Grandpa and Grandma visited my wife and me all the way from Arizona. I took a brisk nighttime walk with my mother's father-a ritual of his decades in the making. We chatted away the minutes and the blocks talking primarily about World War II, something I couldn't much relate to, being born in the last days of even the Vietnam War, as well as when he and Grandma were newlyweds, something I could relate to, being married in the roaring nineties.

He talked of horrifying things he'd seen in the Pacific Theatre, the things that make all men his age talk of war and the military with a bit more measured tone. The old man spoke as if channeling a young one from another world-recalling a truck full of stacked up dead boys his age with their toe-tagged feet hanging out of the end so scarred and seared black as the faceless fruit of war. He talked of being called up to serve and having to leave his new bride so soon after the wedding, and then again later when his first child, my aunt, was born, so as to miss the first few years of her life.

Most of all I remember him slowing down the walk and looking at the moon creeping up ahead of us as our dusk walk became an evening stroll. He talked of how he would look at the moon every night on those war-torn islands in the Pacific and think of his new young wife…. knowing it was the one thing they could both look upon together that day…. knowing that while his generation saw the world in a way they'd rather not, what mattered was still back at home…. knowing that what mattered is that he still had a home…. knowing that in the days when the world could have ended it really was just beginning.

This he told me, whether he knew it or not, so that I would start knowing that every generation can become the greatest if they remember what matters most.