unclaimed digital turf.

In her years in college, The Crimson “had a custom version of Internet Explorer that was branded for Harvard,” Lee says.

“Instead of an E, it had an H, sort of rotated.”

In those days, “the internet was a big deal for the first time,” Lee says. And in the spring of 1997, The Crimson chose to capitalize on the growth of the internet.

The president of The Crimson at the time, Joshua J. Schanker ’98, hired Andrew Prihodko ’98, an undergrad at the time, to build The Crimson’s first website using the Perl programming language.

“I don’t know why, but back then

25

we all used Perl — it was really janky,” Lee says, laughing.

But there was another hitch to the website, besides the underequipped coding language.

“Someone had registered ‘harvardcrimson.com’ — someone not in our orbit,” Lee says. So, The Crimson had to settle with “thecrimson.com,” which is “kind of lame,” Lee muses. “I still kind of wonder who has ‘harvardcrimson. com’ and wonder if we could get it.”

In the fall of that year, The Crimson launched the Online Board to manage the arduous daily ritual of “copying text and

which Lee explains “got ramped up in a big way precisely because the professors hated the Coffee Guide,” she explains.

Students, professors, and administrators alike browsed with confidence, thinking they were anonymous. But “we could see in our logs what people were searching for and where they were searching,” says Lee. “You could see professors looking for their own names inside the Coffee Guide.”

To Lee, her time at The Crimson is emblematic of the type of work that she has done for the last two decades, of observing social and technical changes and rolling with them. “There are these sort of ‘phase transitions,’ where no one knows anything,” she says, listing the internet boom, the rise of social media, and AI as examples.

“We’re just making it up, and it’s a fucking land grab right now,” Lee says. “So those are fun!” she says, laughing.

“We’re just making it up, and it’s a fucking land grab right now,” Imtiyaz H. Delawala Lampoon Lee says. ’03: Theft and Crimson then uploading it” in addition to keeping up the website. Previously, during a gap year, Lee had worked at the New York Times and managed its website, learning Perl along the way. “That was also very janky and also very manual,” she tells us. But, armed with that experience, Lee knew how to run a newspaper’s website.

At that time, Lee recalls that very few people were digitally literate. One of The Crimson’s first digital projects was uploading its course review database, the Coffee Guide. Today, the College uses the Q Guide for course evaluations,

Milestones

I

mtiyaz H. Delawala ’03 is the last person you’d ever expect to find breaking and entering. And yet, late one night in college, that’s exactly what the former Crimson president was doing.

His old classmates tell us Delawala has been the image of professionalism since he was 19. “We would always make fun of him for how he was always perfectly clean-shaven, and his hair was always perfectly trimmed,” says David C. Newman

2001: The Crimson elects first openly gay president

’03, one of Delawala’s executive editors. “He didn’t own jeans. He only wore khaki pants.”

But Delawala broke character as part of an escalating prank war between The Crimson and The Harvard Lampoon, a semi-secret Sorrento Square social organization that used to occasionally publish a socalled humor magazine. That night, Delawala led a raid into the Lampoon’s 44 Bow St. castle to take back stolen Crimson memorabilia.

“I’m one of the few Crimson presidents, I believe, who has actually entered that hallowed building, and I was able to leave it with many, many items,” Delawala chuckles. “I will give them credit for having an interesting little playhouse.”

Delawala’s passion for journalism — which he now works in professionally — began at The Crimson, where he started

as a junior beat reporter covering the Cambridge City Council. He quickly rose through the ranks of the organization, standing out as “a very quiet but very well-respected leader,” according to Garrett M. Graff ’03, another executive editor in Delawala’s guard.

When Delawala decided to shoot for president in his junior year of college, he recalls internal pressures pushing him in opposite directions during the selection process — experiencing a “big push internally” to run, but finding that advocating for representation was often “a point of contention.”

After a heated election, Delawala was welcomed as the first person of color on record elected president of The Crimson’s 129th guard. “It was definitely celebrated and it was something that was noted as an important milestone,” he says.

Delawala’s presidency — which began just months after the 9/11 terrorist attacks — came at an

important time for The Crimson, but also for the nation as a whole.

“I think it was meaningful that a Muslim-American was elected president of The Crimson at that time,” Newman reflects.

“Because The Crimson president is a campus leader, and definitely a leader in journalism.”

