family | Melissa Hardy

Dec 12 2014

Bill Hardy, family, Grandfather, Grandmother, Hardy Family, Martha Nell Hardy, morphine addiction, My mother, Peter Hardy, Thanksgiving

American Thanksgiving . . . meh

Me with my daughter Sabrina and my grandparents at a long ago Thanksgiving

Me dandling daughter Sabrina with my grandparents at a long ago Thanksgiving

I’ve never been keen on American Thanksgiving. In the first place, it’s way too close to Christmas. The memory of my grossly distended belly and the self-loathing that invariably attends that phenomenon have scarcely begun to fade before there it is again: The Holiday Meal, in the case of my family, the exact same meal we ate a month earlier, including the dressing which we always had to call rice because my brother Peter refused, for some reason, to eat anything called dressing.

Then there’s the 2 p.m. timing of the meal. It’s Thanksgiving dinner, for God’s sake, not Thanksgiving lunch! If Thanksgiving dinner happened at a decent hour – any time after 6 p.m., for example – the torment of having to remain awake while cruelly stuffed might be mitigated by an early bedtime. But, no. This insistence on an “early dinner” blows a black hole in the middle of your day — everything is sucked into it; nothing can escape its relentless gravitational pull, and you are left to lie there, beached and disconsolate, a helpless, unwitting witness to the televised spectacle of giant men in tight pants sustaining the kind of traumatic brain injuries that lead to dementia, debilitating neurological diseases and suicide. By which I mean football.

Great Dane Lovey scrutinizes the turkey

My family is surprisingly functional – which is not to say that we don’t have our fair share of little traumas, pretty much all of which can be characterized, as per my daughter Alice, as, “first world problems”. However, not even we were not immune to the kind of dysfunction that seems to go along with quivering tubes of cranberry sauce and pumpkin pie that looks like baby pooh. Case in point: one Thanksgiving when we were children, my mother, frustrated at my brother who was being all winge-y, shook him. Now my parents were not into corporeal punishment; Mom far preferred a good shaming larded with barely veiled threats that she was on the verge of disowning us, as conveyed by such statements as, “No child of mine would ever do (that thing you just did).” All this to say that Mom probably didn’t shake Peter very hard, but, on that one occasion, shake him she did, and, every year thereafter, Peter would kick off Thanksgiving dinner by dolefully recollecting, “And then there was that Thanksgiving Mom shook me. . . ,” sending the poor woman into fresh paroxysms of guilt.

Sometimes we had Thanksgiving Dinner at my paternal grandparents in Hillsborough, North Carolina. My Aunt Elaine and Uncle Clyde would come down from Winston-Salem and Aunt Elaine, who was something of a gourmet cook at a time when that was regarded with some suspicion in the South, would bring along a little something for the family to savor. One year she presented the assembled, bleary crew with tomato aspic, confounding us all. “What is this?” “Do you eat it?” This reminds me of a conversation we had with my husband’s Auntie Gloria in which she described the eating habits of her daughter-in-law. “She eats strange things,” Gloria confided in us. “Like vegetables.”

Between her alcoholism and her morphine addiction, my grandmother had succeeded in pickling herself by the time my memories of her congealed into some kind of coherence. Noni contributed but one dish to the Thanksgiving feast – her signature dish, a sweet potato,marshmallow casserole awash in a sea of bourbon. At fifteen minute intervals throughout the dinner preparations, Noni would lurch to her feet, weave her way to the kitchen, baste the sweet potatoes, baste herself and return to the living room to stew in her own juice.

My father carves as my mother smiles for the camera

In the meanwhile my grandfather, by dint of steady drinking, would wax from sentimental to downright maudlin before deciding to check on the mail. I would accompany him to the mailbox at the end of the long driveway, both of us knowing full well that there was no mail on Thanksgiving but that we needed the air.

So, all in all, I’m thankful for Canadian Thanksgiving, which takes place in the second week of October. Canadian Thanksgiving celebrates the harvest rather than that time before we exterminated them that Native Americans saved our bacon. It doesn’t result in a four-day holiday and, therefore, a loyalty test wherein persons are forced to travel vast distances in inclement weather to prove that they love their families of origin. And finally, being on a Monday, Canadian Thanksgiving isn’t followed by Black Friday, about which don’t get me started. And then there’s the fact that my ex chose Canadian Thanksgiving 1989 to come out of the closet — scarcely festive at the time, but, in the great scheme of things, something for which I am truly grateful.

Tagged Black Friday, Thanksgiving

Jul 11 2014

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Bill Hardy, Cocker spaniel, dogs, family, Hardy Family, Martha Nell Hardy, My mother, Peter Hardy, uncategorized

“Little ****”

Touli

When Tenney, the second of my parents’ two Great Danes, bought the farm, my parents decided that it would be best, given their advanced age, to go with a more compact version of The Family Dog. Accordingly, they reverted back to their first choice of dog breed and saddled themselves with the worst dog ever – a black cocker spaniel named Skatoula, Touli for short. They had just returned from Greece and “Skatoula,”my father was fond of telling people, is the Greek word for “Little Shit.” Which about sums Touli up.

Maybe because my parents were old and didn’t move around much, Touli got it into his head that people should just stay where they were. If anyone stood up and headed, say, for the bathroom, Touli would lunge for his or her ankles, snarling and snapping. And he meant business; my parents were forever nursing some Touli-related injury that inevitably became infected thanks to the apparently toxic nature of his drool. My grand dog Albert gets anxious if anyone strays from the pack and Harry, our old collie, was forever herding the children, but corgis and collies are herders; that’s their job. Cocker spaniels are gun dogs and soft-mouthed retrievers; Touli had no business herding people and he knew it. For him it wasn’t about the flock; it was about the power.

