LAS VEGAS — There would be no reason to visit the M&M store. No rollercoaster rides at New York-New York for me. I was headed to Las Vegas without kids or parents or aunties and uncles for the first time, for a weeklong convention. Yet themes of family still found ways to surround me.

Over dinner one night, a former journalism student of mine from 20 years before asked me about a career choice that could mean taking his young family to a strange city.

I kept my advice simple. I expected him to succeed in whatever job and whatever city he settles on. But I told him that, like most guys with ambition and goals, he was underestimating the effect a big move like that could have on his relationships with his wife and children.

It is a lesson men seem destined to have to re-learn over and over: Pay attention to business at home, I said, just like you would at the office.

I thought about the value of my own advice a couple of nights later, riding down the Vegas Strip in my cousin's two-seat sports coupe.

He's never been married and never wants to be. He owns lots of houses in Vegas and California, and has as much money as he does time to do things like ride motorcycles, learn yoga in classes filled with women and eat great food at nice restaurants.

My son is named after his father, my father's older brother.

Our fathers grew up in a large family during the Great Depression, the children of a Japanese grocer and a Japanese picture bride who settled in California. They struggled to survive, only to be rounded up by their government and sent to an internment camp in the Utah desert at the start of World War II.

My uncle served in Europe with the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, while my father, who was just out of puberty, spent the war surrounded by barbed wire and men with guns.

Here we were, the sons of these men, dressed in pinstripes and shiny shoes, toasting our fathers in Las Vegas.

We drank to their spirit and to their accomplishments. We talked about women and marriage. But we kept coming back to memories of growing up, our parents and our own thoughts on family.

It went like that over and over, as I reunited with old friends and family.

And on my way back home through California, I planted the idea of an enormous family reunion in Hawai'i.

It'll be complicated and expensive to pull off. But I'm hoping that, somehow, a miracle happens, and everyone will be able to get together for what might be the last time before our children start families of their own.

It's not important when and where a reunion takes place, or how many problems will have to be overcome.

It's just important that we come together as a family.

Because no matter how far we travel, family ties keep us grounded to our shared histories.