My Lost Love

His name was Harry Ericson. We went steady all through my high school days. I met Harry one night after a band concert in my home town’s courthouse grounds bandstand. On Wednesday nights in the summer the town stayed alive and the band played. Harry was the new trumpet player that night. During the concert I’d noticed him. Dark hair, dark eyes, not like the high school boys. He was older, just graduated from a neighboring town's high school. Our eyes met once between numbers in the concert. That was all. After the concert he caught up with me and offered to carry my horn case to the car.

“No thanks, I can manage,” I said. He laughed and told me afterwards he thought that was funny. He didn’t give up but followed me to the car. We talked, and from then on we’d get together after concerts. He lived in a neighboring town so I didn’t see him except on those Wednesday nights. Then when school started in the fall he became the new assistant band director and was assigned to help me in practicing my horn. I think it was while playing duets with him alone in the basement that we paused to catch our breath one time. He looked at me, leaned over and gave me a kiss. “See,” he said, “you have to pucker up like that to get the high notes.” 

It wasn’t the typical boy-girl relationship. We didn’t go to parties. We didn’t go dancing. We didn’t go to movies. I don’t even remember our going out to have sandwiches or ice cream. Harry would drive me home from concerts and rehearsals and on the way we’d park at the local lovers’ parking spot overlooking the town. He’d have the radio tuned into romantic music and steal a few kisses. Then I’d remind him of Daddy’s 11 p.m. curfew. “It’s time to take me home,” I’d say. And he’d always do it.

I didn’t date anyone else all through high school. The boys knew I was Harry’s girl. I’d see Harry nearly every day at band rehearsals. When I didn’t have a duet practice with him in the basement of our school I’d hear him from an upstairs classroom playing “I’m Getting Sentimental Over You” just like Tommy Dorsey used to on his trumpet and I’d know he was thinking of me. 

I'm spending a little time just now out on the patio watching the setting sun’s last rays light up the tree tops in our neighborhood. That’s what brought Harry to mind. Another of “our songs” came with him. It goes something like this:

When day is done and shadows fall I dream of you.

I think of all the little things we used to do.

That yearning returning to hold you in my arms

Won’t go Love, I know Love,

Without you night has lost its charms...

When day is done and grass is wet with twilight’s dew

My lonely heart is sinking with the sun.

Although I miss your tender kiss the whole day through

I miss you most of all when day is done.

We adopted the song as “our song” that late afternoon when he was driving me home for the last time. It was just that time of day, you know, when the sun’s rays are especially golden. The wheat fields waved softly as we passed slowly by and the song came on the car’s radio. "Listen," Harry said and pulled over to the shoulder. We stopped talking so we could hear the words and felt they spoke for us. He'd been drafted into the Army, World War II, and was home on leave for a few days, due to go back the next day. I'd be bound for college in California in a couple of weeks. We may have felt a premonition that it was our last time together. The words of the song made us call it "our song."

It was heart-wrenching to write to Harry two years later telling him that I’d found a new love, that I’d be getting married to one Captain Wallace G. Wethe USMC, a fighter pilot. His reply was a bitter, a nearly illegible post card, probably written when he’d had too many beers. Or maybe he was making it easier on me to leave.

“Don’t marry a musician,” Daddy had said. “You’ll always be poor.” Grandmother thought I could do better than Harry too. Wally, on the other hand, had a college education, a secure place in the military. He was brought up in the same religion as I, the son of long time friends of the family, a perfect choice. I’d make that choice again, because Wally brought his own romance and husbandly love, but I still feel sad when I think of Harry. I saw his mother once a few years later. By then I had my first baby in my arms and was visiting my dad and his new wife.  Mrs. Ericson looked at me and the baby. It was the first time we'd met. She seemed to like me and said wistfully, “Harry still has your picture on his dresser.”

I lost track of Harry altogether until some twenty years ago when I visited a museum in a little town called Fountain in southern Minnesota near our old dating roads. As I perused one room I saw a display about a small town dance band called The Polka Dots and there was a picture of Harry with his trumpet! Still handsome. Still with that wide smile, the one he gave me when I said, “No thanks, I can manage.” I asked the docent about Harry. She knew him.

“Did he ever marry?” I asked.

“Yes, he married a girl in the band who played the clarinet.”

“Did he ever have children?”

“No,” she said. “He died quite young.” 

I wish I hadn’t asked how. The docent quietly answered, “Well, he had a drinking problem.”  I thanked her and walked on. I didn’t want her to see me crying.

In those days a young woman’s choice in marriage was more binding than now. I might have been Harry’s wife and played the French horn in his band. We may have had children, or not. The drinking problem? I believed in the vow "for better or for worse," but it had not been a problem to us. If he had a drinking problem then he kept it carefully concealed from me. I never saw him drink, probably because he knew I didn't. I did see him once quite unexpectedly when he was drunk. We'd had a date and when he didn't show up I went to his place in the next town. He was sitting on the edge of his bed, all dressed up but with his head in his hand, not ready to go. He didn't look at me or speak to me. I was naive enough to not recognize he was drunk. I thought he was merely sick and left when a friend of his suggested I leave him there. He'd stay until Harry recovered. 

Would he have had a drinking problem if we’d married? Could we have been happy? Some things we’ll never know. Not in this lifetime. The sad refrain of the words of "our song" I've always remembered.  If I had the chance to turn back the clock would I choose differently? No, and yet music does have a way of making one wonder about things and people once loved and now lost. If there had been no war. If there had been no grandma to send me to college in California. If, if, if...

The sun has set now. Guess I'll go in, it's getting dark. You can't see in the dark.