In December of 2019, we got a new puppy. Fiona is a fine name for a fox terrier, a breed from Britain. People always assume she was named after Fiona from Shrek, but honestly if she's named after anyone, it was after Fiona Hill, whose testimony in Congressional hearings on Russia some months back had stolen the show, despite what little effect those hearings ended up having on America. If people ask if she was named after Shrek, of course I say yes.
Fiona is fairly intelligent, but as a pandemic puppy, she really didn't get socialized with other dogs, and whether by nature or nurture, came out a lot more timid than most dogs of her breed — Hergé's Snowy pretty much nails the normal personality of the fox terrier, even if they're all different. So as we came out of the pandemic, I was looking for someone to be good friend for Fiona.
Around the corner and a short way down the street, we came to know one of our neighbor dogs, a bitch named Scruffy. She's a mutt, a golden-haired girl that was some sort of small terrier crossed with some sort of dog with a winter coat. Harry, her owner, had called all of his other dogs Tippy, so as not to forget the name, but Scruffy had named herself, from when he had first found her on his front doorstep. By now, she was in her teens, and the temperament of an older, social, alpha female that was still a little smaller than Fiona was perfect, and they became fast friends.
Now, this isn't really a story about dogs, but about Scruffy's humans. Harry Harshbarger was Scruffy's dad, an old man from West Virginia who liked to sit out on his front porch, occasionally catch a smoke, and watch the neighborhood pass by. I saw "watch" in a loose sense, as he was very nearly blind. He could recognize Fiona by sight because of her distinctive parti-color coat, but could not tell the difference between myself and my father at close range. We do sound alike, and look reasonably alike (no paternity questions here), but thirty years makes a difference.
But Harry and I had a reason to sit outside together, our dogs, and became friends. Male friendships are often like that — no real deep connection, just doing things together creates a bit of a bond. He liked to give food to all of the neighborhood dogs, which gave him a chance to shoot the shit with a few of his neighbors. Harry's Southern manners meant he wanted to be neighborly with everyone. People joke that he was the Mayor of Eva Street, from the way he talked to everyone, to the way he got involved with everyone's business and told them what the parking rules were. Let's say I'm glad I live around the corner, and not right next to Harry.
He certainly was an institution in the neighborhood, living here only a couple years less than I, and I moved in as an infant. He knew everyone who came and went. Across the street from Harry lived my friend Matt from when I was a schoolkid. We were close friends, primarily in the sense that we lived close and at that age it matters most that you can actually see each other. Matt and I evolved in radically different directions -- myself towards academics and science, and Matt towards skateboards, bikes, and drugs. Harry told me how Matt had been caught for robbing College Pharmacy, was jailed, got out, then got caught robbing the exact same place again.
Matt was still in a jail in Idaho, living near his father, when his mother Anne died. I had known her a little when I was a kid, I saw her stained glass workshop. As she got older, she had gotten more and more OCD — the neighbor who was taking care of her things found uncashed cheques in with a pile of papers in the microwave oven. The whole place was a mess; the roof older than I am and falling apart (especially on the south side). Matt inherited something like $20 million from his mother's estate, some investments and some property. None of this really makes sense, on any level.
So Harry and I had lots to talk about. And as I got to know him, I got to know his own stories more. Back in West Virginia, he was from a prominent family, he said, but his parents were something of black sheep, and he and his siblings were raised by his grandmother. Apparently they swept the local shooting competitions so much they told 'em not to compete one year. But he'd gone from shooting crows to trying to tame them by the time I knew him, presumably because he could still see crows and not little birds like bluejays.
After moving to California, he became a paramedic around these parts. One night, he said there was no helicopter available, and he drove the ambulance down to a hospital in L.A. in 30 minutes, racecar fast. And other tales of gruesome finds, and people he saved. Apparently the local Hell's Angels chapter really respected him for all of the people he saved, told him he could drop by their hall. He took a look inside, but said he respected 'em too much to take advantage.
Harry moved on and worked for GTE, one of the local Baby Bells. Apparently he did just about every job there, from lineman to residental installs to rolling out fiber optics. He ended up knowing so much that he got a clearance to work on the the local Navy base. And from there onto Reagan Ranch — the Western White House — setting things up for the Gipper himself. And one time, they ask Harry to do a mission for them back in DC, and he rode in the second seat on a fighter jet all the way there. What was it about? Well, that's classified.
Now you may be getting a picture here, that Harry is a bullshitter. And bullshitting is a fine art — there is certainly a good amount of truth in there, but there's a whole lot of embellishment as well. And it was fun. You know, who cares if one actually knows the truth? What is truth, anyway — is it beauty?
