Colter had always considered the verse.  From what he could tell, Colter figured Grandfather Hobbes had never been a large man; the biggest thing on him had been his nose.   He’d grown up the son of Irish immigrants.  Escaping the steel slums of Scranton, Pennsylvania, he’d driven south to New Mexico, where he’d met and married my mother at sixteen, following their two week courtship.  During this time, Grandfather Hobbes had slept in his truck, washing up at the filling station, before coming in at lunch to order chocolate egg creams from Grandma Eatsie, just a mile from the little brown house.  By the time Grandfather Hobbes had been drafted, they’d already had two with another on the way.  Thus, he left Colter at three with nothing but a snapshot and the bible verse to relay to him what it meant to be a man.

Read this story in its entirety