This week, I opened a small collection of poems I inherited decades ago and felt something shift. They were written by my great-uncle Harlow, who served in World War II and passed away in the early 1980s. I didn’t know him well, but I remember him kindly. He lived far away—to me as a child at least, in San Francisco. It always felt like more of an idea than a place—and he kept mostly to himself. He never married. He read constantly, especially history and science, and sometim