By the time I got to know him, Harry wasn't very pretty. A lifetime in the sun had left his skin scarred, with melanomas on his brow. His eyes, too, were clouded over. But I was there to talk, and my dog was there to play, and that's what really mattered. He's a lifelong Republican, but we could both complain about Trump under his Ukrainian flag.
Occasionally, on the warmer days, his not-wife came out as well, and I got to know Christa as well. I don't know a lot of Christa's story, since Harry did the talking for all three of us, just about. She's German, and was about ten years old when the Third Reich fell. She came over here and worked in office computing, a little bit programming, and a little bit of spreadsheets. While they're not married, she's lived with Harry for about 25 years. She hurt her foot a couple years back, and while she was at physical therapy she fell and fractured her femur. So we've been worried about her health, and she still has trouble getting around.
So, it's a couple with one good pair of eyes and legs between the two of them, and a cute little mutt. Until a couple of weeks ago, when Harry took a fall. It was before my walk time, but apparently he was outside with Scruffy, had to chase her back from the neighbor's yard yet again (she likes to push the limits), and fell down on the sidewalk doing so.
By the time I walked by in the late afternoon, Harry was in the emergency room for a fractured pelvis, and was soon to be admitted. I went to visit him the next day, and thought he was doing well — well enough to tell the same stories I'd heard twenty times before. But they were going to do a biopsy of some sort, so he couldn't eat solid food. His neighbor Ed told me: Harry had colon cancer, and Harry didn't want to operate.
In some sense, I could see the storm clouds coming beforehand. Over the past few months, Harry had been grumpier, in a worse mood about stupid little things. Christa forgetting things he told her. The way a neighbor parked a car across the street. That neighbor, Harry's rival, called the police on Harry. In typical Ventura P.D. style, they showed up three hours later with two cars, talked to him for a few minutes, realized there was nothing to do, and drove away. He blamed his mood on his worsening vision, which he assumed was making him tired all of the time, as the last gasp of his vision cortex before he went fully blind. It was a good theory, but we could make other theories as well.
I went to visit him three times in the hospital, every time in a different room. I fully expected him to be in the cafeteria on the fourth visit, but he had a nice room on the south side of the hospital. From the room I could see the Christmas tree in my house's picture window, but of course Harry couldn't have seen if even if he could get out of bed. He had managed to walk to the end of the hall and back, and was being discharged to an acute care facility in an hour or two.
In the meantime, I continued to visit his house, because Fiona still wanted to see her best friend Scruffy, and I wanted to make sure that Scruffy was okay. Keeping a routine is comforting for dogs, so I couldn't just stop coming. The first week was hard on Scruff, to be sure, but she mostly bounced back by the second week as various friends and family visited. I learned new things. I learned that there is no love lost between her children and his children, that's for sure.
One time I came over and saw Harry's son with a big stack of cash, and I did the logical thing and ask if a drug deal was going on. No, it was that Harry wanted him to deposit all of that cash in a bank. Somehow Christa mentioned this to the police, who went to talk to the son, whereupon they discovered he had a twenty year old arrest warrant in Santa Clara County. But San José didn't want him after all, and he was released. Let's just say things have been icy since then.
But I have been talking to Christa more, inside the house. Not so much talking, without Harry, but some. A couple days back, she asked me what I had been up to lately. I thought about what I had been watching the previous night, the series Masters of the Air, and how exciting it was, feeling like you were flying bombing missions over Germany. And then I thought about saying to Christa that it must have been no fun to be on the other side of those bombs, right? What I actually said was, "Nothing much."
I tried to take Christa over to visit Harry, but my truck is too tall for her, and my car is too short. Harry had his son take his truck away, so that Christa didn't let uninsured people drive it — which had the main effect that Christa doesn't have a vehicle she's comfortable getting her body into. And so she hasn't been able to see Harry, or leave. This whole thing seems like a "decisions were made" episode.
I never did visit Harry over at the care center. He had come down with an infection, and had gotten weaker. This afternoon, New Years Day, I got a call from Harry's next-door neighbor, Ed. Right away, I assumed Harry had taken a turn for the worse, or was dead. It turned out to be the latter. Not really a shock, not really deeply sad for me. We were never really close friends, just men who talked.
As for Scruffy, Harry wanted her put down if anything ever happened to him. We have decided not to honor that particular wish, as Viking as it is. Sure, she was really attached to him for years. She's doing okay, once she got over the initial hump of waiting for Harry to come home. Some dogs are like Hachi, but most are more resilient. She's supposedly age 17, so I wouldn't expect her to last too much longer, but Scruffy still has some play left in her.
And as for Harry, well, you know that him being dead is just a cover story, right? I'm sure what really happened is that the intelligence folks called him in for one last mission. You see, they needed a guy who could tap Putin's phones, one who could understand every aspect of their antiquated systems. It's very dangerous — it could be a suicide mission. But he's out there right now, Reagan's special agent, fixing phones for democracy. Godspeed, Harry.