Cerebrus

When it comes to clothes, my husband eschews flamboyance. The only thing that trumps his aversion to standing out sartorially is family feeling. That is why he one day donned a pair of fluorescent lime green swimming trunks in preparation for a dip in the pool – his sisters had given them to him as a birthday present. This was when we discovered that Touli was an undercover officer in the Fashion Police. He took one look at Ken’s trunks and his head exploded. It was like a horror movie. Before our eyes Touli metamorphosed into the Cerberus of classical mythology, the multi-headed dog who guards the entrance of the underworld to prevent the dead from escaping and the living from entering. The only way to appease the hell hound he had turned into was for Ken to retreat to the bedroom and replace the green trunks with a more subdued pair. Only then was he allowed to pass. (Touli later had the same reaction to a set of golf clubs. Which I sort of understand.)

In order to procure treats, Touli would snatch a high value target – Mom’s glasses, the remote, and, on three separate occasions, one of my father’s hearing aids — and dive under the bed with it. Any attempt to regain the purloined object manually would result in savaged fingers and yet another suppurating wound for my parents. Instead, they would raid the supply of dog biscuits and cry, “Meat cookie! Meat cookie!” until Touli would slink out from under the bed, grr-ing, and a grim exchange of prisoners would take place. Two of Dad’s hearing aids did not survive the ordeal and had to replaced at great expense.

During meals, Touli would stand beside my mother’s chair and bark at her. He would pause in his barking every few minutes to give her a little nip – this by way of impressing upon her the fact that she’d better feed him or else. He did this all meal long, without interruption. (In our house dogs do not do this. Our first golden, Buddy, would sit silently by as we ate, looking stricken and drooling, but never making so much as a peep. As for Nellie, she’s proactive without being too pushy. First she steals the napkin from my lap exactly twice, then she lies down directly on my feet, just to remind me that she is there and would like to be considered for the prized gig of pre-rinse cycle.) One night my husband had finally had enough of trying to talk over Touli’s incessant, insistent barking. He seized his muzzle, looked him straight in the eye and shouted, “SHUT UP!” Touli stared at him, incredulous. Clearly no one had ever yelled at him before. His mouth opened and closed as if to bark; no sound emerged. I don’t know who was more shocked – the dog or my parents. “Your Mom and Dad looked at me,” Ken remembers, “and I realized I’d crossed a red line.”

My brother Peter once saw a different side of Touli – desolation in a dog suit. “Mom and Dad had gone out and there was just me at home,” he told me. “Touli sat by the window and howled. Then he collapsed on the door sill and lay there in a heap, looking completely abject, as though he couldn’t believe they had left him and he had no idea how he was going to cope going forward.” Peter then keeled over on the couch and lay there on his side in imitation of Touli, whimpering softly and shivering, looking frightened and pathetic.

Mom made me promise to take Touli if anything happened to her and Dad. I reluctantly agreed. Fortunately, that day never came. Touli contracted a rare canine virus at the young age of seven and slipped away in a matter of a couple of days – days over the course of which my parents forked out over $3,000 in an attempt to save his miserable ass.

Big Mac

Touli had one trick. “Find Big Mac,” Dad would say and Touli, charged with purpose, would bustle off, returning some time later with a squeaky rubber hamburger. My parents saw this as a sign of Touli’s intelligence. I didn’t have the heart to point out that there are border collies who can recognize and retrieve hundreds of different objects – one famous one can identify over a thousand. When we were packing up Dad’s apartment, I found Big Mac and gave it to Nellie. She played with it for a while, then ate it, squeaker and all.

And that was that.

Apr 11 2014

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Aging, Bill Hardy, dementia, family, Hardy Family, Long Day's Journey Into Night, morphine addiction, uncategorized

Reality Therapy

Noni in better times

When my father was a child, my grandfather – Pops — served as foreman for a construction crew that traveled all over North Carolina, Virginia and Maryland building Texaco gas stations. My grandmother and their two boys – Dad and Clyde Junior — traveled with him, living in rooming houses along the way; it was my grandmother’s job to cook for the crew. “What was Noni like?” I once asked my father. “You know. Before?”

Dad shook his head sadly. “She was very capable . . . and warm-hearted, hospitable.” He added, “I wish you could have known her then, when she wasn’t this way.” By “this way” he meant, “senile.”

Noni was not all that old when she stepped out for lunch and never came back – in her early sixties, about the age I am now. The reason for her early-onset dementia was fairly straightforward. When she was in her forties, she underwent an operation for phlebitis. The doctor prescribed morphine for the pain and, “Do no harm” notwithstanding, kept on prescribing it. Noni became a morphine addict, which, as it turns out, does not promote brain health. In not very much time at all Noni effectively pickled herself.

Throughout my childhood and several times a day, Pops would announce that it was time for Noni’s medicine and off the two of them would repair to his study where he would, essentially, shoot her up. It was treated very nonchalantly, by which I mean doors were not shut. At the time I thought it was creepy – it involved a hypodermic needle, after all, stuck in parts of your grandmother’s body that grandchildren do not wish to contemplate, much less view – but I did not at the time realize that Noni’s “medicine” was, in fact, morphine, nor did I realize how common morphine addiction was among white women of her generation until I was researching the topic for Paper Son, one of the short stories in The Uncharted Heart – it was, in fact, a virtual epidemic, albeit a hidden one. I suddenly saw Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night in a whole new light; as it turns out, it’s the story of my father’s family set in mid-twentieth century working class North Carolina.

