One of the Blinn College Stories. A California kid and an East Texas forestry major who smelled like a health-food store lived across the hall from each other in the fall of 1988. They had almost nothing in common. Nearly forty years later, one of them is still one of the strangest and nicest people the other has ever known. This is about Todd.
There are thousands of people who have wandered in and out of my life over the last fifty-six years. Most I've forgotten, or at least they've gone fuzzy around the edges after all this time. Then there are people like Todd Smith.
Todd has somehow managed to remain exactly as I remember him for nearly forty years. That's actually not true. He hasn't remained exactly the same at all. He's somehow become even more Todd over time.
I first met Todd in the fall of 1988 at Blinn College in Brenham, Texas. He lived directly across the hall from me in Memorial Hall. If you've read any of these stories already, you'll know Memorial Hall was somewhere between Animal House and Bible camp, depending on which side of the hallway you happened to live on.
Todd and I could not have been more different.
I was a California kid whose plans consisted primarily of tennis, Nintendo, Top Ramen, and figuring out what I wanted to do with my life. Todd was from East Texas and was into forestry, technical writing, Jesus, vitamins, and civic duty. Somehow, none of that ever seemed to matter.
While I occasionally smelled like Top Ramen, Todd smelled like vitamins.
And I mean that literally.
Todd had a giant tackle box full of vitamins for just about every ailment known to mankind. Fish oil, B vitamins, vitamin C, things I couldn't pronounce and wasn't entirely convinced were intended for human consumption. Add to that his allergies, sinus problems, and sleep issues, and I suspect half his daily calories came from supplements.
To this day, if someone bottled Todd Smith
as a cologne, I'm reasonably certain it would smell like fish oil and a health food store.
Todd also kept boxes of VHS tapes from the 700 Club and PTL tucked neatly under his bed. For a kid across the hall blasting Public Enemy, that was its own kind of exotic.
Both were pillars of 1980s televangelism. Pat Robertson's 700 Club was the flagship of the Christian Broadcasting Network — and Robertson had actually run for the Republican presidential nomination in 1988, the very fall Todd and I met. PTL, the Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker empire, had spectacularly collapsed the year before in a fraud-and-scandal implosion that was all over the news. So Todd's neatly boxed tapes weren't just devotional — they were, unintentionally, a primary-source archive of a very particular American moment. Looking back, I suspect Todd spent most of his freshman year quietly wondering if Memorial Hall was some kind of missionary assignment.
His room was immaculate. Ours was not.
His door would occasionally be open. Ours was rarely closed.
He was organized and disciplined. We were trying to figure out if Princess Zelda was hidden behind the 847th random bush in Hyrule.
He was trying to save souls while I was trying to save Princess Zelda.
It all somehow worked.
Todd had a soft voice and a Texas twang that sometimes made him difficult to hear, but he had an intensity about his beliefs that I admired even when I didn't particularly share them. He cared deeply about just about everything. His faith. School. Forestry. Tennis. Voting. Technical writing. Todd was serious about life.
He once became genuinely excited while explaining the difference between soil and dirt.
“Never call it dirt,” he told me one day.
“It’s dirt, Todd.”
“No, it’s soil.”
“Looks like dirt.”
“No sir. Dirt is displaced soil.”
It was perhaps the most Todd conversation imaginable.
Todd, it turns out, was exactly right, and it's a real distinction soil scientists make. Soil is the living, structured system where things grow — minerals, organic matter, water, air, and a staggering population of microbes, all arranged in layers. Dirt is what you get when that system is displaced: soil out of place, on your jeans or your kitchen floor, stripped of its structure and its life.
So dirt is displaced soil
isn't Todd being pedantic — it's essentially the textbook line. He was a forestry and soil-science guy to his bones, and he wanted you to respect the ground you were standing on. Nearly forty years later, I've never once been able to call it dirt without hearing him correct me.