Fiona is fairly intelligent, but as a pandemic puppy, she really didn't get socialized with other dogs, and whether by nature or nurture, came out a lot more timid than most dogs of her breed — Hergé's Snowy pretty much nails the normal personality of the fox terrier, even if they're all different. So as we came out of the pandemic, I was looking for someone to be good friend for Fiona.
Around the corner and a short way down the street, we came to know one of our neighbor dogs, a bitch named Scruffy. She's a mutt, a golden-haired girl that was some sort of small terrier crossed with some sort of dog with a winter coat. Harry, her owner, had called all of his other dogs Tippy, so as not to forget the name, but Scruffy had named herself, from when he had first found her on his front doorstep. By now, she was in her teens, and the temperament of an older, social, alpha female that was still a little smaller than Fiona was perfect, and they became fast friends.
Now, this isn't really a story about dogs, but about Scruffy's humans. Harry Harshbarger was Scruffy's dad, an old man from West Virginia who liked to sit out on his front porch, occasionally catch a smoke, and watch the neighborhood pass by. I saw "watch" in a loose sense, as he was very nearly blind. He could recognize Fiona by sight because of her distinctive parti-color coat, but could not tell the difference between myself and my father at close range. We do sound alike, and look reasonably alike (no paternity questions here), but thirty years makes a difference.
But Harry and I had a reason to sit outside together, our dogs, and became friends. Male friendships are often like that — no real deep connection, just doing things together creates a bit of a bond. He liked to give food to all of the neighborhood dogs, which gave him a chance to shoot the shit with a few of his neighbors. Harry's Southern manners meant he wanted to be neighborly with everyone. People joke that he was the Mayor of Eva Street, from the way he talked to everyone, to the way he got involved with everyone's business and told them what the parking rules were. Let's say I'm glad I live around the corner, and not right next to Harry.
He certainly was an institution in the neighborhood, living here only a couple years less than I, and I moved in as an infant. He knew everyone who came and went. Across the street from Harry lived my friend Matt from when I was a schoolkid. We were close friends, primarily in the sense that we lived close and at that age it matters most that you can actually see each other. Matt and I evolved in radically different directions -- myself towards academics and science, and Matt towards skateboards, bikes, and drugs. Harry told me how Matt had been caught for robbing College Pharmacy, was jailed, got out, then got caught robbing the exact same place again.
Matt was still in a jail in Idaho, living near his father, when his mother Anne died. I had known her a little when I was a kid, I saw her stained glass workshop. As she got older, she had gotten more and more OCD — the neighbor who was taking care of her things found uncashed cheques in with a pile of papers in the microwave oven. The whole place was a mess; the roof older than I am and falling apart (especially on the south side). Matt inherited something like $20 million from his mother's estate, some investments and some property. None of this really makes sense, on any level.
So Harry and I had lots to talk about. And as I got to know him, I got to know his own stories more. Back in West Virginia, he was from a prominent family, he said, but his parents were something of black sheep, and he and his siblings were raised by his grandmother. Apparently they swept the local shooting competitions so much they told 'em not to compete one year. But he'd gone from shooting crows to trying to tame them by the time I knew him, presumably because he could still see crows and not little birds like bluejays.
After moving to California, he became a paramedic around these parts. One night, he said there was no helicopter available, and he drove the ambulance down to a hospital in L.A. in 30 minutes, racecar fast. And other tales of gruesome finds, and people he saved. Apparently the local Hell's Angels chapter really respected him for all of the people he saved, told him he could drop by their hall. He took a look inside, but said he respected 'em too much to take advantage.
Harry moved on and worked for GTE, one of the local Baby Bells. Apparently he did just about every job there, from lineman to residental installs to rolling out fiber optics. He ended up knowing so much that he got a clearance to work on the the local Navy base. And from there onto Reagan Ranch — the Western White House — setting things up for the Gipper himself. And one time, they ask Harry to do a mission for them back in DC, and he rode in the second seat on a fighter jet all the way there. What was it about? Well, that's classified.
Now you may be getting a picture here, that Harry is a bullshitter. And bullshitting is a fine art — there is certainly a good amount of truth in there, but there's a whole lot of embellishment as well. And it was fun. You know, who cares if one actually knows the truth? What is truth, anyway — is it beauty?
By the time I got to know him, Harry wasn't very pretty. A lifetime in the sun had left his skin scarred, with melanomas on his brow. His eyes, too, were clouded over. But I was there to talk, and my dog was there to play, and that's what really mattered. He's a lifelong Republican, but we could both complain about Trump under his Ukrainian flag.
