Losing the Companion

A few years into our marriage, I asked Will if he was in love with me.  He said, "There are other kinds of love . . . like companionship."

I felt devastated at the time even as I realized that it was true -- we were excellent companions.  And throughout our years together we remained great friends and companions as we enjoyed most of the same activities.  Especially the movies.

Kakies's Love of the Movies

I'd been reading about classic films since seventh grade.  My interest began with a youthful attachment to the Thirties Universal horror films and Fifties science fiction.  I would often spend my school lunch money on copies of Famous Monsters of Filmland that I would pick up from the 7-11 on my walk home.  This grew into a love of all old movies.  I once played hooky in high school just to stay home and watch the Joan Crawford classic Mildred Pierce.  Who knew when I would be able to see it again?  I occasionally went to Saturday matinees at the Los Gatos Theater.  On one occasion I attended a screening of The Great Caruso, a 1951 biopic starring Mario Lanza.  The theater was filled with white haired ladies and no other young people. 

In high school I started going to foreign films showing six miles away in Saratoga or 10 miles away in San Jose.  Before I could drive I sometimes could talk my parents into taking me.  I remember being horribly embarrassed when we went to see Elvira Madigan with a very sexy scene played to Mozart's Piano Concerto #21. 

Will and the Movies

Will was largely responsible for programming a movie series at Idaho State University called Cinema 6.  This was a series that brought foreign films to Pocatello -- almost the only way, outside of the occasional PBS broadcast, that one could see anything besides popular movies.  The movies were usually screened in a big, sloped, auditorium in the basement of the business building.  They often arrived in somewhat battered 16 millimeter prints, filled with lines, dirt, and breakage.  He was also among the earliest American creators of a university film studies class.

Kakie Meets Will

from the Idaho State Journal, September 1971

We met at the movies shortly after I moved to Pocatello to attend Idaho State University.  I was going to live with my father's sister, Huldah Bell.  She knew that I loved the movies so in October she took me on a Sunday night the Cinema 6 film series.  The movie was one that had horribly disturbed and offended my mother when dad took her to see it at the Saratoga theater a few years previously:  Ingmar Bergman's The Virgin Spring, a medieval tale of a girl raped and murdered and a father's bloody revenge.  On our way there she said, "I have an odd friend.  I think you'll like him."  When we got there she pointed out a long-haired, bearded middle-aged man at the back of the auditorium.  After the disturbing film she introduced us. 

I began to chase him down and we got together a couple of weeks later -- but that's a story for another time.

Suffice to say, during our long relationship movies were of great importance to us.  Whenever I would drive us to California to visit my family at Christmas and in the summer, we would also spend a few days in San Francisco seeing movies at the "International" theaters:  The Bridge, Castro, Cento Cedar, Richelieu, and Surf and others.  And then, in a most delightful period, we spent the summers from 1979 until 1983 subleasing student apartments in Berkeley and seeing two to three films a day at the various repertory theatres, especially the Pacific Film Archive on the University of California campus.

After he moved to Bend, we continued to visit the Bay Area and in Bend would watch the few independent or foreign films that drifted here.

The End of Movie Companionship

Will's hearing loss gradually made it difficult for him to understand  English language films without subtitles.  Regal cinemas, however, developed a system that made subtitles available on glasses.  So he tried them out on the film Nebraska in 2013.  That was the last English language film we went to see together.

The last foreign film we attended together was The Great Beauty at the Tin Pan Theater in January, 2014.

These days I sometimes ask him, when he sitting silent in one of the wingbacks, if he would like to watch a movie.  He will often just shake his head.

And I have lost my great companion.