Todd was a forestry major, though not the kind I was familiar with growing up in California. He wasn't talking about giant sequoias or Yosemite. He was into Southern pine forests, forest management, and soil science. He absolutely geeked out over technical writing assignments. I distinctly remember him writing an entire paper on the proper use of a crescent wrench. Just imagine trying to explain what a crescent wrench is to someone who's never seen one before. Todd loved that sort of thing.
We played lots of tennis together over those two years. We were pretty evenly matched and probably split our matches right down the middle. We'd walk across campus to the courts and rally for a while before playing a few sets. Looking back, I can't remember a single conversation we had about girls. Politics? Sure. Religion? Absolutely. Forestry? More than I would have guessed possible. Girls? Not so much.
He dressed exactly how you'd imagine Todd Smith dressed. Somewhere between tennis whites and a late-1980s South Carolina real estate agent who occasionally appeared on the 700 Club.
He also drove a pretty cool blue Jeep truck, which frankly seemed wildly out of character for someone who smelled primarily of vitamins.
One of the most important things Todd ever did for me happened in 1988.
He took me to vote for the first time.
At eighteen years old, I really didn't care very much about politics. Todd did. George Bush was running for president and, being from Texas, he might as well have been a rock star in East Texas. Ronald Reagan was leaving office, people talked politics everywhere you went, and voting on campus was a really big deal.
Todd spent days beforehand explaining why voting mattered.
Eventually, I voted.
And then I voted in the next election. And the one after that. And every primary and election since.
Todd picked a big one for a first vote. The 1988 presidential election was the fall we met, and in East Texas it was inescapable: Vice President George H. W. Bush — a Texan — against Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis, with Reagan finishing his second term and handing off the torch. It was the first time in 152 years a sitting vice president would win the presidency.
It was, improbably, an even more Texas election than it looked: Dukakis's running mate was Lloyd Bentsen, a sitting U.S. senator from Texas, so Texans had a favorite son on each ticket. Bush carried the state by about thirteen points. None of which I understood at eighteen — I just knew Todd thought it mattered enough to walk me there. It's funny the things that become important forty years later. If you'd asked eighteen-year-old Brooks what lesson he'd remember most from Blinn, I'm fairly certain voting matters
would not have been the answer. Yet here we are.
After Blinn, Todd transferred to Texas A&M, where forestry continued to be very much a thing. Years later he joined the Peace Corps and eventually found himself living deep in the Ecuadorian jungle, in the Amazon rainforest.
Of course he did.
At this point, I don't think anyone who knew Todd was particularly surprised by this development.
He eventually returned to Texas for a while before finding his way back to Ecuador once again. Somewhere along the way he met his wife through Farmers Only, which somehow sounds exactly like the way Todd Smith should meet his future wife. It turns out she was from Marysville, Washington, of all places.
Today he lives in Ecuador raising fancy nuts.
I understand how ridiculous that sentence sounds, but it also happens to be entirely true.
Then one day, some thirty years after meeting in Memorial Hall, I found myself hiking Mt. Pilchuck in Washington with Todd, introducing him to my work friends.
And Todd was still Todd.
He was fit from living in the jungle, perhaps a bit stranger than I remembered, and exactly the same wonderful person I'd met across the hall in 1988.
There are a lot of things I remember about Blinn College. I remember Catfish Thursdays. I remember Nintendo and Memorial Hall and cow roping in the parking lot outside my dorm window. I remember putting maps on my walls and surviving on Top Ramen some weeks.
But mostly I remember the people.
It's funny how life works sometimes. At eighteen years old, Todd probably thought I needed a little more Jesus in my life, and I probably thought he needed a little more Nintendo in his.
We were probably both right.
What I've come to appreciate forty years later is that people don't have to be like us to become important in our lives. Sometimes the people who teach us the most are the ones we have the least in common with when we first meet them.
Todd taught me to vote. He taught me to appreciate people who see the world differently than I do. He taught me that kindness and conviction can comfortably occupy the same space. And perhaps most importantly, he taught me that remaining true to who you are is a pretty wonderful thing.
Thirty-eight years later, Todd Smith remains one of the strangest and nicest people I've ever known.
I mean that as the highest compliment I can give another human being.
After all these years, I still think of my friend across the hall.