Listening to the radio. A man and a woman are speaking in a language I don't know, possibly Mandarin, but I've caught the English terms "two-for-one stock split," "trading," "profit," and various three-letter abbreviations and "eBay."

This reminds me of weekends with my family. We would drive from Stockton to Sunnyvale or Cupertino or Mountain View, all these towns that looked like suburbs through and through. I always fell asleep on the rides there and back. My dad would perform a Hindu ceremony, with my mother assisting, and my sister and I would crack jokes with our cousin Vinay, and afterwards women in sarees would arrange potluck food on a big table while the men in khakis, jeans, and button-up or dotcom shirts would group and discuss software and hardware. The men would speak some in Kannada and some in English, and of course "datacenter" and "PHP" and "Oracle" studded their conversation, and no one lacked for work. Everyone was prosperous enough and the temples in Sunnyvale and Livermore were expanding. That's how I remember the boom.