This is my Uncle Pete. He owns a small family restaurant in the downtown district of a rust-belt city. The restaurant smells exactly the same as it did when I was a kid, and my first sharp memory of being in Uncle Pete's restaurant is Christmas, 1966. My Dad had just returned from his first 12-month tour in Vietnam and we drove all night to spend the holidays not with family we are related to by DNA but the family we are related to by memory and affection, loss and shared history.

Uncle Pete isn't my genetic uncle (actually, he is my Godfather, I have the fading black and white pictures of him holding me in his meaty paw like a football on my christening day to prove it). Uncle Pete and my Dad met in basic training before they shipped off to Korea in 1956. They formed the core of a tight posse of Rangers who hung together through something harrowing enough to bond them for low these 50 years (but of which they have never spoken outside of their circle), made it back to the U.S., some stayed in and some rotated out (my Dad went back and finished college and OCS and re-upped as an officer and did another tour in Vietnam and later, Thailand and Cambodia).

Pete went back to his big fat Greek family in the northeast but he and Dad and their gang remain tight, through marriages, kids, divorces, the loss of two of their buddies in Southeast Asia (the only two times I have ever seen my father cry), illness and now, the assault of age.

Uncle Pete has always been like a second Dad to me. He's the kind of guy I can call at 3 a.m. and tell him I need $5,000 no questions asked and he's there. He wears Aqua Velva and always carries a little black comb in his back pocket. He goes to mass every Sunday and calls women "broads" and he cried when Roy Orbison died. They don't make guys like my Uncle Pete anymore. Happy Birthday Uncle Pete and congrats on the new heart valves. May your heart beat a gazillion more times.