As president of The Crimson, Delawala stood out for his quiet passion and constant composure.

“He did a great job dealing with the big personalities and territorial nature of The Crimson,” Newman says. Delawala was always the first to arrive at 14 Plympton St. each morning, and he spent many late nights editing and looking after his pet turtle — who spent Delawala’s term living in a tank in his office.

During his term, Delawala worked to reach out to campus affinity groups and expand diversity in The Crimson’s staff and coverage. “Being a person of color as the president of The Crimson

Delawala poses for a photo in the Lampoon Castle. (“You will notice that Imti is not wearing jeans and appears to be the same 35-year old as he looks today,” Graff wrote in an email.)

2001-2005/2006: Ravi Agrawal attends Harvard

2002: Delawala becomes The Crimson’s first president of color on record

26

allowed me to approach outside student groups in a different way than anyone prior to me could,” he says. “And speak with candor about our efforts on diversity and inclusion.”

Delawala was also one of the first Crimson presidents to be a member of The Crimson’s financial aid program, which provides compensation for time spent dedicated to Crimson work for students who receive significant financial aid from the College. He tells us his presidency wouldn’t have been possible without it. “It allowed me to fully embrace my time at the Crimson without having that worry in the back of my head of ‘Oh, I should be spending 10, or 15, or 20 hours working,’” he says.

Delawala wanted to give other students this same opportunity, and his flagship initiative as president was expanding The Crimson’s financial aid program.

Over the last two decades, enrollment in The Crimson’s financial aid program has skyrocketed: growing from only 10-15 students when Delawala first became president to over 200 students today. Both Graff and Newman trace this growth back to the initiatives Delawala started while president.

After leaving The Crimson, Delawala knew that he wanted to work as a journalist for ABC News.

While waiting for a position at ABC to open up, Delawala moved to Israel to copy edit for the Israeli publication Haaretz — something he thinks back on as a journalism “study abroad.” Delawala moved back to the U.S. half a year later to work for ABC, where he now serves as a senior producer.

“He’s doing great at age 42,”

27

says Newman. “He doesn’t look a day over 35, which is exactly how old he’s looked since he was 19.” Even two decades after graduation, Delawala and his friends from The Crimson still keep in touch. “What’s great about The Crimson is that it really does build lifelong friendships and relationships,” Delawala says.

He tells us how he and his former editing staff have a group mailing list they use to send each other life updates. “It’s kind of our very tiny version of Newstalk,” says Delawala, referring to The Crimson’s internal mailing list.

I got a glimpse into this myself after a quick email requesting photos from Delawala and Newman turned into a 10-message-long chain of them sharing photos and memories from their time on The Crimson.

“I should also note that no turtles were harmed in the production of The Crimson,” Newman writes after our interview. “After our June 2003 graduation, Imti’s turtle traveled to North Carolina and was released in a pond.”

Ravi Agrawal ’05-’06: From Editorial to Editor-in-Chief

R

avi Agrawal ’05-’06 doesn’t like to be categorized. When Agrawal was asked “which side of the fence” he was on during The Crimson Editorial Board’s initiation, he burst out laughing.

“I just didn’t understand the question,” says Agrawal. “And then I understood that they were trying to say pick left or right.” Agrawal

grins, explaining that the question referred to his political leaning.

“Now, of course, as a journalist, I refuse to think in left and right terms,” Agrawal says. “If I had to undergo the whole thing now I would have just told them to go and take a hike.”

Agrawal has always known he wanted to be a journalist, he says.

“I mean, obviously, when I was five, or six, or seven or eight I wanted to be an astronaut,” he says matter-of-factly, “but as soon as I was older, in my late teens, and I had a sense of what my skills were, what I was actually interested in, what was actually feasible for me — that’s when I began to think of being a journalist.”

Agrawal was drawn to journalism by its ability to engage

“Now, of course, as to think in left and ri say with the “immense complexities” of social and political life.

Growing up, he recalls the 1991 assassination of Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi; for days, Agrawal says, all of India was “glued to the news.”

But Agrawal was most captivated by how the assassination was being covered by the BBC, he says.

“It occurred to me that journalism was reporting the news, but it was much more than just reporting the news.

It was dealing with topics with immense gravity and doing so very sensitively,” he says.

