Passages

Published April 16, 2014 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


     Things change fast in Spring.  Last Wednesday, here in Lindsay, Orange Blossom Festival was in full swing. By the time you read this, it will be gone and we will be making that arduous passage between Palm Sunday and the Cross, the empty tomb.  Truth is, things change continuously, but in Spring they seem to whiz.


     I spent last week mourning the unexpected deaths of three men I barely knew.  The news of Bill Bream's passing arrived first.  As stories quietly unfolded about the lives he had touched, the relationships he tended, his deep, reliable integrity, it was clear he was one of Lindsay's unsung heroes.  I wished I'd known him.


     Then came news of Pat Maloy's death, followed one day later by his brother Jim.  Pat was the chemist for Pent-A-Vate, the soil amendment business owned and run by Bill and Treva Leigh on Palm.  Pat once interviewed me for a job there I should have taken, and chided me years afterward for not coming to work for him.  But more importantly, he was the best friend of one of my best friends, Robert Bastady.  They were friends all through school and roommates at Fresno State 40+ years ago.  They still watched sports together many Sunday afternoons, "yelling at the TV."  Robert said quietly "I'd have gone to see him Sunday if I hadn't been at Fiddler on the Roof," knowing by then he was already gone.


     I really knew Pat through Robert's stories.  After a stroke forced him to retire from Pent-A-Vate in his early fifties, Pat's love of gardening and food preservation turned him into a sustainable homesteader and connoisseur.  He sowed and reaped, cleaned and shucked, hulled and canned as if he'd been raised self-sufficient.  He mended and repaired, kept his place in order despite his handicaps, accidentally shaming us in our lethargy.  The last time I saw him he was repairing a sprinkler head at his folks' place just up the street from mine, while his sister Louise mowed the lawn.  For a moment I saw their parents in each of them, Bob and Marion making a brief return visit to Homassel, and remembered this is why I moved to a small town:  to know people well enough to be bereaved when they pass.


     Then I heard from my friend Bob Puls that one of his best friends, Tom Daly, had passed away suddenly while working calves for a friend.  Tom was from a family of Yokohl Valley pioneers who still ranch there.  I think I only laid eyes on him once, the afternoon he stopped by to check on Bob at the end of pushing his mother's grove, a long passage Bob had to take after Iris's death.  I was photographing the bulldozer's final passes and watched from a distance as the two men shared that moment of loss, then moving on the way men do.


     But like Pat, I knew Tom through Bob's stories.  Working cows on horseback, living in those hills, was his lifeblood, but he was also a huge part of the county Cattlemen's Association, our Resource Conservation District and getting the county's Fire Safe Council started.  He was adamantly against Yokohl Ranch.  Tom's passing leaves an enormous hole in the lives of those who are trying to hold on to the rural quality of Tulare County.


     Many of us who knew these men will not have the opportunity to join with others in their memorial services.  But I hope that as we privately remember and honor their passages here on earth, we'll also honor their concerns while here.  Perhaps some of us will even take up their batons.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Trudy Wischemann is a writer who has "Will the Circle Be Unbroken?" going through her head.  You can send her your memories of these men and others c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.