by Kenny Easwaran L'98

     Because I knew Bob for four years at Stanford, lots of my memories from high school have been displaced.  I remember one time we were hanging out in Columbae (where we lived since September), and someone asked us how we had met, and we were both thinking for a moment, about to say something about meeting freshman year, but that didn't sound right, and all of a sudden I said "oh yeah, we went to high school together".  Hearing from the Lawrenceville people has brought some of them back, but I think I will always remember him as I knew him in college.
     My earliest memory of Bob is some time freshman year at Lawrenceville, when I met him and Milan.  They would always walk around together, and this time I was talking to them in the big study room on the second floor of the freshman boys dorm.  I had found out they were taking guitar lessons and tried to get them to come with me to a music department picnic on the lawn.
     I remember spring of that year, we played together on the freshman tennis team.  Chris and I were always the bottom two (though we switched places a few times), but I remember Bob and Yann were farther up the ranks.  Every day we had practice, I remember we would come back to Davidson afterwards and get sodas and hang out for a while before Bob went home.  (I always stayed at least until dinner.)
     III form year (sophomore year), we were all in Griswold together, and I remember Bob and Milan and I always hung out in Chris and Yann's room, or Tony's room.  I remember putting together the day student skit for the Christmas party, which was a lot of fun.  I remember our whole big group always sitting together at meals in the Kirby dining area, because Griswold wouldn't let girls in.  Bob also got his driver's license halfway through this year (because he was a bit older, and because Pennsylvania had a younger driving age), and everyone else was always jealous, but he eventually started taking people out to lunch and doing things like that.
     IV form year I had started hanging out with another group of younger friends a lot, but I still spent time with everyone hanging out in Griswold at least.  Senior year, we were taking AP Physics C and Math Seminar together, and in the fall, African American Literature.  (Tony was in all three classes also.)  I remember he really liked Physics, and he liked Dr. Gaffney a lot, but he had to spend too much time working on it all, so he didn't stay with it through the whole year.  I think it was hard for him to reach that conclusion, that some class was too hard, but it ended up making him a lot happier once he didn't have to do that, and he had more free time to do other things he liked more.  I remember going out with him to lunch a bunch of times, with his car, and we had some great conversations about life, the future, and all sorts of things that year.
     In the spring, I remember we went to Stanford's admit weekend together, and had a lot of fun.  I don't remember how we found out where we were staying for that weekend (since we didn't really have cell phones or e-mail at Stanford then), but we managed to meet up and visit each other.  It turned out the place he was staying was where I would live the following year when we came here.
     At the end of the year, I remember we both decided to take the statistics AP (because math seminar had been covering probability theory), so we just stayed up late the night before reviewing the study book, and both ended up doing very well.
     At all of our post-prom and post-graduation parties, I remember Bob kept offering to drive people places when they needed to get home, or to meet someone.  Even though he hated getting woken up in the morning, he volunteered a few times to wake up early and drive someone somewhere, and then came back to hang out with us.  As everyone has mentioned in their other memories, he would always be there playing guitar and getting us to sing along.
     When we got to Stanford, things changed slightly, because we were living pretty far apart from each other on campus, in totally different dorms.  My dorm had freshman who were in the SLE (structured liberal education) program, which all the other freshmen thought was dorky and weird, and he was living in Branner, the largest all-freshman dorm, which everyone else on campus saw as a big party place, and was sort of scary if you didn't live there.  So our circles didn't interact very much, but I remember in the fall I managed to convince him to come visit me once or twice.  At Thanksgiving, Yann came by to visit, and we went up to Yann's grandparents' place in Santa Rosa, which became a tradition for the three of us, since Yann went to school and lived so far from everyone else, and since the three of us were the only ones who had any connection to California.
     At Christmas, when we all came home for the first time from college, he had a big New Year's party for all of us at his place, and I remember it being so great that he had arranged for us all to come back together, because we hadn't seen each other in so long, and had had so many new experiences.  That was the last time that we were all together in one place.
     In the winter, I started visiting him a lot, because I had felt guilty about making him visit me without visiting him myself.  (Probably going to visit him that quarter is what made me so good at visiting all my friends scattered across campus the next year.)  By this point, he had established a really close group of friends in Branner, and they spent all their time together, so he never came out to visit me much after that.  We had a lot of fun hanging out that year, just talking about things and drinking a bit, and in general hanging out.
     The beginning of that year was when I had finally realized I was bisexual, and I had only told a few close friends, and was very nervous about telling people, and how they would react.  That spring I finally managed to get up the courage to tell Bob, which was tough because he was the first straight male that I told.  But he was so nice, and I remember him saying "I always wanted a gay friend", and over the next few years, he would occasionally ask me questions about that aspect of my life, and the way he dealt with it made me much more confident about telling other people.  His support always meant a lot to me.
     Sophomore year, we lived in houses that were closer together, but we didn't see each other that much more.  I did visit a lot, because I visited all my friends around campus a lot that year, and we hung out and talked and listened to music a lot.  We went to Yann's grandparents' place again, and had a lot of fun talking about things.  That was right at the time he and Lynn started going out, and it was great to see something like that coming into his life.  I had met Lynn freshman year when they had just been friends, and it had seemed that they would be so great for each other.
     Sohpomore year I had just gotten an electric violin, and I remember helping him pick out an amp and effects for his electric guitar.  So one day I brought my violin over, and plugged it into his equipment, and we just had a lot of fun trying out all sorts of things.  I wish I had done that more often.