2008: The Crimson elects first Black President

When he moved to the United States and came to Harvard in 2001, Agrawal knew that he wanted to engage with these topics himself — though he could not expect having to confront them so soon. Just days after Agrawal’s arrival to campus, the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks shocked the nation and the world.

“My journalistic consciousness grew in the shadow of 9/11 and the war in Iraq,” says Agrawal. As a beat reporter for The Crimson, Agrawal always sought to relate his coverage of campus issues to international political trends.

Later on, Agrawal was able to write on international conflicts directly when he shifted from news reporting to writing op-eds.

“The Crimson is, at its heart, a

a journalist, I refuse ight terms,” Agrawal ys. campus newspaper. And I loved it for what it was, but it also taught me that it was covering the campus for the world,” he says.

Outside of The Crimson, Agrawal used broadcast reporting to engage his peers in international affairs more directly.

He started a political talk show in college, which he says was “loosely affiliated” with the Institute of Politics, where he interviewed students about their opinions on international issues.

Agrawal says that recording the first episode — a news anchor interview presented in MTV style that focused on students’

opinions on the war in Iraq — was a highlight of his time at Harvard.

“It was a very vibrant, forceful debate,” says Agrawal.

After graduation, Agrawal dove full-on into the world of international journalism.

He began working at CNN International, a job he describes as a “24/7 crash course in what’s going on around the world.” After 11 years at CNN, Agrawal began working for the international news magazine Foreign Policy, where he now serves as editor-inchief.

Though he now boasts a 17year career in journalism, Agrawal traces much of his “professional” reporting knowledge back to The Crimson. “The Crimson is at par with a lot of professional outlets I’ve worked at,” Agrawal says. He sits for a second, then reconsiders.

“Let me rephrase that. The Crimson is a professional outlet.”

Agrawal tells us how, the night of his Crimson initiation, he walked out of 14 Plympton St. “elated.”

“I thought it was the coolest thing ever to be on the Editorial Board of The Crimson.”

T

***

he three of us are all at markedly different stages of our time at The Crimson. One of us has only a single semester left of college; another is just finishing her first semester as a Crimson editor; and the third is smack in the middle — exactly halfway through his time on The Crimson and at college.

In our time at The Crimson, this institution has felt larger than us: How do we find our place in

2022: The Crimson elects first Latinx president

a newspaper that views itself as embedded into the fabric of American journalism? How can we, as reporters, live up to the legacy of our alumni? How do we use our platform for good?

But talking with these former Crimson editors reminds us that our anxieties have been shared by generations before us.

Even our initial hesitance to request interviews from such prominent figures is something that Agrawal relates to. “Harvard’s a very intimidating place, and I learned that it can seem like there are a lot of doors, a lot of closed doors,” he says. “But you’ll only know if they’re closed if you knock them down.”

Kahn reminds us that our journalism matters, from the bombshell investigations to the small scoops. Reflecting on his years covering the Harvard Medical School and former University President Bok, Kahn says that it was an “intoxicating experience as a young person of creating journalism that has an impact, and that people read and talk about.”

And what will we take with us when we leave this building?

Though The Crimson is an institution, it is, at its heart, a community. As Graham tells us, “You’ll get the same answer to every old person to whom you ask that question: my favorite memory is the people who were my colleagues.”

All of us — some sooner, some later — will have to say goodbye to this little brick building on 14 Plympton. But the stories will endure. Not just the stories we write, but the stories we have lived, and the stories yet to come.

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Dear Sophomore Year Michal Goldstein Photos courtesy of Michal Goldstein

D

ear Sophomore Year, I don’t know where to begin or how to commit you to the page.

I almost have to admire your sheer magnitude. You’ve created the perfect storm — drama, rejection, loss. All I’ve been able to say is, “This is too big.” But big things need to be written about. And hard years deserve letters, too.

To your credit, you haven’t been all bad. Your first month held wonder in the air. This campus welcomed me home. I celebrated the return of friends to school, met bubbly freshmen, and daydreamed about what the year would look like. Sundresses and iced coffee in the summer. Trips to Boston and apple picking in the fall. A winter of snowmen on the sidewalk and cozy movie nights, and a spring that left me begging to stay.

