Generation P P is teaching Danni to tell time. Not too long ago he was at 30,000 feet, off the coast of Spain, or somewhere else, carrying four thermonuclear bombs and waiting for orders to blow up the world. Now he's in the living room with an old alarm clock in his hand. Tiny, seven year old, Danielle is scrunched up against her 6' 3" grandfather counting off minutes in blocks of five. It's a scene Norman Rockwell would have a field day with. P's, hulking frame, gray hair and reading glasses, his large hands and forearms, the stern yet patient expression on his face juxtaposed against fifty nine pounds of wriggling, struggling Danielle; perfect little hands, flawless skin, eyes that could light up the dark. P, aka, Lt. Col. James D. Craven Ret. moves the hands on the clock to a new position, "Okay Dan, what time is it?" Danni hesitantly presses her finger against the one. She looks straight into P's eyes. "Five?" "Uh huh." A tiny finger covers the two. Again she studies her grandfather's face for approval. "Ten?" And so it goes, quarter till two, twenty after four, noon and midnight, I sit across the room and witness the very process that has brought us from the caves and the trees to Moon landings and laser surgery. "Good girl!," P is saying with a smile as a beaming Danni does a few flips across the living room floor to celebrate her new found knowledge. Danielle and her sister Jessica are spending August with their grandparents. The waves and ripples of some giant corporate merger five thousand miles away have put their mom under tremendous pressure at work just when the girls are out of school for the summer. The youngsters, ages seven and ten, have been frequent guests here. Jim Craven and his wife, Jane, have often put their granddaughters ahead of travel plans, social events or just relaxation. As a frequent guest myself, generally orphaned temporarily by some personal or professional disaster, I’ve watched them grow from babies putting nervous toes into the shallow end of the pool, to veritable fish with the seeming ability to stay submerged 'til it's time for dinner or the latest from Goosebumps on TV. The enormous cultural strain on young families in modern America has caused the process of child raising to boil over into the lives of grandparents. Working moms and the prohibitive cost of day care combined with the extended healthiness and life expectancy of seniors has led to the retreading of large numbers of WWII generation parents. Colonel Craven got his unusual nick letter, "P", by a default of sorts. His wife, Jane, has made a life of self education. She's the kind of person that Alex Trebec, of Jeopardy, has nightmares about. Jim Craven started to jokingly refer to her as "M," after the venerable spy master of the James Bond novels. Their three grown children, assuming that M was for mom, began to call their father P for pop. The remaining inhabitants of the known universe soon followed suite. I read this morning that Bob Dole, if he is elected, will be the last person of P's generation to lead our country. I don't know Bob Dole, but if Jim Craven is any indicator of the type of person we’re about to go on without, I feel a deep sense of dread. Early this century P was arguably the poorest kid in Belleville, New Jersey. His father had disappeared when he was two. Sixty years later Colonel Craven finally found his Dad's grave in an old cemetery in Boston Fortunately or not, P grew up before the advent of the welfare state. There was no color TV, no high topped sneakers and barely enough food. In the summer, to temporarily give his Mom one less mouth to feed, he was shipped off to his uncle's farm outside Christiansburg, VA. It was summer camp, Depression style. No swimming, no baseball, no counselors, not even electricity. P spent his school vacation chopping wood, feeding pigs, carrying milk urns and listening to the train whistle at night as it neared Christiansburg, thirteen miles away. His uncle’s family went that short distance to town only once each summer. Some families never went into town. One of the locals told P that he'd been hearing that train whistle all his life, but had never actually seen the train. When World War II arrived the Army Air Corp. began looking for "the best and the brightest “to fly its huge B 17 bombers against Hitler's relentless expansion. Tall, skinny, twenty one year old Jim Craven found himself at the controls of a 60,000 pound, 10,000horsepower machine that could deliver four tons of high explosives to the heart of Nazi Germany. P flew 25 bombing missions against the Third Reich including the first daylight raid on Berlin. I asked him, one day, what it was like on that flight. "Well," he said, lowering his newspaper and looking thoughtfully off into places and events that the rest of us can scarcely comprehend, "they really didn't want us there." After one mission, with a damaged aircraft and no remaining fuel, P barely made it across the English Channel before bringing the bomber in for a controlled crash in the fog shrouded English countryside. The huge plane spun in a 360 degree circle and came to rest in a field. No one was injured. During another raid on Germany, attacks by enemy fighters were so thick and unrelenting, Colonel Craven's gunners fired their entire 10,000 round supply of 50 calibre machine ammunition. "The worst part," P told me, after I dragged that story out of him, "was that we were still over Germany." After the war P briefly returned to civilian life, only to be recalled to duty as hostilities flared in Korea and the Cold War began to take its ugly shape. All P really wanted was a good job and a safe place to raise his family. But America needed his skill and experience. After training on B29s, the last of the piston engine bombers, Craven was transferred to the Strategic Air Command at Salina, Kansas. There he was introduced to the first aerial dreadnought of the Cold War, the jet powered B47. The new plane was incredibly smooth and powerful compared to the lumbering warhorses he'd flown in WWII. When asked, P still speaks of it fondly. "It was more like a fighter," he told me, "fast and maneuverable." Also, at that time, it was the deadliest weapon ever devised by man, a doomsday machine of unimaginable effectiveness. As the theory of Mutually Assured Destruction became the philosophy of defense in the 1950s, Colonel Craven and his aircraft were the most unmistakable assurance. Ultimately P would go on to command an ever advancing series of nuclear armed bombers; those silvery brothers in arms that patrolled endlessly through the midnight skies from Diego Garcia to the South China Sea. It was a dangerous job based on very risky theory. Thanks to people like Jim Craven, it worked. The aforementioned facts alone should be enough to make any man a hero. What greater macho could there be than the proven courage and demonstrated ability to take out entire cities with the flick of a wrist. If the measure of manhood is simply the ability to obliterate one’s enemies and to operate effectively while staring into the face of death, my friend P makes Bruce Willis look like Little Bo Peep. One night has passed since Danni's instruction on the measurement of time. It's early morning and P has settled into his favorite chair with a copy of the New York Times and a hot cup of coffee. For a man who grew up in an America where right and wrong were clearly understood, easily defined concepts, the state of our society today is a nagging concern. Rampant illiteracy and illegitimacy, vulgar rap music and the relentless portrayal of random violence and casual sex as acceptable, even admirable, facets of contemporary life furrow his brow. It must leave him to wonder if this, the tattered remains of a once magnificent culture, was worth penetrating the wall of flak over Berlin or the endless tedium of piloting an enormous B52 in the long hours before dawn, contemplating what it would be like to commit megacyde and praying he never got "the word." P's moment of solitude is short lived. Hyper, irrepressible Danielle has arrived on his lap with a world of new questions and a tug at his newspaper. I look across the room at him in sympathy, expecting him to shoo the child away or beg for just a little more time to relax. But that's not what heroes do. Together they study the Times, learning new words and new concepts. There is no hint of irritation in P's voice, no half hidden signal that assisting in the care and education of this child may finally be something above and beyond the call of his duty. Right is right, wrong is wrong, what could be simpler than that. In the sleepless hours, I can't help but wonder, is P the last of his breed? Are we doomed to live in a world where good and bad become unrecognizable lumps in a pea soup of cultural diversity? Will our heroes simply be killers and nothing more? I don't know Bob Dole. My half century of experience with career politicians has been disappointing, at best. But I'm praying that he's at least half the man P is. For the sake of little Danni, and the rest of us.