The Last Waltz

I watched the documentary "Ain't In It For the Health" a couple of days ago.  It's a portrait of drummer and singer Levon Helm, first famous for his work with The Band and later for his resurrected career in the 2000's after radiation treatment for throat cancer in 1998 seemed to have killed his voice.

Not only did he come back from the treatments, he won three Grammy awards between 2008 and 2012, the year of his death.

Watching this movie, I was transported back to my life in Eugene in 1981.

I was a graduate student in the Ph.D. program in English at the Univ. of Oregon.  My first wife, Eileen, and I had moved to Eugene in 1979 and she was completing a Masters degree in Journalism.

Back then, one journalism student from the U. of O's program each year was chosen to do an internship at The Oregonian and Eileen was chosen.  In June, she moved in with her brother's family and worked at The Oregonian and came to Eugene every week or every couple of weeks.

I spent the summer preparing for and passing a comprehensive examination in 20th Century American drama and I also completed my foreign language requirement for the Ph.D. (which I never finished) by taking German for Reading Knowledge.  I also began to prepare for my comprehensive exam in Shakespeare and Renaissance Drama, coming up in the spring of 1982.

I enjoyed this summer.  I had a lot of studying to do, so I enjoyed the time alone.  I spent time with Deb and Sally and John and Barbara and other friends, so I wasn't that lonely.  I discovered Lone Star Beer. Down the street, the Big Dipper served a turkey and cranberry sandwich I loved.  I went to Portland once or twice to see Eileen and had fun on those visits.

Now, Eileen and I loved the movies.

Downtown, the Cinema 7 showed a lot of independent and foreign movies, and a lot of documentaries.  Nearer campus, in about 1980, the Bijou had opened and showed movies in the same vein.  Both houses often showed double features, often pairing two movies by the same director or two movies featuring the same actor. 

We saw a ton of great movies at these two houses.

Let's say it was July, or maybe August, of 1981, when the Bijou showed two movies (for the price of one) featuring the lead guitarist, songwriter, and vocalist for The Band, Robbie Robertson in The Last Waltz and Carny.

We loved both movies.  We were both ignorant about The Band and loved learning so much from The Last Waltz, a movie of their last concert, and the movie's music was right down our alley.  Both of us enjoyed Carny a lot, too.

What I'll never forget about this double feature, though, was Eileen occasionally biting my shoulder -- she didn't leave teeth marks or anything -- but it was her way of expressing, well, the lust Robbie Robertson aroused in her.

I thought it was funny and was happy to play along.  To me, at that time, so many things were signs of strength in our marriage and how we related to each other:  we lived apart so that Eileen could take advantage of a superb opportunity to pursue her aspirations in journalism; she'd had a huge movie crush on Harrison Ford in The Empire Strikes Back and saw the movie multiple times, each time returning home baffled by how irresistible she found him and how she almost couldn't stop seeing the movie, and, rather than being jealous, I laughed and listened to her talk about how over the moon Harrison Ford sent her;  I didn't mind her biting my shoulder multiple times during a Robbie Robertson double feature.

To this day, I remember the summer of 1981 as fun, as a summer that significantly defined paths for Eileen's future and for mine.

It was also the last summer we were ever married.

In late September/early October, not long after Eileen returned to Eugene from her internship and we both started back to school, we were having ice cream at a Prince Puckler's shop and Eileen told me she didn't think she wanted to be married any longer.

This conversation baffled me and I couldn't grasp it and I acted like she was talking hypothetically -- but she wasn't.  In December, we went our separate ways for Christmas and never lived under the same roof again and our divorce was final in August.

Watching the Levon Helm documentary, which had clips of The  Band, seeing visuals again of Robbie Robertson, I could still feel Eileen's bites into my shoulder and I still feel the excitement I felt that night that Eileen was back in Eugene for a couple of nights and I felt like I was having the time of my life.

Nothing that happened afterward as we separated and divorced, not the bafflement, the confusion, the pain, the anger, or the brief interlude of despair dulls the pleasure I remember of going to Cinema 7 or the Bijou with Eileen.  None of it dulls the pleasure of my introduction to The Band that night, of later buying the album, of having the DVD in my keeping right now.

 As the fall quarter of 1981 wound to an end, Eileen had left town to go to Coeur d'Alene and be with her family.  I wrapped up the quarter by spending evenings in the Douglas Listening Room at the Univ. of Oregon and putting in requests for audio taped versions of different plays of Shakespeare.  I was fatigued those evenings, but wanted to keep up with my studies and reading the plays while listening to them was the way to go.

Then, when it neared closing time, each evening, I put in a last request to the listening room staff as a way to end my night of study with good energy and vitality. I put in a slip requesting The Band playing "Up on Cripple Creek".  The evening staff in the Douglas Listening Lab were work study students and they came to know what my final request would be each evening and since not many others were in the listening room, they would put on headphones, stay behind the service counter, listen along with me to "Up Cripple Creek" and dance, uplifted by Levon Helm's drum work and vocals.

Levon Helm was so reliable.  So was The Band.  I went home at night where things were lonely able to stave off moroseness with their help and knowing the staff had been uplifted, too.

It would give this piece I'm working on perfect symmetry if I wrote that when Eileen and I went to the Bijou Theater and saw two movies featuring Robbie Robertson that it was our last waltz.

But, I can't write that.

I don't know when we had our last waltz or what it would look like if I tried to remember.

I do know that a couple of days ago I liked the movie about Levon Helm taking me back to that night at the Bijou.  I know that when it comes to Eileen, the great times I had with her in England, in Denmark, at the movies, on road trips, at the coast, playing cribbage, listening to music, and talking about all kinds of things melts the pain I felt for years when and after our marriage ended. .

The older I get, the more it's this way with all the failed loves of my past.

My memories are hardly ever bittersweet.

Mostly, they're sweet.  And I'm grateful.