In Loving Memory and Honor...Arlen

“Penny—you did it! I’m so proud of you!” He said this as he was walking up the steps towards me, smiling. And then he leaned over the rail and kissed me.

Few dreams have ever felt so good. And prior to this one, twenty years in the making, in all my other dreams/nightmares he was always angry with me for not waiting for him, for going forward in my life with Kelly.

It wasn’t really Arlen who was angry with me though—the dreams were a mirror of the struggle I was having within myself—and Arlen wasn’t allowed by me to come in, in any other way, until I resolved my feelings of guilt and shame and worthlessness surrounding him.

That dream of him being proud of me was the first chink out of a gigantoid iceberg. It was the marking of a point in my life where I had made the conscious choice to no longer beat up on myself. I had looked in the mirror one day, looked into my own eyes leaking over with tears, and realized how cruel and harsh I had been with myself—more so than I would be to anyone outside of me. I sincerely apologized, right then and there, to myself. And I began to actually practice loving myself unconditionally and with compassion. The girl who stared back at me in the mirror had tried and tried and tried SO HARD to do, and be, all the “right things”—only to be harped at and to go unappreciated by me. I was finally done with not being good enough.

Arlen was my first love. We were neighbors—grew up on farms and ranches—and he and my brother, Tim, were best friends from childhood. Tim and his wife, Cheri, pretty much orchestrated the two of us getting together, and from the moment of our first date we were a foursome who did everything together.

When I slip back into our year together, I remember it as being so fun and full of laughter. Arlen and I both loved animals and nature and looking at the stars--true romantics at heart. He picked me a bouquet of wild yellow sweet peas when he, Tim and I went to check out the damage after a tornado had passed through a deserted neighboring farmstead. When I quit school and returned home, he stopped the pick-up in the middle of the road on the way into our family farm where Tim and Cheri lived, to kiss me, saying, “I’ve been wanting to do that ever since you got home.”

He and Tim whole-heartedly threw themselves into acting like fools just to entertain their women. One of my favorite memories of those two is watching them run, in their cut-offs, down to the beach of Haley Dam, girlishly squealing as they held their towels in front of them and then daintily dipping their toes in the water.

The four of us were parked in the pick-up on the Big Hill, and I remember Tim making some wise crack to which Arlen replied as he kissed me, “Shut up, Lewton, I’m trying to seduce your sister.”

He hunted all over his parents’ home to find a child-size helmet that would fit me when he took me with him on a motorcycle ride in the pastures to check cows. As we stopped to open a gate, he told me, with the most charming grin, that I looked like a little kid in that helmet.

The memories go on and on, warming my heart with every one. I used to be terrified of forgetting anything from our time together, and I actually did forget for an awful-feeling frantic moment. But then my heart started filling in the gaps: and the memories, I’ve discovered, have gotten sweeter with age and experience.

That year was filled with a lot of firsts for me. My grandmother had passed away when college started, and Arlen, my first boyfriend, and I had just started dating that summer. I was in my second year at NDSU for landscape design when I hit school burnout. I was sick with something like walking pneumonia most of what was to be my last fall quarter, and the school thing was just something I was doing because everyone else my age seemed to be doing it. In looking back, it wasn’t my desire—I was feeling really empty and lost there. I was in a void.

The idea of an education in a life-long career of doing one thing was feeling really limiting and suffocating for me. I couldn’t put it into words then because of feeling so much shame at “being a quitter” in the first place, plus I was mentally exhausted from trying to perform to the level of excellence I was expecting of myself. Even then, I was wrestling with the “not good enough” theme.

At nineteen years of age, I was an expert at rote regurgitation of all kinds of subject matter—my teachers and instructors loved it—but I was losing my sense of unique identity, my own “I am-ness.” My sense of imagination and creativity had just torpedoed down a black hole. I was a conglomeration of everyone else’s ideas and belief systems, molding myself this way and that, immersing myself to the point I no longer even felt real. And so choice-making,for me, became overloaded with overwhelming and paralyzing fears of making the wrong choice.

So, I quit, returned home and went to work at one of the local drugstores part-time. I was a painter-for-hire with my mom and sister on our days off. And pretty much every weekend was spent with Arlen and Tim and Cheri, and my newborn niece, Crystal.

Arlen never once treated me like, or intimated that, I was only a fling for him. I was treated with honor and affection all the while we dated. So, now when I look back at one of our last times together, I’m astonished at how much an I’m not good enough self-perception managed to twist and distort what was really a very unconditional love-based act.

He had pulled over on the township road, after leaving Tim and Cheri’s, to talk. As he held me, he asked, “Do you think we should break up so you can go back and finish school?”

Believing he was sick and tired of dating pathetic me, I found myself bawling my eyes out at the thought of parting from him—and that only made it worse in my eyes, because I detested women using tears to manipulate men. And there I was seemingly doing that very thing—even though that wasn’t my intention.

It took me nearly twenty-five years to look at that moment from some other perspective than “I’m a loser nobody would want to be with.” Twenty-five years to even consider the possibility that that was maybe guy-speak for, “I’m feeling serious about us, but I don’t want to get in your way of happiness. And I’m asking you how you feel about us.” He sure kissed me afterward like he meant business. Grin.

But no—I couldn’t even let myself fully enjoy that at the time, because, in my mind, I believed he was resorting to kissing me in order to calm down a hysterical wreck and to smooth over an awkward moment of trying to break up with me nicely.

I was SO NOT PROUD of MYSELF back then, and for all those years afterward…and that made for a very long and difficult journey.

This is the start of my story with Arlen…there is so much more to come…but this is enough for now…

For more on the story of Arlen, click the titles here to read the posts:
Can Death Be Transcended?
Good-bye Conspiracy Theories