Tommy Glen

 Tommy Glen

   Reading all this stuff lately about the relativity of the time/space continum in the Planck Epoc has got me thinking about whether time is real.  I dreamed last night that I was back in college, a weird montage of the past and the present. It was now, but it was also "then". As if there was no time and I could jump around like a photon blinking in and out of being, just before the Big Bang.

    And so, both as my current self and as college self, I was back there again, this time at some sports field or "dome";  outside,  but with large bleachers that were partially covered. This created an amphitheater-like back drop to my dream. Glen was standing before me there on a clear, bright day. In that strange cinematic fisheye zooming-in effect, the bleachers moved back and details of the dream became bleary as he became the only thing I could see. His face was so absolutely clear and so detailed that I could see laugh lines around his eyes, the olive tone of his face, and jet black hair, curly and tossled.  I stared at him transfixed by the clarity while he smiled broadly. 

    I said, "You're hair is so black, did you dye it?" (Seeming to notice that it could not be that black in the here and now. I was very clear that this was NOW). 

    "No", he said with warmth. He was amused.

    The image of him was an amalgam of everything I loved about my Glen; handsome Mediterranean features (I think his ancestors came from France, actually), beautiful  curly hair.... and skin that was both smooth and masculine. But mostly his beaming, laughing, mirth-filled eyes.

    As I looked at him in wonder, I knew in my dream that it was a visitation...a gift...an invitation to remember....I felt all that I felt with Glen 42 years ago, all the love, belonging and allegance we shared. It all flooded back in as I looked at him, and it was delicious.

  Already, college had been an awakening me; a time of remembering who I truly was; more that just the last, lost,  "afterthought" 6th child of two terribly unhappy people at the broken end of their own time here; unable to give me anthing but a basic sense that I was loved. (Love is quite a gift, I eventually understood, when a person is almost truly spent themselves). So in my escape to college, I started to feel the layers of bad stories slide off of me, 

like shed skin,
like a suit that does not fit.... 

Then in the nexus of my rmembering myself, came Glen.

    Glen loved me wholly for who I was; a newly un-tethered, scared young woman putting together the pieces of a broken and weird (but interesting) childhood. One where no one particularly noticed that I was smart at all. 

    Oddly we hardly ever talked about my past as "trauma", that is not how WE saw me. That aspect of life was of no import. It didn't matter that no one in my childhood saw much about me except that I was a member of the family and therefore did belong to our tribe. I was cared for in a basic way, mainly by my sister Nita and brother Sonny who were barely more than children themselves.....Glen didn't notice any of my insecurities;  he thought  I was just  bright, and independent. 

    I remember he once commented while I sketched Linus Pauling during a seminar on the healing powers of vitamin C, "Your biggest problem is that you are too talented. It is going to be hard to decide which path to take in life." It was the sweetest non-compliment of my life.  

In the movie Avatar, the two blue characters look into each others eyes as they pronounce allegiance and love and say "I see you".  

    Glen saw me.

            I was 22.

    His love helped me launch; to evade the lie that my childhood defined who I was and who I would become.

 Sometimes being seen is all a girl needs.

 I took flight

Found my true course. 

Because of how damned good Glen made me feel, I sometimes    get stuck thinking I need a relationship now to mirror back to me my worth. Maybe so, but in my dream I was gifted a reminder of that feeling  again.

Like an ember to carry along with me now. 

    I woke up and dug out my one album of our two years together. How funny that I remember every detail of him with only a few fading pictures in an album doomed to disintegrate on my shelf. I basked in going back and forth in time; stirring up all those truths about myself and my Glen. I felt it lift and  reassure me of who I am.

    Glen is happy about the visit too, I hear him saying saying, "Go back and grab those feelings and swallow them up. Feed yourself!"

      As someone in a movie said yesterday, "Everyone should know true love once in their lives". I sometimes wish I had not been too young and impetuous to hang on to it. 

    Glen would probably respond, "That is the way of things, Cutie."