And So It Went

I'm not sure exactly how to explain the 4 months I spent in Eugene. That's because nothing significant happened - and that's the main reason I left after only 4 months, but I'll get around to that eventually. So the next couple of posts will be more "odds and ends" than narrative.

First - to wrap up the story of Bernie:
 It took a while for him to make it from Dallas with the trailer, but he did eventually arrive in Eugene and he got himself a little apartment west of downtown. I vaguely recall that Karina moved in with him for a short while, but they had some kind of major falling out and that was the beginning of the end of their relationship...
Bernie got a job as a traveling piano tuner (nowadays they have electronic equipment for that but he did it mostly by ear - apparently people like that were hard to find back in the day), and one of his clients was a store called Tallman Piano in Redding, California. They offered Bernie a full time job so he moved down there, and in 1975 (after a few twists and turns) he opened his own store called Bernie's Guitar Shop. (He's been there ever since.) I visited him numerous times over the years, but I'm pretty sure Karina never saw much of him after he left Eugene... He ended up getting married in the late 1970s and afterward he didn't want to have much of anything to do with me. I guess he just wanted to put it all behind him.

BTW: Shortly after Bernie arrived in Oregon we all drove out to the coast and stopped at Devil's Churn and the top of Cape Perpetua before heading back. Yeah - I'm not even going to try and describe how incredible those two spots are. Hard to forget the first time you see them.

As I mentioned in my prior post, mom, Karina and I rented a 2 bedroom unit on the ground floor near the southwest corner of the Clairmont Apartments between Adkins Street and Coburg Road... The main thing I remember about the complex is that there was a really nice pool table in the rec room (but that's not particularly relevant). The manager was a widow named Jeanne (an absolutely wonderful woman). Her best friend Doris also lived in the complex (she was a retired school teacher who had never married). Mom got along really well with them and they all remained friends for many years. (Jeanne and Doris even attended my wedding reception, but I'm getting ahead of myself.)  We didn't have a car at the time so Jeanne took mom shopping when we needed stuff. That was a huge help. (As it turned out, mom never drove again after being hospitalized for cancer earlier that year...)

Aside: Jeanne's car was a 1965 Chevy Impala sedan (cream colored) with a 327 engine. I remember that because I did a tune-up for her once. Unfortunately I couldn't get it running quite right because it had a burnt exhaust valve on the passenger side (probably due to a stuck heat riser). Sigh... Yet another detail that got stuck in my memory despite being utterly irrelevant :-)

Mom loved Eugene more than I did. She'd spent her entire life dreaming of moving to Oregon, and Eugene (as it was in 1972) turned out to be an ideal place to be a "psychic counselor / astrologer". It was only a matter of weeks before mom (once again) had a sizable group of followers. I honestly don't remember much about them (other than a couple of them were attractive women) because I'd kind of stopped paying attention to much of anything at that point :-)

My only activity in Eugene of any significance was playing guitar in a folk mass group at St. Paul's (not far from the apartments)... The parish had a young (progressive) priest, and I met some really nice young people there but didn't form any lasting relationships... I remember that two of the guys (about my age) were studying electronics at Lane County Community College. I was quite envious of them, although it seemed like they were just a bit too "full of themselves" about it :-) Yeah - I couldn't even afford to think about school at the time.
Also, there was a girl in the folk mass group (another guitarist) I thought was really cute... I recently did some poking around on Google and it turns out she was younger than I thought she was (that explains a lot). And yes - I do remember her name (her father owned the largest car dealership in town) but it seems kind of pointless to mention it :-)

Yeah... For me, the time spent in Eugene was about trying to figure out who I was and where I belonged in the world... And that will be the topic of my next post.