A toy from Grandma's house

The plastic motorcycle cop, legs molded in China to form the perfect straddle, was hanging lopsided from his once-glimmering Harley Davidson. A layer of dust covered the aviator-wearing patrolman from his CHiP's-style helmet to jet-black boots. He wasn't the lawman he used to be.

His bike's seen better days, too. The foot-long motorcycle was on the verge of snapping in five different spots. The siren and radio antenna hung by frayed wires. Once able to wail and flash, the 20-year-old assembly of burnt-out bulbs and jammed motors was now dead, like the corroded 9-volt battery rusting inside the Harley's frame.

When I was a kid, no more than 5 years old, I loved this thing. I remember the smell of burning plastic it made, like a model train, when I tuned it on and let it loose. It would race across the tile floor of my grandparents' kitchen, clattering and wailing, bumping into the wooden cabinets and chasing the other motorized toys my grandfather had bought for me at flea markets and bric-a-brac shops around town.

At least 15 years since the last time I'd seen this cherished plaything, I found it. The toy was sitting on a shelf in my grandparents' living room -- the same shelf I'd always put the plastic cop after every ride. The years, though, had added clutter to the motorcycle's parking space. The thing was on top of a calendar stuck in January, 1992, with a Chinese diaroma of a white crane stuffed next to it, along with a box of pictures left over from my parents' wedding, and a dozen other events that happened more than a quarter-century ago.

For the first time in at least a decade, I was back at my grandparents' house. It's a place where I spent so much of my time as a little boy living and playing, right at that age when your first memories form, and certain smells and sights get hardwired into your brain forever.

I'd like to say that when I stepped back into this house, it was like going back in time. The television in the living room is the same hulking Sony from the 1980s. Original baby pictures of me, my brother and cousin are still hanging over the front door. The carpet is still thick and pink like it was in 1985, the same pomegranate trees grow in the back yard, and the koi pond is still shaded by creeping jasmine vines.

But my return wasn't quite a trip back 20 years. This house, its Westminster, Ca., address stamped on my grandfather's naturalization certificate hanging in the dining room, and on his death certificate tucked away in a drawer somewhere upstairs, has remained far from frozen in time. Coming back into this house was like visiting a grandmother after too many years have passed. It's aged, and like hair thins, bones get brittle and skin turns pale, time has left this place a dusty anachronism, a worn memorial to an era passed, left wrinkled by a future moving at the speed children grow up, and plastic motorcycles rust and crumble.

If those baby pictures over the door were updated, they'd show my brother off fighting a war in Afghanistan, my cousin away at college, and me, the firstborn with his portrait placed a little higher than the other grandsons, writing this memoir in the next room, wishing the koi pond still had fish inside, and the pomegranate trees were still in bloom.

A brief memoir about looking back, and sprinting ahead

Nostalgia's been courting me these past few days, but I've been able to keep her at bay by grinding through finals and working on my last few news stories as a college student. Now that all the papers have been written and exams completed, I've finally found a moment to reflect. But when I close my eyes and let my mind wander, instead of images of the past, flashes of the future fill my head.

My college years have been incredible. They've changed my life. They've defined me as a person in all the ways that matter, allowed my soul to soar and my heart to mature. During these four years and five months, I've forged lifelong friendships. I've fallen in and out of love. I've found my talent, my passion and my calling. I got out of college everything I wanted and so much more. And as I look over now at my cap and gown sitting on my bed, I feel not nostalgia, but contentment.

I'm ready to go, and I am more excited than ever to live every day once I'm gone. When I close my eyes and think about the months and years ahead, I find that my dreams are beginning to mirror reality.

I graduate from college tomorrow with degrees in journalism and political science. A few days later, I will celebrate Christmas with my family in Lakeland, Florida, and the next day I will leave to begin work on what I hope will become the most compelling, moving, and meaningful story I have yet to tackle. My reporting will take me to California, and then to Southeast Asia, where I will retrace the steps of my family as they lived, died and found their way to freedom during a time of turmoil in the world that shouldn't soon be forgotten. When I return after a few months, I will rest and reflect, and begin writing my story. I will also be eagerly awaiting the future. On June 1, I start an internship with the New York Times.

And while I've yet to fall in love and stay in love, the future, I'm sure, will lead me exactly where I need to be for that to happen.

If someone told me that my life would be like this at 22 when I was an 18-year-old moving into his first college dorm room, I would be proud of myself, beyond any doubt. But I would be proud not because of any accomplishment or title, but because I stayed true to myself, and followed my heart, not anyone else's idea of how my life should play out.

I don't know what I've done to deserve such a blessed disposition, so all I can do is say "thank you" to my mother, father, brothers, sister, and everyone else who has guided, loved, hurt and helped me, or in some way steered my path along the way to now.

A Newsroom is...

A newsroom is a frenetic hub for spit-fired facts and weighty revelations.

It’s a command center for online streams of audio bits and .jpeg bytes.

It’s a switchboard, hotline and control tower for phone calls dialed-in from disparate corners of the world, or from the seldom-used pay phone on the downtown street corner.

Like a nervous system in its synergy and synthesis of information, a newsroom takes in and processes volumes of details and reams of data.

It takes the chaos of life, death, money and politics and distills it down to the essence of what’s important, and what’s merely static obscuring the truth and the public’s best interest.

Finals

I started home from campus tired and hollowed out, still woozy from the marathon of cerebral exertion I'd just crossed off: a writing session more like an endurance trial, a grinding stretch of hunched and shivering study, a down-to-the-wire exam ever-crucial to finishing the term and ending college. This late-semester crucible had consumed me for the past day, night and morning in a sleepless amalgamation of run-together hours and sunlight melting into darkness and materializing back again. As I walked, my body was drawn toward the ground by a force more than gravity. Instinct weighed on my shoulders, urging me to crumple and rest. But as I wandered through this deeply November afternoon, my body still cursing my mind, rays of satisfaction shone behind my eyes. The thrill of victory, of getting it done -- and done right -- gave me the sensation that if I flexed my arms and pumped them strong and steady through the air, I'd take off from the ground, bound by nothing under the sky.