I'm still not entirely certain what all had managed to get into the house, or of the origins. Of one thing I am fairly certain, and that would be that I don't think I will be staying again in the Best Western in Pasadena, California. Although I was bit itchy when I departed here in a hurry on or about February 2nd, by the second night in the motel, I was scratching to the point of sleeplessness.
By the time I returned here on February 8th, I was an unhappy camper, and I spent most of Valentine's Day slathered from head to toe with insect repellent as I wandered the house with a bottle of flea-killer, soaking down the baseboards and wetting every last nook and cranny I could find. I also had to wet down all of my own nooks and crannies with a delousing shampoo, and yesterday I decided it was time for a final solution to the bastards. An entire six-pack of "Real Kill" total-release foggers were set off inside the place and another two cans were distributed to deal with the garage and shed. After an hour taking a walk and a visit to Kmart to buy some fans, I set about the task of venting the fumes from the place. It took almost 4 hours to clear out the air in the place, and this gives me some ideas about home-improvement for this house, on the matter of better positive ventilation.
I was just getting settled in to watch Access Hollywood when the phone rang. I almost didn't answer it, but picked up anyway, and it was well that I did. It was my eldest sister, calling me to tell me that my father had just died.
California is a fascinating place. I had last been there when I was four years old, or so, and we had driven from my home in Farmington, New Mexico, all across one heck of a lot of desert not incredibly different from the deserts around Farmington. The difference was this: at the destination was my aunt Mildred's house, and not incidentally, Disneyland.
That was a visit of which I have little memory other than having lots of fun on the rides. This would be a visit I would not remember as fun. Aside from the problem with the itching, it was really tough seeing my father in his present condition. He was developing bedsores, had circulation problems leading to a darkening color in his extremities, he wasn't very hungry, but he was glad to see all of his kids all in one place at one time. Never much of a conversationalist in recent years, his deafness had progressed to the point where you never quite knew if he'd really heard you or if he was just offering generic responses because he'd seen your lips move. Yet I think, I hope, he was able to hear me when I told him that for everything he'd ever said or done that I hadn't liked, I forgave him, for the things I liked and/or which benefited me, I thanked him, and that regardless of anything else, I loved him.
We kids had all dropped everything and hopped the first available jets out of town when we heard from Dad's current wife -- and heard it confirmed by Dad's doctor -- that he was at death's door. By the time my return ticket date arrived, Dad seemed to have stabilized and didn't seem nearly so sick or weak. But a few days later, indeed it has been five months to the day since the passing of my mother, my father finally succumbed to circulatory failure and passed from this world having nearly reached the age of ninety-five.
Thomas J Hardman was born in Kansas in 1917, one of many children on what was at the time a fairly prosperous farm. Yet that prosperity -- such as it was -- came to an end for his family, as it did for so many others across the Midwest, with the start of the Dust Bowl. It cannot have been easy for him to spend his adolescence in struggle and devastation yet somehow he survived. Later, with President Franklin D Roosevelt's creation of the Civil Conservation Corps, Dad found some relief and much opportunity, as did a great many other men. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, Dad sought to enlist. He once told me he was turned down by everyone except for the Navy. He thought that was a little ironic as he had never learned to swim.
Among his other talents, evidently living a fairly rough-and-tumble life back in Kansas and beyond had given dad a certain skill with fighting, enough so that for a time he was in the Shore Patrol, manhandling drunken sailors and Marines. From there, he somehow volunteered for a new outfit called the Beach Jumpers. They were a special unit operating in and around North Africa and the Mediterranean Theater, and I never could get Dad to talk much about them, though bits and pieces build a nebulous and shadowy picture of lots of stuff getting blown up real good, with many of the enemy tricked and defeated. It may have helped that he spoke a little German and came, in large part, from German ancestry. (Family legend has it that the Hardmans came from "Elsass", or Alsace-Lorraine.)
