ArcaMax

Some people (fewer every decade) put a little sticker inside the front cover of books they own. It's called a "bookplate," and it tells people you own the book. Maybe it also makes people return the book when they borrow it from you. Sometimes the bookplate says, "From the library of," and then your name. You can have them made, and they're not expensive.

A few years ago, I bought a used three-volume set of Bruce Catton's history of the Civil War. I bought the books at an annual book fair held at the Quaker Meeting house in Westport, Massachusetts.

It's a good book fair for a nerd like me. They always have a lot of history and biography, and you can buy hot dogs and soda. They're used books, so they're cheap, and for $25, I can walk out with a winter's worth of hardcovers.

I first read the Catton series when I was 13. There's probably something wrong with a boy that age who isn't fascinated by the Civil War.

I took the books home, but I didn't read them because they got lost in the river of books that runs through my house, but I settled in with the first volume a couple of weeks ago.

Inside the front cover was a bookplate that said "Montgomery H. Throop."

Montgomery H. Throop, by the way, is a great name for a Civil War general.

I don't know if it was my old reporter blood or just curiosity, but I did a little digging and I found my Throop.

He was dead, of course, but he'd lived in Westport, Massachusetts, and he'd been born in Shanghai, China, where his parents were Episcopal missionaries. He spent the first 15 years of his life in China and went to Columbia University.

He was a decorated combat fighter pilot in World War II and flew 81 missions.

And, because all of us have to work, or most of us do, he came home from the war and worked for I.B.M., a classic mid 20th-century employer of World War II veterans with college degrees, guys with gray flannel suits and a thin gold money clip in the righthand pocket of their trousers.

He was a singer, and he sang in several choirs. He also belonged to a bird-watching club and owned a sailboat.

He had a wife, because a serious man has a wife. She's not around anymore, either.

But his books are, and I've got three of them in my library, and I'm not taking his bookplate out of the front, either.

He had a hell of a life, Throop did, and I wonder if, at the end, he heard the sound of spoken Chinese or the chatter of machine gun fire or a choir singing or the hoot of an owl. Did he sometimes dream about dogfights over Europe, or did he sometimes dream in the Chinese that surrounded him as a boy?

Tough to know, and maybe not important. Throop's dead, and a man's memories and loves and fears die when he does.

But this New England winter, when it's dark and cold, I sit in my big brown leather chair (I bought that secondhand, too) with a cup of coffee and read Throop's books.

And J.E.B. Stuart is riding around the union flank with a plume in his hat, and the boys in blue are standing off Pickett's charge, and sad-faced General Lee is riding off to surrender.

And I hear an owl hoot outside.

"Howyadoin', Throop?" I say to the ceiling.

To find out more about Marc Dion, and read words by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit www.creators.com. Dion's latest book, a collection of his of his best columns, is called "Mean Old Liberal." It is available in paperback from Amazon.com, and for Nook, Kindle and iBooks.