I only remember one instance during my teenage years in which Noni appeared cogent – probably because it was such a rare event. Pops had just concluded a tall tale and Noni piped up, “Anybody believes that, stand on your head and I don’t see no feet!” Silence. Everyone turned to look at her. “What?” she said and went back to being not there.

Most of the time Noni sat on a urine-infused sofa in the living room looking blank. Every fifteen minutes or so, she would lurch to her feet, exit the living room, turn right down the hall, traverse my grandfather’s study, enter the kitchen, duck into the pantry where she would take a slug of bourbon from the bottle stashed there, return to the living room via the dining room and resume her seat on the redolent sofa, where she would twitch a couple of times before sinking once again into catatonia. That was how Noni rolled. She would only come back to life when it was time for us to leave. Then she would rouse herself and, no matter what time of day or night it might be, say, “Are you sure you won’t stay for lunch? There’s plenty of bologna.”

This woman provided one quarter of my DNA. (Or something like that. I’ve never properly understood DNA.)

Pops and Noni. By this time Noni’s pretty cooked.

My grandparents both lived well into their nineties. They spent the last five or so years of their life in different wings of a nursing home. Pops was frail but, like my own father, mentally sharp. He resided in the unlocked ward and had a great old time, acquiring a girlfriend named Bunny and editing the home’s newsletter.

Noni was placed in the block of rooms set aside for people with dementia. My brother Peter and I visited her there in the mid-eighties. A sign on the door to her room read, “Mrs. Hardy is undergoing Reality Therapy. Please ask her what day of the week it is, what year it is and who is President.”

“Hey, Noni,” we asked. “Who’s President?”

Noni shook her head. “Why does everybody ask me that?” Then, “Harry S. Truman.”

As we were waiting for an elevator down to the main lobby of the nursing home, I said, “What do you think about this Reality Therapy business? Do you think it’s doing Noni any good?”

The elevator arrived. We entered it. The door ground slowly closed the way elevator doors do in old folks homes. Peter looked solemn. “Don’t see no feet,” he said.

STORY PORTAL

Past Due is a story about a senile old woman, her housemaid and a whole lot of chickens coming home to roost. I did not base Miss Bob on Noni, but Noni does inform certain aspects of her character. It appeared in the Dalhousie Review in 1992. To read it, click on the title.

Apr 04 2014

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Aging, Bill Hardy, family, Happy Hour, Hardy Family, Martha Nell Hardy, memory

Happy Hour

Bill Hardy, 2nd Lieutenant, US Navy

On March 30, 2014 my father, William Marion Hardy, turned 92. He was born in Norfolk, Virginia in 1922, the second son of Clyde Thompson Hardy and Norah Morris Hardy. My grandfather was from a town called Little Washington in eastern North Carolina. He met my grandmother when he was working at a saw mill near her father’s tobacco farm in neighbouring Littlefield. When they were courting, an itinerant photographer took my grandfather’s photo and tried to talk my grandmother into buying a print. “If somethin’ were to happen to Mr. Hardy,” he told her, “you wouldn’t take five dollars for it!”

In 1995 my father suffered a clinical depression, made that much more unnerving by the fact that his disposition had been, up to that point, unrelievedly sunny. During this period he slept fourteen hours a day and lost twenty pounds; his effect was flatter than road kill. My mother finally got him to get help by threatening to leave him. Then she threatened to leave him and take the dog. Dad went to a psychiatrist and a few months later recovered his misplaced bonhomie. He refers to this period as, “When I was crazy.”

Recently we traveled to Chapel Hill to break up Dad’s apartment; he was moving to the nursing home attached to the assisted living community where he has lived since 2004. It was Friday night – the night of the week when a group of between twelve and fifteen of Dad’s friends gather at the Clubhouse for Happy Hour — drinks and dinner, with an emphasis on drinks. With an average age of 88, they are a rowdy bunch; the Cedars reserves for them their own private dining room, doubtless in the hopes of not terrifying the other old people. It is an odd assortment of individuals. At other times in their lives they would have probably moved in very different circles . . . but, as it turns out, age is a great leveler. Who cares what your political views are or your social status? All that matters at Happy Hour is that you have a pulse, a thirst and a yearning to connect.

We accompanied Dad to Happy Hour as his guests. My sister and I ordered a gin and tonic. We observed the bartender pour. “Doesn’t that seem like a lot of gin?” my sister whispered to me as the girl half-filled a large tumbler with Tanqueray. Neither Pamela nor I back down from a challenge, especially when the challenge involves alcohol. We drank our drinks and ordered another.

After that I don’t remember a thing.

Well, actually, that’s not true.

I remember gushing at great length to a beautiful old woman about how truly grateful I was that, in my lifetime, blacks had made such great strides and weren’t they an amazing race? Why, what would America be without them? This paean to the black race is my default encomium when I’ve had one too many (in this case two were one too many). At least I wasn’t flirting outrageously with an eighty five year old Auschwitz survivor. That was my husband. He had had one martini. A Happy Hour martini.

Hours later, in the wee hours of the morning, I awoke, disoriented and jumbled, to find myself in the guest room of Dad’s apartment. I did not remember the rest of the meal. I did not remember returning to the apartment. I did not remember going to bed. An image of my aged father sitting slumped in his wheelchair, abandoned and forlorn, leapt into my mind. “OMG,” I gasped. “Did we leave Daddy at the Clubhouse?”

Fortunately we had not.

