@HomewithDean – Homily 06/18

I was adopted from birth. I don’t know my biological father. Whoever he is, he has never been interested in having a relationship with me. But my real father—the man who chose to raise me—I knew him, and these thoughts are for him.My father was born on a Friday, October 6, 1922, in the one horse town of Deer Trail, about 53 miles east of Denver in Arapaho County, Colorado. He was named Robert Thurman Sharp, but to everyone in the world I knew he was just Bob. As I understand it, his parents lived for a time in Oklahoma and Arkansas (where he picked up the drawl that infected me as a kid) before they settled down on a farm just outside Ottumwa, Iowa.He was a child of the Great Plains, a child of the Great Depression, a child of the Dust Bowl. He had an 8th Grade education and a talent for operating heavy equipment that, along with farm life, he spent the better part of his youth trying to walk away from. He was 19 years old when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and within the week he enlisted to fight in WWII. In an attempt to get as far away from Iowa and tractors as he could he joined the Navy and hoped to be a battleship gunner. He was at the top of his training group when a physical revealed he was color blind which at the time disqualified him from operating artillery. So my father was reluctantly transferred to the Sea Bees (the newly formed Naval Construction Battalion) to serve his country half way around the world, sitting on a tractor, plowing jungles into airstrips in the South Pacific. After the war he did all he could to not return to Iowa, and ended up married and operating heavy equipment in Long Beach, California. By the time I showed up he was running Scholl Canyon Landfill for the Los Angeles County Sanitation District.My father was a quiet, soft-spoken man. He would never have called himself a leader but he was so capable and dependable and so good to the people around him, that they kept putting him in positions of leadership because they trusted him—whatever the task—to get it done. He was t