After a long battle with cancer, Grandpa Smith left this world.  Born in the middle of World War I, he and his older brother lost their mother in the flu epidemic of 1918.  Soon afterward, their father abandoned them and they shuffled, unwanted, from relative to relative until the Great Depression hit in 1929.  No one needed two extra hungry mouths to feed, and so at ages thirteen and fifteen they hopped a freight train and never looked back, shifting for themselves until World War II came along.  The military provided the closest thing they ever had to a home, and so there they stayed.  Most of those who made it back from the war married and fathered the baby boom generation that is still driving our economy.  My father’s generation provided the heartbeat for the final century of this past millennium.

My mother, brother and I followed him from one military base to the next.  We went from Jacksonville, Florida to Charleston, South Carolina where we sat on the sides of bridges and fished till our shoulders and legs were burned a deep copper. We climbed over rubble at Fort Sumter and listened to his stories of pirates and of treasures he felt certain were surely still buried in the sand beneath our feet.  In New London, Connecticut, we played in snow for the first time while he welded together nuclear submarines.  At Yorktown, Virginia, we waited until the tide ebbed, and then collected lead balls left over from colonial battles. 

You see, to H.T. Smith life was a grand adventure, and every day brought a gift of unlimited possibilities.  We went along for the ride.  I was the “new kid” in school nine times in twelve years.  From one base to the next, my brother and I bounced around on the back seat of the Chevy along with other things Mom gathered up at the last minute: a wash tub full of plants, the mop and broom and, once, a puppy.

We knew a few things for certain in our uncertain lives.  We knew we were responsible for packing our own stuff, and for keeping up and that good people can be found everywhere.  We understood that a home does not depend on the house you put it in.  All were valuable lessons learned at an early age.  Mother asked only one thing from life.  She prayed daily that my father would become a man of faith.  Her prayers finally persuaded him that faith is the only logical answer to questions asked by this illogical world.

In 1965 he retired to a cabin by a lake full of fish in Florida.  Sometimes he looked up from his boat to catch a glimpse of a rocket launched from Cape Canaveral.  That’s where he was when men first walked on the moon.  In between fishing, he made time to get his high school diploma and a degree from a community college.  He lost his final battle to an enemy who, eventually, always wins.  The sweet irony is that, in losing his final battle, this time he left us behind for the greatest adventure of all.