Glancing around at all the flushed and animated faces that night, I could see, glittering from within the crusted carapace of age, the young person each Happy Hour devotee still was, full of life and passion — pretty girls and dashing boys, and chief among them my sparkling father, holding court, holding sway. They’d all had two drinks, but they were the Greatest Generation. Unlike our sorry lot, they could hold their liquor.

I have many photographs of my father, but my memory of Happy Hour, incomplete and ragged though it is, is its own kind of keepsake.

I wouldn’t take five dollars for it.

Mar 07 2014

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Bill Hardy, dogs, family, Grandfather, Grandmother, Hardy Family, James H. Zant, Martha Nell Hardy, My mother, uncategorized, Zant family

Ughy — My Ur Dog

Dad with me, Peter and Ughy.

My father courted my mother with puppies. The first was a mixed breed called Pot, who was summarily run over. The second was a black cocker spaniel named Ughy. Ughy arrived on the scene four years before I was born, at a time when Mom and Dad were both married to other people, but clearly gearing up to bolt – you don’t give just anybody a puppy, not in my family. And Dad gave Mom two.

My mother’s childhood dog was Poochie, a terrier who spent his dogs days asleep in the sunny middle of the street in front of their house in Stillwater, Oklahoma. Unlike Pot, Poochie died in the fullness of time and of natural causes — for the dozen or so years he was on this Earth cars just edged around him. If this seems extraordinary, consider this: my grandmother never learned how to back up a car. She didn’t need to. She only went two places — her beauty salon and the grocery store — and both her hairdresser and the boy who bagged her groceries were more than happy to turn the car around for her so that she could drive herself back home. That’s the kind of town Stillwater, Oklahoma was — women could drive cars in one direction and dogs could sleep undisturbed in the middle of its streets. Of course, if you were a black man and dusk was approaching, you would have been wise not to count on the same degree of insouciance. We’re talking Oklahoma here and some things don’t change.

People assign names to dogs; their dog names emerge with time. Thus Bill’s Fancy became Mary Frances; Luv (allegedly Danish for Lion) became Lovey; Tennessee’s Waltz became Tenney, which also happened to be the name of the circle we lived on. Ughy’s given name was, improbably, Lord Ogilthorpe, thence Oggie, thence Ughy, a.k.a, Boodle Dog. My Grandfather Zant always called him, “Black Dog.” “Hi, Black Dog,” he would say. “Come here, Black Dog.” Ughy adored Grandaddy, perhaps because Grandaddy recognized his true essence. He was, after all, a black dog.

Ughy watching over my bassinet . . . or was he?

My mother told the story of how Ughy would drop his toys into my bassinet. She maintained that this indicated a desire on his part to share his toys with me. I think it’s more likely that he was actually trying to take me out from the air. Then again, he used to bring Mom mice that he had killed and how can that be interpreted other than as an act of largesse? In his seventeen years, Ughy only bit me once and that was because I stuck my face in his food dish. I would do the same to anybody who stuck their face in my food dish. Consider that fair warning.

Growing up, I was convinced that Ughy could talk; I figured he was just holding out. On weekends, my father would take me and Ughy along on various errands and, while he was in the Hostess Outlet Store or at the roadside corn stand, I would edge closer to Ughy and whisper in his silky ear, “It’s all right. He’s gone. You can talk now.” That’s when parents left kids in the car and no one thought a thing of it.

Golden Retriever with false teeth. You get the idea.

Golden Retriever with party teeth. You get the idea.

Ughy had two tricks. He could sit up on his hind legs for hours while wearing one of my Dad’s white t-shirts, and he would happily circulate amongst party guests, gag teeth clamped between his jaws, for so long as people applauded. He taught himself those tricks in his spare time, which was copious.

Ughy buried bones in the carpet. He would dig and dig and dig, creating no hole whatsoever, then deposit the bone in the no hole he had dug. There it would remain until someone glanced over at it, at which point he would promptly dig it up from the no hole and bury it in plain sight somewhere else. Once a kid on our block dared to call Ughy fat and I beat him up. He was the only person I have ever beaten up and I never felt a shred of guilt about it. Call my dog fat: you’ve crossed a red line.

Ughy was my first dog – the original dog; the archetypal dog; the Ur dog.The worst thing I could imagine, apart from the death of my mother or father, was Ughy’s demise. I would lie in bed at night and try and imagine what a world without Ughy would be like. But then I’d have to stop myself; his loss was too painful even to contemplate.

The last year of his long life, blinded by milky cataracts and wracked by cancer, Ughy was falling apart the way old dogs do: at the seams. During that sad period Dad carried him tenderly up and down the stairs as required. My husband and I can relate. For the better part of three years we hefted our aged and enormous Golden Retriever up and downstairs, hoisting him into cars and airlifting him onto beds. Recently a fit-enough looking neighbour told us he had been forced to put his Springer Spaniel down because she could no longer climb stairs. As soon as he was out of earshot, my husband and I looked at one another, aghast. “He couldn’t carry a Springer Spaniel up and down stairs?” we asked.

Ughy contemplates his Christmas stocking

Every night Dad fed Ughy his green cancer pain pills, stroking his throat to make him swallow, as he sang:

“Green pills, they taste so good/

when doggies eat them like they should./

Green pills, they taste so nice./

They taste like they’re made out of sugar and spice.”

He sang this to the tune of Green Sleeves.