     Junior year, I went abroad to Hungary in the fall, and didn't keep in touch with people that much, but I e-mailed him right when I was about to get back.  He invited me to his 21st birthday, which was just with his closest friends that he had known since Branner.  It was fun hanging out, just with six or eight people.  We didn't drink all that much, as everyone at college has already been drinking before they're 21, and it was great catching up with him, and all his friends (who I was definitely becoming friends with by then).  Over the next few weeks, we hung out a bunch of times, and I actually managed to get him to come visit me in the house I was living at that year.  I think that was the first time he actually came and visited me since fall freshman year.  (He was so close with his friends that he never went out anywhere else.  He was the only one out of our group from high school that managed to get a group as close in college, it seems.)  After a few weeks of occasionally hanging out together, I had been searching for a cell phone, because the campus phone service was too expensive for the little I actually used it.  Once I got a cell phone, I knew I would occasionally call high school friends and my family because of free long distance, and that it would be so much more useful to me for receiving calls, because I'm so rarely in my room.  So he brought me out to Palo Alto, and we went to a couple different shops, and he was very careful to help me check out the different plans and figure out which one was best for me.  He was always very good at making deals and figuring out what to do with money like that.  Unfortunately, after that time, we didn't see each other for a few months, until we coincidentally found out we would be living in the same house senior year, as I mentioned in the shorter memories page.
     That summer, we were both staying at Stanford (though he was in some university subsidized apartments just off campus), so I invited him to my 21st birthday party.  That was a lot of fun, because so many of my friends came by, and it turned out that a lot of them knew each other from other random connections.  In particular, Bob Frezza also knew my friends Bob Schafer and Bob McGrew who were both in my fraternity.  It turned out Bob Frezza had helped Bob Schafer with some company he was running, and had worked with Bob McGrew at PayPal.  It was great to see him coming out of where he lived and spending time with other friends, and not just his closest friends from Branner.  It was also great to see that some of my other friends knew him, and it was great to see that they knew what a wonderful person he was, when I told them he had died.
     The rest of that summer, I came to visit him and Lynn in the apartment they were living at off campus.  I remember one evening coming out to visit them, and then going to the hot tub with them for a while, and then playing Risk for a while.  That was a very fun evening, and I think I came by to visit several other times.
     In the fall, I ended up living just two doors down from Bob and Lynn, with the RA and my roommate being the only other people on our hallway.  So we hung out a lot, and talked about all sorts of things.
     I remember one evening talking with him about economics, and trying to figure out what it was he was studying in those classes.  We discussed the incentives of competition, and I learned what 'externalities' are, and tried to argue that they're not really external.  I really want to continue that conversation, because I remember we were debating about whether a total monopoly might actually be just as good as a competitive market, because they would be forced to take into account all externalities.
     I remember we were discussing grad school applications, and what we were planning on doing the following year, how he and Lynn had planned on going to grad school in the same place, or if not, then one of them would go to grad school and the other would get a job (Bob in computers or Lynn teaching) near where the other was.  Talking about grad school made us realize we needed to take the GRE, and Bob got us all organized, and finally got a group of five of us together to take it.  We needed to wait on the phone for at least an hour, and we had to find a day we would be able to make it.  It was October, but it turned out that although they offered the test every day, the next free day was in December.  I remember Bob got up early in the morning to drive us, just as he had at the end of high school, no matter how much he hated doing that.  If it hadn't been for him, I doubt I would have had the test scores in time to send off to graduate schools.
     I remember when we went to Yann's grandparents' place for the third time this Thanksgiving (because I had been abroad the previous fall) and Bob and I had some great conversations about our private lives, and our relation to the campus mainstream, and how all our friends seemed to be just from one segment of Stanford's population, no matter how many people it seemed like we knew, when we were on the car ride up and back.
     I remember one of the last weeks of the quarter, Bob had gotten a new game for his PlayStation called "Frequency", which involved trying to follow music as it was playing, and beat out the patterns on the controller.  No one else liked it except Bob and me, and we had a lot of fun playing it together and advancing to the higher levels of the game.
     During finals week, because we had no classes and had totally different exam and paper schedules, we had more free time to spend together.  One day I went with Bob and Lynn to Toys’R’Us to buy Christmas presents for someone, and I saw a computer game I wanted (Civilization III), and they decided to buy it for me.  I remember several days that week waking up in the middle of the afternoon or some other time, when Bob or Lynn or one of our friends would walk into my room and say hi, and I would stop by in their room until all hours of the night to see how studying was going, or to play Frequency or just hang out.  It was so great being able to spend time with them just on random little occasions like that.  He would make us Orange Julius, and I would make them lemonade.  I wish we could have continued like that for the rest of the year.  I remember the day before I left, I hugged everyone else goodbye, but we expected to see each other in just a week, when Christina had organized a get together for a lot of our high school friends.
     I think we always tend to remember people as they were the last time we spent time together, and so I will always remember him as we were this fall.  I just read all the things everyone else has written, and looked at all the pictures on the page, and none of it seems to be the Bob that I know.  We all know different sides of him, and we all have to hold onto him in our own special ways.  What I know him for is those conversations we were able to have, just the two of us, with no one else around.  We talked about all sorts of things, from our personal lives, to the future or past, to friends, to academics or music.  I won’t say that I could always talk to him about anything, but in these conversations we had, we definitely hit almost any subject I’ve talked to anyone about, and we were both able to be so serious and totally respect everything the other one had to say, so it always felt comfortable.
     Anyway, I've left out so many of the little things, the day-to-day things, because I've known him in so many different ways over the last eight years, and I can't possibly get them all down here.  But as I remember them, I'll add more reminiscences to the shorter memories page

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