And so we commenced…
My senior-year crush in high school was the boy who would become the class valedictorian. As the 1971 graduates of Bentley High entered the football field I could see him being directed to the stage with the others who would be honored that warm evening.
My heart skipped a beat, maybe two. I couldn’t have imagined that the intensity of my feelings for this witty, cool, brilliant classmate in Advanced Placement English could have been any greater—that is, until it was time for his speech.
Everyone liked Dennis Watson. He wasn’t off-puttingly smart or overly competitive. He didn’t strive to be valedictorian; he was just a natural brain.
As he stepped up to the microphone and cleared his throat, no one expected what he was about to say. The typical remarks for the occasion would include thanks to teachers and parents, some inspirational words about following one’s dreams, and, perhaps, a sentimental reflection on friendships made.
But he told us that the war in Viet Nam was wrong, in fact immoral. He said that hard decisions about military service were likely to face many the young men seated before him. At that point a muttering from the bleachers started to rise.
Lots of parents in the audience had served in WWII. My own father who died the year before was a Marine aviator in the Pacific. I remember that he and my mother once had a conversation about how lucky they were to have only daughters and they didn’t need to worry about the draft. A boy in our neighborhood fled to Canada rather than go to war. They were sympathetic to the family’s dilemma.
The muttering soon was punctuated with boos by those who believed that draft dodging was being advocated. It seemed boorish for adults to behave that way. I wished my father had been there, because I knew he would understand.
When Dennis paused for a moment, the students cheered loudly to drown out the heckling.
His next subject was the need for gun control. Geez Louise! How brave could one skinny kid be? The principal looked from side to side as if trying to find a way out. It was inspiring and comical at the same time.
I don’t think the phrase “speaking truth to power” was yet widely used in the American lexicon. But this was it. Now my crush combined with genuine admiration—and that’s a heady emotional elixir.
That fall Dennis and I both attended the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. I only ran into him once on campus the first semester and we exchanged only a wave and a smile. He didn’t stop to chat and I wasn’t bold enough to seize the moment.
Many months later I was with another young man, a mutual friend, walking to the end of the long line at a theater showing a Woody Allen movie. About mid-way we saw Dennis standing in line by himself. “Hey guys,” he said, “I was waiting for you” as he let us cut in. “Good move,” I thought. There were no complaints from those in back of us.
We talked easily as the line slowly advanced. I learned that his number in the draft lottery was 299. He also told the story of the day after our graduation when he went to pick up some paperwork at the school office. As he stood by at the secretary’s desk, the principal, who had received calls about the speech, walked by and said to Dennis, “There you are, you little bastard.”
Even though it was accidental, sitting next to him in the dark and hearing him laugh was heavenly. I didn’t want him to think I was sweet on the other boy, so the following weekend I called Dennis to see if he wanted to go to see a folksinger named Chuck Mitchell at a local coffee house. His older sister answered and said that Dennis, his little brother and parents were on a vacation trip out West. I thanked her, but didn’t leave my name.
A few days later, to my astonishment, a letter arrived on campsite stationery. Dennis said that his sister told him “a girl called” and he hoped it was me. The rest of the summer of 1972 was incandescently romantic.
We did go to see Chuck Mitchell perform and felt sad that he and Joni couldn’t make it work. Dennis loved the Marx Brothers and he took me to see “Duck Soup” at the Cinema Guild. We went to the fireworks on the Detroit River and saw Rick Nelson and the Stone Canyon Band. We read Lawrence Ferlinghetti poems and watched the political conventions together.
Back at school in the fall, we were inseparable. We studied side by side at the library for long hours. Dennis’s intellectual curiosity seemed boundless. He read everything. We cast our first votes for George McGovern that year.
During our junior year we both worked on the morning newscast for the student radio station. Getting up at 4:00 a.m. to prepare for the 6:00 a.m. broadcast was torture for me, but Dennis was so disciplined. He’d splash his face with cold water and that was that.
He knew every detail of Watergate and in the summer before our senior year we celebrated when Nixon resigned. As a Journalism student, Dennis’s class on the First Amendment sparked his interest in law school. I was drawn to the history of broadcasting in my mass media courses.
During his first year as a legal beagle, while I was ensconced in graduate studies that would lead to a Ph.D. and a career in academe, we visited a local jeweler to pick out an engagement ring. We were married the following July 4th weekend and took a quick honeymoon trip to Niagara Falls, where we laughed so giddily so often that we must have been the most annoying couple in a town full of similarly excited newlyweds.
It’s been fifty years since the night Dennis bore witness to the facts of his time. In the decades since, our marriage confirmed the truth of the fact that it’s a sad and beautiful world. The lion’s share of it has been blissfully happy. Friends would joke that we should write a book about what makes a marriage work.
I once heard a talk about the different yardsticks for measuring success in life. The one that most resonated with me was: “If you are married to a person whose company you enjoy, you are a successful person.” By that metric we were on the top of the world.
But other successes came too. Our career paths followed a steady upward trajectory. Dennis took up running as a way to deal with the stress of his legal practice. His first big goal was to qualify for the Boston Marathon. He did in 1996 and ran it six more times. Next, he wanted to run the JFK 50-mile race. He did that in 2001 and again in 2002. Then he set his sights on running a marathon in each of the 50 states. In 2009 it was accomplished. Ultimately he ran 133 marathons.
In the Acknowledgments of a book I had published in the late 1990s, I wrote “Not a day has passed during two years of working on this book—or in twenty years of marriage—that my wonderful husband didn’t say or do something that made me laugh heartily. Of the four million Americans born in 1953, I am certain that Dennis Watson is the funniest, and I’m the luckiest.”
By the end of the first decade of the 21st Century those words were still true. We were looking forward to the next phase of life—making early retirement plans to write movie scripts together. We had already written one that had been optioned. It was a pipe dream, but not out of the realm of possibility. A notebook of ideas and research for other stories was full of hope and promise. There were blue skies ahead….