I've been watching Ken Burn's "The War" on DVD this week. Sad. Triumphant. Conflicted. Proud. It's bittersweet to hear the stories of 1942. (I'm only on part 1)

"Stardust" - Tommy Dorsey and his Orchestra (featuring a very young Frank Sinatra)

That track was recorded years before the war began, in 1936, but it seems to evoke the melancholy of that era. A global depression. Then a massive world war. Decades of misery and togetherness. A whole generation of lives, interrupted.

"Take the 'A' Train" - Duke Ellington 

I won't ramble on about how it was the greatest generation. We know it. We felt it in the precise agony of highschool history books. In the veterans, and in our own families. I'm proud to have my family's history, woven into that great tapestry. My grandmother, a manager of an army post exchange. Her first husband, a dashingly handsome pilot named Charles, who died in combat in the Pacific. My grandfather, a hard-working engineer, fixing bombers in Europe, who would meet my grandmother years later.

Those days feel so far away. Like they were lifted from this earth on a great bullet train, traveling the speed of light, streaming out into an unknown universe. The lives of those who died, flickering in the sky, one of millions in a galaxy of lost memories.

And on a completely unrelated note, Dizzy has a PSA. Bonus: "Hey Pete, Let's Eat More Meat" - Dizzy Gillespie