Gypsy Memoirs

It was still freshman year, and Lukus, Brenden, Renee and I were all hanging-out nearly exclusively.  Every now and then, I would ask Brenden if he liked Renee and he would adamantly deny it.  I had no idea how Lukus felt about me, but I was beginning to feel more comfortable in our relationship, not so much agony as there had been.  We were clearly becoming very good friends, and when Brenden and Renee started hanging-out on their own more and more, Lukus and I just had each other.  We had other friends of course, but by mid-freshman year, everyone was pretty established in their crowd.  I hate to say things like that because it’s reminiscent of high school cliques, but it wasn’t quite that way.  There wasn’t a “cool kids” crowd, or “nerd group”, but everyone simply had their consistent group of friends that they hung-out with.  Seeing as how we’d established what appeared to be an “us four and no more” kind of group, we were somewhat hung-out to dry when half of the group disappeared.  Despite his constant denial, Brenden and Renee were both irredeemably twitterpated by the end of the year.  That wasn’t the case for me and Lukus.

Lukus and I became best friends, indispensable friends.  He had such big, vague plans, and I likewise, had big, vague plans.  He was studying finance to be an entrepreneur, and I was in advertising because it was the most artistic degree at ORU without being an art degree.  We had no idea what we really wanted to do specifically, but we were both sure it would change the world.  I wanted someone who wanted to change the world with me, and he wanted someone who believed in him to do it.  Ah, blissful, naïve Youth.  How the memory of you mocks us as we grow older!  But it supports the process of falling in love, at least.

I was beginning to get a hint that Lukus might be falling for me.  He was calling me to do things more than I was calling him.  He was becoming very attentive and could recall the details of every mundane little story I told him.  Then, he asked me to go swing dancing with him.  Swing dancing had made a huge come-back while we were in college, and it was especially popular for ORU students who found a loophole to the whole “no dancing at school” rule that ORU had at the time.  Lessons and dances were going on twice a week at a local Baptist church gym (of all places), and Lukus, who really liked dancing, asked me to go.

I was so nervous.  I didn’t know what to wear.  I’d swing danced once before and knew enough that it made you sweat like a cow.  I opted for black pants and a semi-sheer black top with a tank-top underneath.  That seemed reasonable, cute but practical.  I met Lukus downstairs and he was wearing khakis and a vintage-striped polo.  He looked so good and I was really ready to see this guy dance.

We arrived in time for the group lesson, and from the get-go my palms were sweaty.  By the time Lukus took my hand for that first time, my hands were dripping sweat.  I realized too that my choice of attire was the worst possible choice I could have made.  My tank-top, which I had planned to be my sweat-absorbing layer, was a poly-rayon blend and so was the blouse I wore over it.  I was wearing two of the most sweat-producing fabrics there are.  Fortunately, the fabric doesn’t show sweat because it doesn’t absorb, but it does get slick enough so that it’s like standing water on a countertop.  You could literally whisk puddles of sweat off of my back as we were trying to dance.  Lukus’ hands were a little sweaty, but my hands were so bad that he actually commented on my sweaty palms.

Lukus wasn’t a polished dater.  In fact, he’d never been on a date, never had a girl-friend, never kissed a girl, ever-ever.  He’d come from a very conservative family and was himself very shy, hence the behavior that I had initially interpreted as “stuck-up”.  So that night, swing-dancing with me, was Lukus’ very first date and his brutal honesty about my sweaty palms didn’t offend so much as it displayed his amateur dating status.  This fact actually served to give me more confidence, that I was the one who knew the p’s and q’s of dating, and he just might be the one who’s nervous this time.  Finally, an even playing field!

But man alive, this shy, home-schooled, never-dated-a-girl-before guy, boy could he dance!  Whereas most confident guys get shy on the dance floor, Lukus was completely unintimidated.  He had the rhythm, he was smooth, and he unwittingly flirted with his smile the whole time.  I had really wondered how a night of dancing would turn out with a guy who had been nervous about buying his first non-Christian CD, but swing dancing with Lukus that night turned out to be some of the most fun I’d ever had, and by the end of the night, his pit-stains were as bad as the dripping from my blouse.  We didn’t care.  It was totally worth the sweet moves we’d learned, and a girl never felt so good as when she’s tossed like a rag doll into the air and caught in some strong, tan arms by a good-looking, smiling guy.  I knew then that Lukus was falling for me too.

