On Dad’s 84th birthday, Harvey called, concerned about Dad’s disconnected phone. Harvey and Dad were the last of their generation, two boys thrust into manhood by the Korean War, bound by the memories and loss.

The narrow road from Murree wound through the Himalayas, descending 7,500 feet onto the sweltering, Indus Plain. The journey in the back seat of a speeding mini-van left me nearly revisiting my breakfast. I was a high school freshman on a field trip to the Rawalpindi Leprosy Hospital.

In the quiet hill station town of Murree, daily life revolved around two shopping areas: the Upper and Lower Bazaar. Girls from my school were only permitted to visit the Upper Bazaar with its wide-open spaces, tourist shops, and restaurants. The Lower Bazaar, by contrast, was a narrow street packed with shops tucked among old colonial buildings as it wound down the hillside. Only the boys from school were allowed to visit the Lower Bazaar, a rule that felt unfair to me at the time.

After school, we ran back to the dormitory to change clothes. Thursdays were shopping days for the girls in Murree, and we only had 15 minutes before the green school bus left campus.

In the fall of 1970, we sold our single-wide and left Happy Acres Trailer Park for Fremont, California. Dad got a new job as an engineer in a water treatment plant, and we settled into a spacious two-story townhouse in a community next to a nunnery.