Fathers and Sons

Among the regretfully growing circle of my old friends who have hit the long trail home is Mark Hartman, a fellow I met for the first time in my freshman high school geography class. I was instantly attracted to the fellow, whose worldliness and braggadocio were justified by the fact that he was a year older than me…..and most impressive of all, he had been to California. Mark was one of those types of people you meet that you know is full of beans, but you make allowance for it because of their talent in delivering their tall tales. In any event, Mark and I became good friends, and ended up taking drama classes together as we progressed through high school. It was through Mark that I met my close friend Fred Pascoe, who I never would have chummed around with because he sang in the choir while Mark and I were “actors.”

I had a lot of firsts with Mark. I rented my first house with him, took my first road trip with him, and took my first classes in college with him. When I married Jayne, Mark and Fred were at the wedding, and I still have numerous pictures of the event that show Mark making his way back to the keg of beer we had in the back yard. I ended up living in Flagstaff after that, and I saw very little of Mark until we had moved back to Tucson and were living in the desert on the city’s far east side. There, one evening, Mark brought over an Australian girl he had met, Jannene, and announced he was going to marry her and move to Oz. He did both.

We saw Mark intermittently over the next decade or so. He tried moving back to Tucson once with his growing family and we visited with them at Fort Lowell Park. His boys were very little then, and I hardly remember them. After that, I believe I saw Mark one more time, when he was living alone at his father’s property off of east Speedway, and afterwards he returned to Australia to be with his family. There is where he died at age 47.

Flash forward to 2011, and our final days here in Sydney before we must return to Bozeman. I contacted Jannene through email and asked if it would be convenient to see her, but her work would not allow it and she forwarded our contact information to Wyatt and Luke, Mark’s sons now age 31 and 27 respectively. Yesterday we took the bus to Chatswood and met them at a tavern near the train station. What a wonderful evening! We were joined later by Wyatt's girlfriend, Shelly, a charming woman who works as an animator for Australian television, and one of Wyatt's mates, Lance, who is a musician. It was a real pleasure to see what fine young men Mark managed to leave the planet, and we tried to talk about just about everything other than indulging in my own memories of their father. I didn’t need to talk about Mark, for he was very much there sitting right with me in the form of these fellows. We had seen Wyatt before during our 2008 trip to Australia, but I had never met Luke, who works as a security officer on the Sydney trains. The guy is solid muscle, and he had made a special effort to meet us after working some pretty tough shifts. I was touched that he did so.

I suppose that is what life is all about. We are born, we live, and we pass from the scene, generally unnoticed and unlamented save only by a few close friends and family members. But sometimes we do leave something behind for the planet; a good deed, a work of art, a building, or if we are very lucky, our children. In that sense, Mark was a very lucky man. He did leave the world a better place with his contribution of Wyatt and Luke.