Then one day it happened — Ughy was gone. A chasm opened up in the earth and in we fell, only to struggle out, not twenty-four hours later, with the parti-coloured ball of fur and bad news who would become Crocapuppy – the infamous Frances of the Socks. If Ughy was a true gentleman — and he was — Frances was bitch incarnate. Life goes on and new dogs come on stream — one after another. And then they die, and you feel like you’re going to die, and then you don’t.

. . .

And then you do.

Jan 31 2014

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Alice Miller, children, Collie, dogs, family, Sabrina Miller, uncategorized, Will Miller

Harry

Harry with Sabrina. Harry appears to be working on a shoe.

In the dead of the winter of ‘86, when my twins were one and Brina four and a half, my ex and I decided that what we really needed was a puppy. And not just any puppy. A Scotch collie puppy. This was because my ex’s thesis supervisor had owned a succession of Scotch collies and imitating him in every respect seemed to my ex a prudent course. Accordingly, one cold and snowy night we wedged the diapered duo into their car seats, sandwiched Brina in between, and slip-slided our way down the 402 to a farm outside of Sarnia. There, in a barn, we found a rattled looking mother collie and her litter, asleep in the hay, and returned to London with Harry zipped inside my coat.

It is hard to house train a puppy in the winter. It is even harder to house train a puppy in a house with no door opening onto a fenced in yard. It is harder still to house train a puppy with perambulating one year olds whom you dare not leave alone while you are escorting the puppy outdoors lest they fatally injure themselves or their twin. Because Alice and Will fought from the moment they achieved sufficient muscle tone to deliver a reasonable facsimile of a wallop and didn’t stop until they were teenagers, when they went all twin-y. Looking back on it, I must have left them alone the occasional time, figuring that screams would alert me to any true danger. Perhaps I instructed Sabrina to look after them, knowing full well that she was still on the fence as to whether we should keep them.

Harry was beyond long suffering. The kids would sprawl on him, sucking their thumbs and twiddling his fur. He would lie on his side, looking put upon, but resigned. Occasionally his lip would flicker, revealing massive fangs and he would say, without conviction, “Grrrr.”

Collies are herding dogs, which worked because my kids were a wayward flock, always trying to scatter or make a break for it. Collies are also watch dogs. If a leaf fell in the front yard, Harry barked. If a car drove by, Harry barked. If, God forbid, a person should walk down the sidewalk, Armageddon! Harry barked when he was awake and he barked when he was asleep and, if I had had a gun, that’s the way he might have gone down — barking. Only I didn’t, so he didn’t. One more argument for gun control.

Harry liked to couple the pleasures of barking with lunging, usually at windows. He broke through the pane glass window in the front of the house on four separate occasions and was saved from hurtling to his death from an upstairs window by a astonishingly resilient screen. I would appear at the glass repair shop, carrying a window with a collie-shaped hole in it. Harry was famous at the glass shop.

The first time my ex and I spent a night away from the children, we hired an older woman to babysit. When we returned home, the kids roasted the sitter. She was mean. She had thrown a book at Alice. She had locked Harry in the back room the entire time. I didn’t believe them. Then Harry, who was not a small dog, climbed onto my lap and leaned all of his weight against my chest, pinning me to the chair. He lifted his fabulous needle nose to the sky and began to keen. We never hired that sitter again.

One Canada Day, Harry was listless. He lay on his side looking pooched. “That dog’s sick,” my neighbour said. “You’d better have him seen to.” It was a national holiday; the regular vet was closed. I took him to the emergency vet, who stuck his finger up his bum, announced, “This dog has gas,” gave me a bottle of Pepto Bismal and charged me $100. Another time, Harry swallowed a bouncy ball, which lodged in the opening between his stomach and his intestine. The operation to remove it cost $800. The vet let the children in to visit Harry, who was lying on the floor of the animal hospital with IV tubes coming out of him. They ran up to him, his flock of unruly sheep, and fell to their knees, embracing him and cooing. Harry’s tail thumped. “Operate,” I said.

Harry contracted Lupus at age seven and died too soon. Writing about him, I remember him. Remembering him, I miss him. Harry was two good dogs ago, but I guess the pane glass window wasn’t the only thing Harry put a collie-shaped hole in. He put one in my heart.

Jan 24 2014

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Alice Miller, children, family, Lost children, uncategorized, Will Miller

Oh, Paulie!

Will at about the age of his disappearance, wearing a Kermit the Frog head. His twin Alice looks on, askance.

When my son Will was a toddler, he was kidnapped. Or he ran away. In any case, one sunny summer afternoon my ex and I glanced up from our work in the garden to find Will nowhere in sight. We panicked. While I stayed back in the yard with the girls, breathing via a paper bag, my ex careened around the neighbourhood, flailing his arms and shrieking, our collie, confused but psyched, in hot pursuit. Neighbours joined in, some on bicycles to broaden the search area. I called the police.

Then, about a half an hour in, Paulie, the dozy pre-K grandson of our next door neighbour, jerked to sudden life and decided to share. “I saw where Will went,” he said.

Now Paulie was a pathetic child – strangely boneless with a thin face and lank hair. Rheumy eyed and snot encrusted, he looked like he subsisted entirely on a diet of Cheetos. But it wasn’t just Paulie’s desperate appearance that rendered him piteous. It was everyone’s palpably low regard for him. My children, being children and therefore without mercy, thought him very weak tea indeed, but so did his family. “Oh, Paulie!” they would cry with thinly veiled contempt. Paulie couldn’t do anything right and he knew it.

But not that day.

“Really, Paulie? You saw where Will went?” His mother dropped to her knees before her wretched child, seizing him by the shoulders. A thought bubble appeared over her head: “Is it possible that my limp rag of a loser son might actually be the one to save this day?”

