Veterans’ Day stirs up three memories: A boy tugs open a dresser drawer to talk to his dad. A man named Bucky beckons from a photo on a wall half a world away. A strange man thumps up our stairs at midnight to grab me.

The first memory belongs to a friend. His parents married in January 1942. He was born in November. Soon after, his dad went off to war.

His mother rode a train to Missouri to share a few tender hours with her husband near his Army camp. And that was all there was.

Her husband, his dad, died in Belgium in 1945.

“My mother probably never looked at, never thought of, another man,” my friend tells me. “She was like a swan who lost her life’s mate. She knew there would be no other.”

So he grew up without a dad, without even a memory of one, without knowing fully what a dad was supposed to be.

“When I wanted to talk with my dad,” he says, “ I ran up to my mother’s bedroom and pulled open the dresser drawer and talked to his uniform and his medals and the flag that had draped his coffin.

“When I think of my dad, that’s what I think of. I think of all those times I talked to him in the dresser drawer,” he says.