The late literary critic and professor Leonard Casper was from my father’s time.  He was two years older than my father, born 1921.  Both served during World War II.  Theirs was a generation of men that I understood from having “grown up” in Veterans Hospitals in Manila and New York City.  I was surrounded by them as a child, one thing I never really questioned as I was born when my father was pushing fifty.  They were all just wise, old men.  And one by one, they left.