“Come on, Paulie!” his grandmother chimed in. “Tell us! Tell us where he went!”

As if around a blazing fire on a cold night, all the grownups in the vicinity instantly gathered round. Suddenly Paulie was the center not merely of attention, but rapt attention. He reacted to this the way fainting goats react to panic – he froze, agog. I removed the paper bag from over my mouth and sobbed convulsively. “Paulie, please!”

Emerging from his brief myotonic episode, Paulie shuddered convulsively. Then he turned thoughtful. “Well,” he began. He paused and began again. “Well, he came down those steps.” He pointed to the front steps of our house.

“Yes,” said his mother, ”and then?”

“He came down the walk . . . .” Paulie indicated the walk the front stoop to the sidewalk.

“And then? What did he do then?”

Paulie furrowed his brow and screwed up his mouth. He cocked his head to one side and glanced down at his battered flip flops. His eyes widened as if he was seeing his toes for the first time.

“What did he do then, Paulie?” his mother implored him. “Do you remember what Will did then? It’s very important!”

The grownups joined in a rousing chorus of encouragement.

“Atta boy, Paulie!”

“We believe in you, Paulie!”

“You can do it, Paulie! You can save Will!”

Paulie sucked in air, exhaled and surveyed the adults crowded around him. Like Obama after his second Inauguration, he was pretty certain he wasn’t going to see this again and he wanted to take it all in. Finally, he spoke. “Then Will split in two and half of him went this way and the other half went that way!”

“Oh, Paulie!” everyone cried, turning away in disgust.

That was when the police showed up, followed shortly thereafter by Will. He appeared in the front door, theatrically rubbing his eyes and claiming to have been asleep under a desk in his father’s office the entire time. Years later he confessed that he had, instead, watched through an upstairs window as the drama unfolded. Which we, being not entirely stupid, always sort of suspected.

As for Paulie, he had been, however briefly, the center of attention, a shining light, a hero in the making, a human being worthy of regard and a source of pride to his family. In a life which, I suspect, would afford Paulie few such opportunities, he saw his chance, boldly seized it and then played it for all it was worth.

Jan 03 2014

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Bill Hardy, Captain Star, family, Hardy Family, Martha Nell Hardy, My mother, Peter Hardy, uncategorized, Vampirina

My parents: Captain Star and Vampirina

Mom and Peter and me. Our matching dresses are red.

I am the child of celebrities. Going back to the fifties, when my father played Captain Star on a local children’s television show and my mother, a.k.a., Vampirina, rose out of a coffin to host late night horror movies. To get to the gig, off she would scuttle off in the dead of night just as Dad was coming home from rehearsals; they would pass like ships in the night. He was teaching Drama at Texas Western at the time and she was gnawing on her knuckles as a largely stay-at-home Mom in a new subdivision of tract housing separated on one side from El Paso by ten miles of cactus strewn, rattlesnake riddled dessert and, on the other, from Mexico by the same.

One day she heard breaking news from the local radio station that a mysterious space ship had landed on the highway separating El Paso from our subdivision and that the army had been sent out to investigate. Mother, being Mother, kicked into survival mode. She filled a thermos with water, stuffed a bag with sandwiches and tied Peter, me and Ughy to her waist with ropes; she was ready to set out across the dessert towards Mexico with two toddlers and a cocker spaniel in tow. Then she tuned back in to get an update and found . . . nada. Back to regular programming. Never a mention. Never an explanation. A complete news blackout. Fort Bliss, a major Cold War military center, was close by; possibly the alleged “space ship” had been a top secret test gone awry. The weird thing was . . . Mom was apparently the only person who ever heard this story. No one else has ever corroborated it. Yet she swore all her life that it was true and I believe her. Mom didn’t lie; she did, however, exaggerate for effect.

Demographics ensured that my brother Peter and I, being somewhere between two and five years old at the time, were far more impressed by Dad as Spaceman, than by Mom as Living Dead. Captain Star was typical of the kind of locally produced kids’ programming of the time – hosted by a colorful host with an exotic persona such as cowboy, jungle explorer or, in Dad’s case, spaceman, whose job it was to DJ cartoons and, in the breaks, engage with a live studio audience of adorable kids, who, as Art Linkletter was fond of pointing, “say the darnedest things!” Case in point, my brother, who, when allowed to participate in the studio audience, blew Dad’s cover by replying to the question, “And who are you, Little Boy?” with, “You know who I am! You’re my Daddy!” Apparently, Spacemen, like monks, were not supposed to have children. Peter was banned from the set.

I, being older, and a far more accomplished liar, adroitly handled the subterfuge, as a result of which I was allowed to come on the show a number of times. Honesty might well have been the best policy, but the stakes were high. The show was sponsored by a local bakery. There was cake and I was willing to do anything to get some. In later years, my family would continue to be impressed by the sheer brio with which I could and frequently did prevaricate. “Lightning is going to strike you dead!” my mother would cry reproachfully, but it was reproach tinged with admiration. I would like to point out here that I only lie to weasel out of things I don’t want to do — white lies, intended to avoid hurt feelings. “Now you’re going to have to figure out some other excuse for why you have to leave early,” my friend Linda Nicholas told me when my dog Buddy died. Dammit, I realized. She’s onto me.

Another thing Captain Star did was to call apparently random numbers and ask whoever picked up the phone a question like, “Who discovered America?” Then, if that person couldn’t answer, he’d ask the studio audience the same question. What he actually did was call his hung-over friends, who, it being nine o’clock on a Saturday morning, would roundly curse him. At which he would smile and nod and say, “I’m sorry, Bobby, but ‘oak’ is not the right answer. I guess I’ll just have to ask the Boys and Girls what kind of tree George Washington chopped down.”