Life moved fast. A good summer turned into a difficult fall, but it was the usual kind of difficult, of things not going the way you’d hoped they would. A kind of difficult that makes you realize why people write songs about heartbreak, and makes you listen to them, and makes you move on. I went to class, I declared a major, I made new friends. Life didn’t slow down — until it did. Until it crashed. *** No one quite tells

There’s a bright side to hardship, the way shared grief makes room for new friendships that quickly turn to family.

27

you what to do when you get the news you’ve lost a friend. No one tells you who to call, or where to go, or how to write about it. There’s nothing to cushion the blow, and there’s nothing you can tell yourself that will make it better. It just is.

You just are. I can’t blame you for being the year my friend was What’s left after loss is not taken, even if I want to. nothing. What’s left after loss is Still, after all of that, you love. (And his favorite mug.) weren’t easy to trust.

I hesitated to approach you again in January. I focused on what I could control. Classes, calendars, routines. I counted one good thing every day. The soundlessness of falling snow. A beautiful walk down Brattle Street. Colorful nails. Cups of tea. Friend dates. Themed parties. It worked as well as I guess it could.

I

***

’m finding it hard to write about you. I can’t sum you up into distinctive parts as I could in freshman year, and I’m having trouble remembering which moments of you happened when. You’re a blur to me. A tangled mess of experiences that seem small and unexceptional in the grand scheme of things. It’s not your fault — you’ve been stained by grief, and I can’t clean you up into something presentable in one letter.

I guess what I should admit is that you’ve disappointed me. You lack the newness of last year — the “magic” I once wrote about — and you lack

up in the morning despite that.

Life after loss seems to be about blindly choosing hope. Even when I don’t believe in it, even when the truth is staring me in the face. I choose hope because deep down, I know some part of me isn’t ready to give it up.

I daydreamed of a winter of snowmen on the sidewalk and cozy movie nights, and a spring that left me begging to stay.

the constancy that was supposed to make up for that. The reality is that I’m still nostalgic for freshman year. But I also gravitate

I

***

n my letter to my freshman year, I wrote, “You weren’t flawless. But you showed up.”

It’s funny reading that now, knowing that my problems then were so trivial in comparison. But it’s true for you, too.

You’ve shown up. No one can argue with that. You’ve woken me up for 7:15 a.m. spin class (surprisingly euphoric), you’ve walked by me through reflective strolls by the Quad, you’ve spent

for you, but I’m steadier now.

Steady enough to end this letter with the gratitude I’ve worked hard to find. For friends who make me laugh and let me cry.

For intellectual work that ignites my brain and reminds me what I care about. For this campus — it holds so much. For the privilege of this fragile life. For the growing confidence that it’s worth believing in.

I don’t know what next year will hold, and I’m not as optimistic as I used to be. But even if the perfect junior year isn’t around the corner, I know what is: the same safety in the people I know, the same desire to try, the same love I can’t and won’t let go of. And for now, that’s enough for me.

Yours, Michal

What’s left after loss is not nothing.

What’s left after loss is love. I know I have a lot of it to give. toward that nostalgia; it’s what keeps me close to the memories of the person I’ve lost.

At each step, this campus reminds me of him — each time I pass by the Inn, each time I eat Krave cereal in the dining hall, each time I find a penny on the ground. I try to embrace that. I try to linger in the ambiguity of how I feel.

Grief is full of hopelessness and full of hope. Somehow, the two manage to coexist. Hopelessness is the biting truth that goodness does not always prevail — a truth I’ve learned the hard way. Hope is the quiet resilience that gets me

fun, delirious nights with me at The Crimson. You’ve even shown me there’s a bright side to hardship, the way shared grief makes room for new friendships that quickly turn into family.

What’s left after loss is not nothing. What’s left after loss is love. I know I have a lot of it to give.

I wasn’t ready

Some things never change.

28

Paraphernalia of Love

Kaitlyn Tsai

Photos courtesy of Kaitlyn Tsai

I

t’s the Saturday night of Halloweekend, and outside, partygoers whoop and laugh so loudly I can hear them even with my earbuds in. I’m alone at my desk watching a video of a Japanese woman making meals for her family.

It cuts to a clip of her, her husband, and her daughter gathered at the dinner table. The daughter places a stuffed toy in her dad’s shirt pocket, and the tenderness and simplicity of the gesture triggers something in me. I start sobbing so uncontrollably that I have to pause the video.

