Happy birthday, Grandpa!

Had he lived, my dear grandfather would have been 90 years old today.

I know everybody thinks their grandfather was the greatest. But mine really was. I'll put him up against anyone.

I can't remember a time when I didn't adore my father's father. By many standards, he was an unexceptional man. He didn't finish elementary school. The Army rejected him for having flat feet. In all his 71 years of living on this planet, he had traveled no farther than Kentucky -- and Georgia, for the great reject the U.S. Army issued.

Those people who would dismiss him on those terms don't know my Grandpa.

He was loving, loyal and kind. He loved a chaw of Red Man, mixed with Beech Nut. Nothing was more restful to him than sitting on the front porch on a summer's evening with a bowl of vanilla ice cream. And no meal was complete without a spoonful of Peter Pan peanut butter.

(I'm glad my grandfather didn't live to see the Peter Pan recall earlier this year. It would have crushed him. Choosy mothers may choose Jif, but grandfathers loved Peter Pan.)

Grandpa's childhood was rough. He was 6 when his mother died, and his father sent him into the bowels of the earth as a coal miner at age 14. He was paid in scrip -- or rather, my great-grandfather was. Grandpa didn't see any of his pay for years.

He married my grandmother in 1940, and together they raised five children. My father was their second born, and the second son. While he worked in the sawmill by day, he, my grandmother and the kids worked to build what became the family home. Grandpa designed it himself, and it was the place I thought of as home for my first 25 years. Even today, the word "home" conjures up images of the house my grandfather designed and led his family in building.

I was the first grandchild, and I freely admit my Grandpa spoiled me rotten. One of my first memories is of being devastated because I couldn't marry him. I thought then -- and I still think today -- my grandmother got the last good one.

My childhood memories are filled with Grandpa, who served as a surrogate father when his own son abandoned me, my mother and my sister. He was a consummate storyteller who could keep me in stitches. I double over when I regale others with his stories, but they look at me with stony silence. That storytelling gene, undoubtedly, died with him.

I was in college when my grandfather began having health problems. The coal mines took their toll, and combined with years of smoking, he suffered from emphysema. He suffered a heart attack while in the hospital for pneumonia, and while he recovered from that, it was another stealth disease that robbed his mind and eventually claimed his life.

Alzheimer's disease. It was a funny-sounding term I remember reading about in John Irving's Cider House Rules. Now, we were living it. Thoughts and functions that once seemed involuntary were taking their toll on my wonderful grandfather. Nine months before it would claim his life, the disease erased any memory of me. I -- and the rest of the family -- became mere faces hovering over his bed.

His hard-fought battle was lost in 1991, and a day doesn't go by that I don't think of my Grandpa. I honored his memory a couple of years later by naming my daughter after him, and I tell her often about the great-grandfather I wish she had known -- the great-grandfather who would have poured all his love onto her.

Happy birthday, Grandpa. I'll love you forever.