We don’t actually have a photo of Captain Star. I can’t think why not. I can tell you, however, that he wore black tights, a black turtleneck, a Papier Mâché space helmet and a cape. The cape, which Mom had fashioned, was black and featured appliqued sequins and stars of silver lamé. It hung in our hall closet when not in use, next to the raincoats and the windbreakers. Captain Star was a tad portly. Dad had been skinny all his life, but living in close proximity to cheap Mexican rum for an extended period had resulted in him acquiring a notable pot belly. His fans didn’t seem to mind. A four year old boy once appeared on our doorstep with a toy car to bestow upon his hero and Dad was regularly mobbed at the local swimming pool with cries of, “It’s him! Captain Star!” while he sat, slouched and distended, nursing a hangover in the shallow end, a cigarette hanging out of his mouth.

Vampirina

Vampirina had her fans too, although not among the toddler set. The apogee of her fame came when she was featured on the cover of the local TV Guide, together with a story about this nice, pretty Mom who, amusingly enough, moonlighted as a horror show host. What they didn’t write about . . . what they couldn’t have known was the woman who was ready to strike out across the desert to avoid alien abduction. That woman’s day was to come.

Dec 19 2013

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Bill Hardy, Cocker spaniel, dogs, family, Great Dane, Hardy Family, Martha Nell Hardy, My mother, Parent, Peter Hardy, uncategorized

Crocapuppy

My brother Peter and Frances

My family had a rule: the time between dogs should be as short as humanly possible. No sooner had Ughy, our beloved seventeen year old cocker spaniel, shuffled off this mortal coil than his replacement was locked down. And by “no sooner” I mean that same day. I’m not sure whether the new puppy was on Mom and Dad’s radar or whether, immediately upon Ughy’s demise, they rushed out into the street, crying, “A puppy! Dear God! Let there be a puppy!” I rather suspect the latter, given how ill advised the choice of Fancy, a.k.a, Frances, a.k.a. Crocapuppy, turned out to be.

To say that Frances was overbred would be an understatement. Frances was the product of incest. A lot of incest. She was a parti-colored cocker spaniel, meaning that her coat was two colors, buff and white. The breeders were aiming for a completely white cocker spaniel, so kept mating the lightest male in a litter to the lightest female, which, as often as not, turned out to be his mother. And this had been going on for generations before Frances wobbled balefully onto the scene.

Whenever you bent down to pet Frances, she was so overcome with excitement that she promptly fell to the ground, rolled onto her back and proceeded to pee all over her stomach, resulting in chronic and piteous eczema of her nether regions. This unfortunate propensity, however, was the only evidence of submissive behavior that Frances served up over the course of her life. The rest of the time, she was just an ornery old mess.

Frances was a hoarder. Her specialty was socks. She would filch them from our respective dirty clothes hampers and add them to an ever-growing heap in the little hall that separated the dining room from Dad’s study. There she would guard them until, as my mother used to say, dark circles would start to form under her eyes and someone would have to go in and save her from herself, not to mention the socks.

Pinkies

This was all made more complicated by the fact that Mom and I used to give Frances our hand-me-down pinkies. Pinkies were those fuzzy pink slippers popular in the sixties and Mother and I both wore them. Frances would sashay around the house, exuding innocence, the pinkie of the moment clamped between her jaws. No sooner had she had lulled us into complacency, however, than she would raid the dirty clothes hampers of the house, cramming the purloined socks down in the depths of the pinkie, and make a beeline for the Hall of Socks. For years after her death, my brother Peter and I would catch ourselves hesitating on the threshold of that narrow passageway, the image of an obsessed and furious Crocapuppy lodged in our memory like a tooth. Eventually all of Frances’s pinkies went to the dark side and we would have to wrest the offending slipper from her and bury it in the back yard. Which was OK. There were always more pinkies where that came from.

Like any respectable dog, Frances was voracious. She was also bold. One night my parents were hosting a cast party for a production of The Boys in the Band, which centers around a birthday party. In keeping with the birthday theme, someone had contributed to the feast a large sheet cake complete with many small candles. Since this was a drinking party, however, the cake had few takers . . . until Frances jumped up on a dining room chair, then onto the table itself, and proceeded to hoover the entire cake down, candles and all, before anyone could rouse him or herself to action. Then she proceeded to throw up the entire cake, complete with intact candles, while madly sprinting around the entire house.

Frances had many enemies, most of whom were dogs eerily resembling herself who hid out in mirrors and in the panes of glass in French doors. These she would attack with vigor on a regular basis, hurling herself repeatedly against them. Our house had two double sets of French doors and two single French doors. They kept her pretty busy.

Lovey

Her arch enemy, however, her very nemesis arrived on the scene the day my mother and father unexpectedly brought home a Great Dane puppy named Lovey. Mom had a notion that, because Frances was a female and Lovey was a puppy, she might feel motherly towards the interloper. In this she was sadly mistaken. Frances loathed Lovey from the moment she laid eyes upon him. And it didn’t matter that she was a lowly and rather overweight cocker spaniel and he grew up to stand 6’5” on his hind legs. First impressions count, especially with dogs; Lovey was terrified of Frances her entire life. Whenever he wanted to go upstairs, Frances would lie on the lower landing and look baleful. (There was no dog that could do baleful like Frances.) Lovey would hesitate, dancing on the spot, his claws clicking against the floor, then tentatively take a step or two towards the stairs. Frances’s lips would quiver and then slowly draw back to reveal her teeth. She would growl. Lovey would retreat in confusion. This would go on until Mom would cry out, “Frances! For Heaven’s sake! Let Lovey go upstairs!” At which point Frances would grudgingly rise and insolently trundle downstairs, giving Lovey a look in passing that clearly meant, “I’ll deal with you later.”