Somehow during this time, he met, and eventually married my mother:
Not too long thereafter, my eldest sister was born in Newfoundland (later a part of Canada), and in short order along came my middle sister, born in Kansas.
Times were often tough for the family before I was born some ten years after my middle sister. Eventually Dad found steady work with the Department of the Interior (Bureau of Mines) at their Helium refinery in Shiprock, New Mexico. Steady work came along with some associated problems in the community. Some clues might be found at the web page of writers David and Aimée Thurlo. David Thurlo is a contemporary of my sisters (and his father would have been a co-worker with mine), and will attest to some of the problems in and around Shiprock, minor details such as entire neighborhoods contaminated with radioactivity, etc.
Overwork and high altitude (and terrible diet) combined to give my father his first heart attack. My mother had been working as an administrative assistant (actually, the administrator in all but name) at the hospital in Farmington, and the family relocated there, and dad began to slowly recover while his wife became my mother. While Dad was given a very poor prognosis, Mom became the breadwinner and began to climb a career ladder that would relocate us to Aspen Hill, Maryland, in 1963.
As Dad became more able to work, he pursued home-study in electronics and got several certifications along with experience at a variety of fairly small local or locally-based firms. He eventually got a job working as a audio-visual technician for Montgomery County Schools. He had a route covering most of northwestern Montgomery County, from the foot of Sugarloaf Mountain down to Gaithersburg. Eventually he got a full retirement from them in the late 1970s, to add to his retirement and disability pension from the Department of the Interior.
Home life with Dad was not always pleasant, to say the least. What the modern world has come to know, and expect from Veterans, as Post-Traumatic Stress disorder, was not exactly present in a full-blown state, but if Dad got mad enough, on the one hand he would get as adrenalized as if he were back in North Africa kicking some Nazi ass. On the other hand, that would set off his angina pectoris. Making Dad mad wasn't a good idea, in many ways. To be positive, he generally tried to keep himself in a good mood, or at least a level mood; it was necessary for his health. We kids, also to be positive, learned to not get too emotional as we might set off Dad's anger and/or angina. I personally learned a lot of self-control at a fairly young age, though as an adolescent I tended to forget to use it. By then, Dad's condition had much improved.
He liked to go camping, and was an avid "Rockhound"", and loved to camp anyplace there were interesting geologic formations. Sometimes he and I would drive nearly a day to find a good camping spot. Usually we preferred to camp someplace where there were interesting rocks and good fishing, fishing being his other passion. He preferred fly fishing and I preferred having fish for dinner, so I tended towards hooks baited with salmon eggs. Dad got me a very early start in the path of Conservationism and this comes as no surprise given his years with the Civil Conservation Corps.
In later years, Mom and Dad started to fight like cats and dogs, and right about the time I graduated from highschool in 1976, they decided to call quits to the marriage. By the early 1980s, with his divorce finalized, Dad moved back to Farmington, New Mexico, where he had lots of friends from the old days at the Helium Plant. He also loved everything about the high desert, and he had been a fair supervisor to a great many Navajo who worked there. He had a fair number of friends among the Dineh people. He got to be a Rockhound all he wanted, and he learned to do some silversmithing to mount some of the fine specimens he found in the desert and ground into shape back at the homestead. Eventually he met, and later married, Sally Currie, in the 1990s. Not long ago, they moved to Pasadena, California.
Pasadena, California, is a really nice place, the sort of place where the climate is the envy of most of the rest of the world, where they have an actual fork in the road in a fork in the road, a lovely "Water-Wise Public Garden of drylands flora, a very tidy and somewhat posh downtown, and the cleanest streets I have ever beheld. It had an excellent little Carniceria near the motel, where you could get excellent pupusas if you didn't mind sitting around for a half-hour while they were made.
Yet I don't think I'll go back to visit anytime soon... because right across the street from a world-class hospital, in a clean and very well-run little convalescent home, attended by polite and competent staffers, my father passed from this life, peacefully and in his sleep after a good lunch, at the age of ninety-four.
