I had a lovely dream Thursday night about Arlene ..., my high school girl
friend. It was a dream of innocence. She was a beautiful teenage girl, and
although I was unaware of myself as being anything different, I assume I was
also that age. We were again boyfriend-girlfriend and just sharing each others
company. Nothing erotic about the dream; we didnt have that relationship, few
did in the 1950s, I think. I woke up feeling very good. For a dream to have
that emotional impact it had to have been special.
I knew that Arlene was very ill. I found out several years ago that she had
lung cancer. I often though that I should call just to make sure she had
someone to help her through this, however it would proceed. I knew she had
grown children, so I felt she would have that company. She was divorced and I
had talked to her ex-husbands bother, with whom I had taught a short while,
and the divorce had been bitter. We had broken up in high school because she
wanted to date this fellow, who had been a grade school friend of mine before
his family moved to another small town. When we broke up, it was a quiet,
friendly episode. I was hurt, but only hurt, not devastated.
After high school, I saw her in college where she attended briefly,
probably because her boyfriend was there as well. Neither stayed to graduate.
And about 15 years ago, I found myself standing next to her at a checkout at a
mall clothing store. We just said hello and did not talk beyond that. And that
was all the contact I had with her in the last 40 years.
Yesterday, I learned that she had died the day before my dream. Were I the
mystical sort, I would make more of the coincidence of the dream and her
death, but I just felt enormously sad, for her and her family and for me - I
will miss her memory so much because she was the innocence that cannot survive
adolescence.
RN