Take this waltz: It’s yours now. It’s all that there is.

Take this waltz: It’s yours now. It’s all that there is.

The vast majority of survivors of a dearly departed spouse are afflicted by certain regrets. One regret that gnaws at my soul as I lie sleepless at night is that I never took Anne dancing. Why? I was the world’s worst, most embarrassing dancer. Even in those heady days of the 1970s, when dancing often seemed to entail flailing about the dance floor like an intoxicated shellfish on steroids, I looked and felt ridiculous. Anne, on the other hand, was always poised and graceful, and gazed longingly at dancers who performed “proper” steps, especially the salsa, the rumba, the tango, and most of all, the waltz.

About 400 years ago, when I was a student at Oakridge Secondary School in London Ontario, one of the major events of the institution’s social calendar was a yearly dance featuring a group called the Mandala, commonly referred to, for some unknown reason, as the Mighty Mandala.

As a socially inept ugly duckling, I spent most of my time at these dances lurking miserably in the corner of the gym or concealed in the washroom.

However, I would scuttle out of hiding when the Mighty Mandala belted out their hit tune, a real crowd pleaser called Love-Itis. Not their own composition, but their trademark masterpiece nonetheless:

My family doctor couldn’t find me no cure, oh no
Said you really got it bad and I know it for sure, yes, he did, baby
He said the only one that can fill your prescription, oh yeah
And this feeling I got, ain’t got but one description

Said I got a thing called

Love-itis, got a hold on me
Love-itis, got control on me
Love-itis, got a hold on me
Love-itis, got control on me

I tried so hard, baby, but I couldn’t run away, oh no…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GrQThbeEEUM

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandala_(band)

As a teen in London, the refrain “Love-itis, got a hold on me” took over during those sleepless nights when any hope of love or romance seemed a chimera, an unattainable summit for an ugly duckling boy like me.

Yet somehow, by an act of grace I never earned, I was given forty-seven years of extraordinary, requited love – a love that even now lingers like music after the last note, still turning softly through the halls of memory in an ethereal waltz, radiant, tender, and forever felt.