The Last Good Day

I was very happy on Thursday, July 16, 1981. My first wife, Eileen, was coming home on one of her days off. She lived in Portland that summer. She was a copy desk intern for The Oregonian. I lived in our apartment in Eugene and took German and began to read in earnest for my English Renaissance Drama field exam, coming in April, 1982.

Eileen seemed happy, too, to have some time together. In fact, on Thursday, July 16, 1981, we indulged ourselves and bought fresh salmon filets and a bottle of wine and some fresh salad vegetables and a couple of potatoes. We overdrew our checking account to buy this food. We had a barbecue with our Hibatchi.

But, Thursday, July 16, 1981 also saddened us. Deeply. That day Harry Chapin, singer, songwriter, and warrior against hunger, was killed in a car crash on Long Island. The report came over All Things Considered and we were stunned.

We loved the two Harry Chapin concerts we had heard in the Spokane Opera House. The first was with a supporting musicians, part of a tour that was later released on a double LP, "Greatest Stories, Live", an album that became a soundtrack to our young married life. The second featured Harry Chapin solo and was a benefit to raise money for a Spokane group working to fight hunger.

Our favorite Harry Chapin songs were dramatic monologues. Harry created characters in his songs gave voice to the delusions, dreams, and sad failures of these characters. "Taxi" featured a cabbie whose fare one night is a lover from years ago whose dream to become an actress has come true, while the cab driver, who was going to be pilot, only flies when he's at the wheel of his cab getting stoned. "Mr. Tanner" tells the story of a man who works at a laundry and sings while hanging clothes: "He did not know how well he sang. It only made him whole."

We had splurged and bought the salmon and wine before we heard the news of his death. We remembered his tireless drive for social justice. We laughed at how funny he was and tried to make sense of his death, tried to believe that, like his famous song, "Circle" that maybe his death completed the circle of his life, since, as he sang:

No straight lines make up my life;
And all my roads have bends;
There's no clear-cut beginnings;
And so far no dead-ends.

He'd reached his dead end, and,we thought, desperate for meaning, the circle of his life had been closed.

We grilled the salmon and tossed the salad and baked the potatoes and put Harry Chapin on the turntable, as if we were having a last supper with him. We enjoyed a perfect meal and felt our grief at Harry Chapin's death and the joy of his music and having a rare evening together.

I didn't know it at the time, but this was our last good day together.

Soon, Eileen's trips to Eugene nearly disappeared. She preferred staying in Portland. I took a trip to Kellogg alone when summer school was out. I thought our being apart was a sign of strength in our marriage: we didn't have to be together all the time like lesser couples. We were strong. We could pursue our ambitions, independent of each other, with full mutual support. I thought we had the perfect mature and modern marriage.

In Kellogg, rumors flew in the Silver Valley about the Bunker Hill shutting down. Soon Uncle Bunker would die, putting hundreds of men out of work. Dad would soon lose his job. Things were falling apart.

Back in Eugene, Eileen began to talk about wanting to leave our marriage. At first, I thought she was being hypothetical. I was still feeling high from our dinner together on July 16, 1981 and was deeply committed to the idea that we had a failsafe marriage.

By December, our marriage was over. I'd been living a delusion. Eileen longed for a life of freedom that I couldn't or wouldn't understand. She wanted to move around, earn money free of our graduate student life, and, I suspect, to be free of my erratic temperament, single-minded academic drive, and drinking binges.

I think back to July 16, 1981 often. In my mind, it was our last good day together. It was a good day with a full range of grief, admiration, ambition, music, great food, wine, sadness, and pleasure. It was as if the whole complex of experiences that comprised our marriage were compacted into a single day.

I suspect, though, that I have fallen into the Emily Webb trap. In Our Town, Emily, after her death, can go back and relive one day in her life. Mrs. Gibbs urges her to choose an insignificant day, but Emily goes back to a day she remembers fondly, her twelfth birthday.

When she relives that day, she sees it from a perspective she lacked as a twelve year old. She sees her father being oblivious, concerned with mundane things, not Emily's joy. She sees her family taking moments for granted, not seizing them for the joy they hold. Revisiting her twelfth birthday chastens her excitement.

I've wondered too many times what would I would see if, after I die, I transported myself back to July 16, 1981. Would it really be my last good day with Eileen? What would I see decades later that I didn't see on July 16, 1981?

I'm pretty sure I know. Eileen was faking it. This was not a good day for her. I would see that she came home out of a sense of obligation, dreading being back home with me.

I would see that her grief for the death of Harry Chapin was genuine.

I would see the distance she was keeping. I would see myself as foolishly ecstatic, trying too hard, aware underneath my delusions that Eileen was unhappy. I would see the salmon and the wine and the salad and the potatoes as a thick quilt of temporary comfort I wrapped myself in to feel secure, but that isolated me from any awareness that our marriage would soon end.

On July 16,1981, I didn't want to believe what revisiting that day would show me was inevitable. I would see that the security and approval I longed for and that I thought marriage would guarantee me for life was a childish dream, ungrounded in actuality.

In his song, "Taxi", the cab driver, Harry, lets his old lover, Sue, off, "past the gate and the fine trimmed lawns", never to see her again.

The song's last moment reminds me of the last time I saw Eileen. It was in Portland in June of 1982. I moved the last of the furniture and other belongings that were Eileen's to her apartment in the northwest part of town and went to the Oregonian to return her apartment key. She took the key,

And she walked away in silence,
It's strange, how you never know,
But we'd both gotten what we'd asked for,
Such a long, long time ago.