Occasionally, on the warmer days, his not-wife came out as well, and I got to know Christa as well. I don't know a lot of Christa's story, since Harry did the talking for all three of us, just about. She's German, and was about ten years old when the Third Reich fell. She came over here and worked in office computing, a little bit programming, and a little bit of spreadsheets. While they're not married, she's lived with Harry for about 25 years. She hurt her foot a couple years back, and while she was at physical therapy she fell and fractured her femur. So we've been worried about her health, and she still has trouble getting around.
So, it's a couple with one good pair of eyes and legs between the two of them, and a cute little mutt. Until a couple of weeks ago, when Harry took a fall. It was before my walk time, but apparently he was outside with Scruffy, had to chase her back from the neighbor's yard yet again (she likes to push the limits), and fell down on the sidewalk doing so.
By the time I walked by in the late afternoon, Harry was in the emergency room for a fractured pelvis, and was soon to be admitted. I went to visit him the next day, and thought he was doing well — well enough to tell the same stories I'd heard twenty times before. But they were going to do a biopsy of some sort, so he couldn't eat solid food. His neighbor Ed told me: Harry had colon cancer, and Harry didn't want to operate.
In some sense, I could see the storm clouds coming beforehand. Over the past few months, Harry had been grumpier, in a worse mood about stupid little things. Christa forgetting things he told her. The way a neighbor parked a car across the street. That neighbor, Harry's rival, called the police on Harry. In typical Ventura P.D. style, they showed up three hours later with two cars, talked to him for a few minutes, realized there was nothing to do, and drove away. He blamed his mood on his worsening vision, which he assumed was making him tired all of the time, as the last gasp of his vision cortex before he went fully blind. It was a good theory, but we could make other theories as well.
I went to visit him three times in the hospital, every time in a different room. I fully expected him to be in the cafeteria on the fourth visit, but he had a nice room on the south side of the hospital. From the room I could see the Christmas tree in my house's picture window, but of course Harry couldn't have seen if even if he could get out of bed. He had managed to walk to the end of the hall and back, and was being discharged to an acute care facility in an hour or two.
In the meantime, I continued to visit his house, because Fiona still wanted to see her best friend Scruffy, and I wanted to make sure that Scruffy was okay. Keeping a routine is comforting for dogs, so I couldn't just stop coming. The first week was hard on Scruff, to be sure, but she mostly bounced back by the second week as various friends and family visited. I learned new things. I learned that there is no love lost between her children and his children, that's for sure.
One time I came over and saw Harry's son with a big stack of cash, and I did the logical thing and ask if a drug deal was going on. No, it was that Harry wanted him to deposit all of that cash in a bank. Somehow Christa mentioned this to the police, who went to talk to the son, whereupon they discovered he had a twenty year old arrest warrant in Santa Clara County. But San José didn't want him after all, and he was released. Let's just say things have been icy since then.
But I have been talking to Christa more, inside the house. Not so much talking, without Harry, but some. A couple days back, she asked me what I had been up to lately. I thought about what I had been watching the previous night, the series Masters of the Air, and how exciting it was, feeling like you were flying bombing missions over Germany. And then I thought about saying to Christa that it must have been no fun to be on the other side of those bombs, right? What I actually said was, "Nothing much."
I tried to take Christa over to visit Harry, but my truck is too tall for her, and my car is too short. Harry had his son take his truck away, so that Christa didn't let uninsured people drive it — which had the main effect that Christa doesn't have a vehicle she's comfortable getting her body into. And so she hasn't been able to see Harry, or leave. This whole thing seems like a "decisions were made" episode.
I never did visit Harry over at the care center. He had come down with an infection, and had gotten weaker. This afternoon, New Years Day, I got a call from Harry's next-door neighbor, Ed. Right away, I assumed Harry had taken a turn for the worse, or was dead. It turned out to be the latter. Not really a shock, not really deeply sad for me. We were never really close friends, just men who talked.
As for Scruffy, Harry wanted her put down if anything ever happened to him. We have decided not to honor that particular wish, as Viking as it is. Sure, she was really attached to him for years. She's doing okay, once she got over the initial hump of waiting for Harry to come home. Some dogs are like Hachi, but most are more resilient. She's supposedly age 17, so I wouldn't expect her to last too much longer, but Scruffy still has some play left in her.
And as for Harry, well, you know that him being dead is just a cover story, right? I'm sure what really happened is that the intelligence folks called him in for one last mission. You see, they needed a guy who could tap Putin's phones, one who could understand every aspect of their antiquated systems. It's very dangerous — it could be a suicide mission. But he's out there right now, Reagan's special agent, fixing phones for democracy. Godspeed, Harry.
"Kitto daijoubu da yo." - Sakura Kinomoto