One of my earliest memories is an embroidered patch on the sleeve of my father's flight suit.

My father was in the Air Force, and when I was very young we lived at Griffiss Air Force Base in upstate New York. The patch belonged to Strategic Air Command. It showed a mailed fist emerging from a cloud and clutching lightning bolts. I was fascinated by it long before I understood what it represented. At the time, SAC stood at the center of America's nuclear deterrent. To me, it was simply part of my father.

I was born in 1958. I remember the JFK assassination. The Cuban Missile Crisis is murkier; I was 3 years old. What survives is a residue of dread. I remember klaxons, adults behaving differently, the sense that something important and frightening was happening beyond my understanding. Most of the details have faded, but I can still summon the anxiety.

Lately, I've been thinking about another child born in 1858.

An Arkansas child born that year would have been 3 when the Civil War began and 7 when it ended. He would have been too young to understand secession, slavery, military strategy or constitutional theory. Yet he would have remembered the war. Not the way historians remember it, through campaigns and dates, but the way children remember: through distracted adults, absent fathers, whispered conversations and sudden disruptions in routine.

What interests me is how long those memories might have lasted.

A child born in Arkansas in 1858 could easily have lived into the 1940s. He might have ridden behind a mule team as a boy........

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