The Map
In 2015, Dad suffered a mini-stroke while teaching a Sunday morning Bible class at the church where he served as the “Golden Age Minister.” The stroke temporarily paralyzed his voice while he was teaching, and convinced that it might happen again, perhaps while preaching a sermon or officiating at a wedding, Dad decided it was time to retire from the ministry. He was eighty-six.
Mom worried that Dad wouldn’t know what to do with himself during retirement. Yes, he could garden in the summertime, but what would he do during those long Ozark winters? He wouldn’t even be able to drive his beloved John Deere tractor. Her first thought was to put him to work cleaning out closets. After all, they hadn’t been thoroughly cleared in decades, and my parents had lived in the dreamhouse they designed and built since 1963.
My sister and I, however had another idea: Dad should write his autobiography.
Meet the Man From Hobbtown
The idea appealed to Dad, and he launched into the project with enthusiasm. His memory was always vivid and sharp, but he conducted online research to enhance his memories. He tracked down the ships’ logs he’d written as a yeoman in the Navy during the Korean Conflict, photos of the ships on which he’d served, and the complete lyrics to songs he remembered from USO shows. He revised the text diligently, and carefully selected dozens of photos to illustrate his life story. He even chose the cover photo—a picture taken on the steps of the community church where his family had worshipped when he was a boy in Hobbtown, Arkansas. Dad stands on the lower step—a ten- or eleven-year-old boy in overalls, arms crossed, staring into the camera—family and friends behind him. Entitled Meet the Man From Hobbtown, the autobiography was privately published in 2019. Dad was eighty-nine.
COVID struck shortly after Dad turned 90. He and Mom struggled during the first year of the lock-down in their dreamhouse. In 2021, they sold it and moved into assisted living; in 2022, they moved into a nursing home—for Dad’s failing health, not Mom’s. Then the unthinkable happened.
Just two days before Christmas, Mom fell and broke her hip. She lingered to celebrate their 70th wedding anniversary, and died a few days later in January 2023.
A Place That No Longer Exists
Dad faced this loss with courage and faith, but just as Mom had worried that he wouldn’t know what to do with himself when he retired, I began to worry that he wouldn’t know how to fill the empty days ahead without her. After Mom’s funeral, I flew back from Missouri to my home in Portland, trying to envision a new project for him, something that had meaning and purpose.
And then it dawned on me: Dad could make a map of Hobbtown, something none of us had thought to include in his autobiography.
The community of Hobbtown, nestled in the hill country between the Boston Mountains to the north and the Arkansas River to the south, no longer exists. It was beginning to fade away when I was a child. The church was still there—and Uncle Will and Aunt Bessie’s house. But by the time I was in my early twenties, Dad’s childhood home was gone and my great-grandparents’ house had been abandoned. Now the only landmark that remains is the family cemetery.
My memories of Hobbtown are hazy, but my older cousin Roger remembers it well. Shortly after Mom’s death, I asked him to take a stab at a Hobbtown map, then e-mail it to Dad and me.
That’s when the magic began to unfold.
Memory After Memory
Dad was thrilled with the project. He amended Roger’s map. Several times. Adding one landmark after another: roads, footpaths, the church and school, Mr. Hobbs’s store, my great-grandfather’s blacksmith shop and sorghum mill, my grandfather’s sawmill. Dad also added one residence after another—not just homes that belonged to his aunts, uncles, and cousins, but to the many families who played formative roles in his life.
The map also triggered memory after memory, stories about people and places that weren’t in his autobiography. When he added Frank and Molly Carpenter’s place to the map, he remembered that a tornado had ripped the roof off their house and neighbors gathered to replace it. The shingles, Dad said, were handcrafted from white oak, and made on-site. Dad carried freshly made shingles from the carpenter to the men working on the roof. He left the shingles at the bottom of their ladder. “I was old enough to carry a load of shingles,” he remembered, “but not old enough to climb the ladder.”
Then there’s the weaning house. When each of her thirteen children got married, Great-grandmother Morrison would banish the newlyweds to the weaning house for a few weeks so they could learn, in complete privacy, what it meant to be a married couple. The weaning house was at the far end of my great-grandparents’ farm, so far away that its location was literally off Dad’s map.
Dad also recalled a historic moment that took place at his married sister’s house—"Deen and Joy’s home” on the map. Dad, who would turn twelve in a few days, and his cousin Donald had been out hunting on the afternoon of December 7, 1941. As they headed home, they noticed several cars parked around my Aunt Deen and Uncle Joy’s place. “Something’s wrong,” Dad told Donald.
Everyone was gathered in a circle in the front room, and no one said anything as the two boys stepped inside. Dad saw tears in my grandmother’s eyes, and asked my grandfather, “What’s wrong?” “The Japanese have bombed Pearl Harbor and there are lots of casualties,” Grandfather said. He told Dad that the United States had joined the Allies in the war in Europe. He said, “If this war drags on a long time, you may have to go.” Maybe that’s why there were tears in my grandmother’s eyes.
Half a continent separated Dad and me as we worked on his map. I’d email an image of the map to Dad. He would review it and sometimes email his changes back to me. Or we’d simply talk through his changes on the phone, and I’d pencil them in, then e-mail the new revisions for his approval. That’s why both my handwriting and his appear on the map. But the map itself is entirely Dad’s creation. It was his idea to add spots of color here and there—blue for ponds and swimming holes, yellow for locations that were especially meaningful to him. In addition to the map, I took notes on the stories its creation had prompted—three pages, single-spaced and typewritten. He reviewed my notes too and sometimes corrected them.
We finished the map in early March, and although Dad and I continued to chat every day by phone, our e-mail exchanges slowed and then stopped. His health declined and so did his computer skills. “I’ve forgotten more than I used to know,” he observed.
Dreams of Hobbtown
In June, I flew to Missouri for a visit, and my sister and I then drove to the Hobbtown family cemetery for Decoration Day services with our extended family. Dad was too weak to join us, but we took copies of his autobiography and the map. He was there in spirit, and when we returned, Dad started making plans for a trip back to his boyhood home. Surely, there was a way he could travel again—just one more time.
But fate intervened.
During July and August, he fought off one serious infection after another. He was hospitalized for an extended period, and when he was released the last time, his doctor told him, “Mr. Smith, there’s nothing more I can do for you here.”
On August 30, Dad must have dreamed about Hobbtown. He reached for the painting of his childhood home that hung over his bed, and pulled it—nail and all—off the wall. The nursing home staff found him asleep the next morning with the painting across his chest. Dad died the next day.
Today would have been Dad’s 94th birthday, and the map we made together seems especially precious now. It charts not just a place that no longer exists or one man’s fading memories of childhood, it’s a roadmap into a past life, my family’s past life—and a gift to future generations.
Happy birthday, Dad. And thank you.