I want to be like that again, I want to be the daughter, I want to be taken care of, to have such a simple conception of the world that all that matters is my home, my parents, the food right before me, what I’ll play with next, I word-vomit into my notes app.

I don’t want to think about taking care of myself or getting through the days. I want life to be simple. I want to be cared for.

U

***

ntil recently, the gravitational pull that the past exerts on me has been one rooted in warmth. I still have my cringey middle school writing in journals and on my laptop. I love flipping through photos — everything backed up on my laptop since high school freshman year, my infancy and toddlerhood documented in photo albums at home.

But this year, I’ve found that my relationship with the past has gradually changed; that its pull, while still tender, has become primarily sharp and painful.

I’ve found myself not just indulging in these trips down memory lane, but wishing I could stay in them forever.

31

I’ve spent this past year vacillating between blazing through work and curling up on my couch crying, two extremes whose combination has been so jarring that my mind has opted to simply dissociate more days than I’d like to admit. The summer left me raw; upheavals in my relationships, coupled with the stress of balancing an internship and a research position, left me questioning everything about myself, my values, and my world. When I entered the fall semester, still processing it all, I felt decidedly not ready to take on extracurriculars and courses.

But the world stops for no one. Work became what it always had been: a stressor, but also an escape mechanism, something I could throw myself into as I staggered away from myself, this girl who felt so lost and was hurting so badly, this girl I could not stand to be. Work was an anesthetic, a cushion between my pain and myself — because what was the point in being mired in sadness when there were papers to be written, pieces to be edited, emails to be sent?

Inevitably, I would crash and burn. And crash I did, into a full-blown depressive episode. Years-old wounds I thought I had stitched up burst open again, oozing into everything I was already struggling to process. Again and again, I had tried to run away from myself, but running only works for so long before your legs give way — before you have to stop, and look back at what you’re running from

I

***

t’s Thanksgiving, and my morning starts with an art project: assembling pages and pages of photos alongside various trinkets in a pine green gift box I’d folded the previous night. I want to open it and go through its contents when I

Flowers from a flower stand at the farmer’s market back home in California that the author frequents in the summer.

can’t remember how loved I am, how happy I’ve been, how happy I could be.

They litter my desk now, all these paraphernalia of love. Receipts from outings with my boyfriend.

Printouts of emails and texts from friends, family members, and mentors. A good-luck pendant my mother gifted me before I came to college.

Most of all, there are the photos: wild fungi, intricate leaves, the Pacific Ocean; my favorite flower booth at the farmer’s market back home; my boyfriend smiling at me while I grin at the camera; the FM exec cinnamon roll-hug at our last meeting; baby me in my dad’s arms, pouting at a bird at the

zoo.

Cutting out the photos one by one, I fight the urge to cry. A blur of feelings swells in my chest — the bittersweetness of these representations of a simpler life and a happier self; the sharp pain of the juxtaposition between them and myself now, sitting alone at my desk, hurting and hurting and hurting.

But more than anything, I feel overwhelmed by love, by how lucky I am to have and have had such an abundance of care in my life, so many reasons to smile, so many people and places to love and thank.

As tears escape down my cheeks, it hits me, a thought as liberating as it is terrifying: This is what I

The author with her fellow FM execs and former managing editor Jasper G. Goodman ’23 at the end of their last meeting in November.

32

need. To not just remember and long, but to create, to be; to seek out and put myself in situations and places where I feel like my younger self again: loved, carefree, happy. To stop denying myself what is simple and pure, to set aside everything once in a while, to do some things for the hell of it, to let myself live, for once.

T

***

he sun extends its rays through bare branches and evergreen foliage, dappling my body and the earth with speckles of luminescent warmth. I draw in a deep

breath, imagining the cold, piney air traveling through every vessel in my body. It’s winter in California — post-storm, at that. The creek roars and rushes down the rocks, slicing through the earthy slopes. Behind me, I can hear my dad’s steady breaths as he treads uphill.

Pausing at the top of a small slope, I admire the backlit leaves above me. Why would anyone want heaven if we already have this on earth? The thought is so foreign in its wonderfulness that a giddy laugh bubbles in me. As I trot down the slope, I let myself break into a run, the same way I would when I was younger. My eyes water from the cold. My cheeks hurt from my smile.

The author as a baby in her father’s arms, pouting at a bird in a zoo.

33

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