My brother and I felt sorry for Frances. She had not been enough dog for my parents and so they had supplanted her with Lovey. When I went looking for photos of Frances for this post, there were precious few. Of course, once Peter and I were teenagers, there were precious few of us either. There were, however, dozens and dozens of photos of Lovey – Lovey with his ears taped, Lovey lying on his back in inadvertently lewd postures, Lovey sprawled upon my parents bed, which he shared with them, Lovey standing with his front paws on Dad’s shoulders. If strangers were to look at my parents’ photo albums, they might be forgiven for thinking that this couple had two adorable children who, just before puberty, were tragically killed in a car accident along with their cocker spaniel, after which point the couple got a Great Dane puppy upon whom, going forward, they focused all their attention and affection. Peter and I agreed that, if Mom and Dad were going to neglect Frances, we ought to try and brush her more and take her out for walks.

But, of course, we were teenagers so that never happened.

Frances died when I was away in graduate school. Dad woke one morning to find that she had gone in her sleep. I don’t know where she was in the house when she died. In my mind, it was not in my parents’ bedroom, but in some more remote part of the house, alone, perhaps in the Hall of Socks. She did not live nearly as long as the venerable Ughy had – eleven to his seventeen years — but neither was she as loved as he was.

RIP, Crocapuppy.

Oct 25 2013

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American history, Civil War, Confederacy, family, North Carolina, politics, Rednecks, slavery

Ruminations on the Confederacy

I am a Southerner. A bona fide one. My direct lineal ancestor, Lemuel Lamb Hardy, was born sometime between 1695 and 1700 in Chowan, Bertie County, North Carolina and died there on Salmon Creek in 1750. Solomon Zant, my mother’s Great (times five) Grandfather on her father’s side was probably born in Switzerland, but made it to Ebenezer, now a ghost town in Effingham County, Georgia in time to hitch up with Elizabetha Keiffer on March 24, 1767.[i]

My point is: my Southern roots go back to before the U.S. became a country. We came early to this party and we stayed late. Which gives me the right to comment on this whole “Romance of the South/ Up with the Confederacy” CRAP coming up through the drains these days, poisoning our public discourse with pure vituperative nonsense.

Any student of American history knows that the United States was founded on a fault line – slavery – and that it was only a matter of time before tectonic plates shifted and the nation was rent asunder. A civil war was in the cards from Day One. In fact, pace Tea Party, it’s arguable that the Second Amendment had a lot more to do with assuring Southern whites that they would be able to surpress a slave rebellion than it did with ensuring that patriots could defend themselves from some nonspecific tyranny. It still does. “Don’t want too many of them brown people getting up in our white business, after all.” Isn’t that what you believe?

There was nothing romantic about the Old South. It was predicated on an abomination. The Southern “way of life” was a rare bloom growing from a great reeking heap of manure. Africans did not benefit from being dragged to these shores in chains and then treated worse than pack animals. (The wonder is that they have managed to succeed to the great extent that they have, enriching our culture beyond anything us honkies could pulled off under similar circumstances.) As for the ladies, corsets like Scarlett O’Hara wore resulted in everything from squashed ribs and hearts to displaced spleens. If childbirth didn’t get you, your corset surely would. (Not that you could ever hope for a seventeen inch waist. I’m talking to you, Paula Deen.)

And here’s the kicker, those of you just a-longing for those good old days upon the Swanee River, for most of you that will be a case of nostalgie de la boue. Because you descend from Crackers. Yes, Crackers. All of you who are so proud to call yourselves ‘Rednecks’? Crackers. Tenant farmers. Dirt Farmers. Poor white trash. You know how to tell? Do you have a great grandmother who belonged to the Daughters of the Confederacy? Is your daughter eligible to be a debutante in North Carolina or Georgia or Mississippi? No? I thought so. Crackers.

I’m a Cracker too. I once asked my Grandfather Hardy what his people had done in the Civil War. “Why, they hid in the swamp every time the recruiter came by,” he told me. “They didn’t think the war had anything to do with them. They were dirt farmers. They didn’t own slaves.”

And your relatives probably didn’t either, so stop dreaming!

When I was twelve years old, I read Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind for the first time. Then I read it four more times. I loved it. I fell for it hook, line and sinker. For a number of years it informed my view of the Civil War and the history of the United States and my own identity as a Southern woman. Excuse me. As a flower of Southern Womanhood.

Then I grew up.

So don’t save your Confederate money, boys. The South will not rise again. And you are not who you think you are and never will be. So just get over it. And, while you’re at it, learn to spell.

[i] (Interestingly enough, Ebenezer was established in 1734 by 150 Salzburger Protestants who had been expelled from the Archbishopric of Salzburg in present-day Austria for religious reasons. Elizabetha was a Saltzburger, as was Solomon’s mother. The town was intended to be a religious Utopia on the Georgian frontier, but that’s another story.)

Melissa Hardy

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Category Archives: family

American Thanksgiving . . . meh

“Little ****”

Reality Therapy

Happy Hour

Ughy — My Ur Dog

Harry

Oh, Paulie!

My parents: Captain Star and Vampirina

Crocapuppy

Ruminations on the Confederacy