It was the last day of our freshman year, single-handedly, the BEST year of my life up to that point.  Finals were over and the parking lots were full of moving trucks and tiny cars covered in cheap possessions accumulated over the school year.  I had decided against living with my parents over the summer.  I had tried living with them at the beginning of the year and discovered that 1) once you’ve been on your own, coming back is asinine, and 2) I felt too disconnected as a commuter student with ORU being 90% on-campus living.  So moving in with my parents over the summer didn’t really seem like an option to me.  No, I chose something far crazier:  going back to California to stay with my aunt, her two sons and her friend’s daughter in a tiny two-bedroom apartment.  That meant saying good-bye to Lukus for an entire summer.  We were still “just friends” and I was scared he’d lose interest over the summer.  Heck, I was scared I’d lose interest over the summer.

Lukus would be leaving the next day to spend the summer at his parent’s home in Oklahoma City.  Yep, somehow I found myself falling for an Okie, something I’d never dreamed would happen to me.  It’s not like he came from a small-town, ranch family, or any of the other clichés people conjure up when they think of people from Oklahoma.  It’s just that I knew what Texas guys were typically like, and Oklahoma was right next to Texas, so wouldn’t there be an Oklahoma type?  If there was, Lukus certainly didn’t seem to fit it.  He had no accent, he dressed like he wanted to be a rock-star, he didn’t care about “down home livin’” and preferred the city to the country.  He was interested in art and culture and didn’t have any of those awful, traditional views of women and male/female roles.  He did come from a large (six boys!), traditional, home-school family, but he was extremely independent and didn’t mind my boldness, my honesty or my sense of adventure and independence.  He didn’t have one way that he talked to his guy friends and another way that he talked to me.  I liked that.  I liked that he saw me as an equal, not a sex object and not a priceless, dainty treasure, but simply a person.  We were friends.  And we were saying goodbye.  And I liked him a lot.  And he didn’t know.  And three months is a long time.  And we only had one day left together.

So after our packing and dorm-room cleaning, we headed out for the night.  We saw a couple we knew from ORU making goo-goo eyes at each other and we started talking about how pathetic it all was, dating, mind games, playing with people’s hearts, stupid couple terms like “boyfriend” and “girlfriend”.  We were so jaded and yet so naive.

We stopped at Taco Cabana for dinner, and amidst all of our cynical talk of frivolous relationships, Lukus tells me casually over a stuffed burrito that he has started to have feelings for me and he’s been praying about “progressing our relationship.”  All of a sudden, I was no longer hungry for nachos, but kept intentionally eating, trying to seem as casual as he was acting.  It wasn’t particularly romantic and sounded more like a business plan than a guy pouring his heart out.  I didn’t know what to think.  Fast-food Mexican, last day of school, just talking about how stupid dating is, and all of a sudden he’s “praying about progressing our relationship?”  Somehow, everything I’d wanted to hear over the last several months came out so foreign and formally.  Was this Lukus the person?  Or Lukus the finance major?  Or Lukus the home school kid?

Over the next couple hours worth of talking and walking in the park, the conversation began to flow more naturally, and I realized that Lukus had never done this before, and though I had, neither of us wanted to jump into anything and mess it all up.  The reason it came out so formally from Lukus was because, in his mind, and rightly so, to start a relationship with someone meant that you’d thought things through to the point that you could actually see yourself marrying that person.  This was no casual cliff-dive.  Why would you mess around with love?  Why start something that doesn’t seem like it has much of a future?  What’s the point in that?  When I realized that Lukus had been considering the possibility of actually marrying me before he ever even told me he liked me, it was a lot to take.  I appreciated the fact that he wanted to protect my heart so much that he wanted to wait to make sure we had something potentially real, but at the same time, it was quite a leap to go from, “I like you” to “I can see us possibly getting married someday.”  He was suave enough not to say that, but suddenly, it all made sense why this guy who had been hanging-out with me exclusively for the last several months had never admitted that he liked me.  Then, all too soon, it was time to say goodbye.

Lukus’ letter took a long time comin’.  I wondered if he’d regretted our talk, or if he was going to be stupid and try to “play it cool.”  I should have known Lukus wouldn’t pull a mind-game like that.  Almost a full week had gone by, and nada.  It hadn’t occurred to me that Lukus, going back to his familiar home and life, might just be a lot busier than me.  I had no car, no job, and my old friendships were on their last legs since, apparently, people’s lives had gone on without me.

Going to California and to my aunt’s was stupid.  I had been planning on going on a missions trip to Spain, but had gotten too busy to fund-raise.  While almost everyone else I knew was either going off on some grand, foreign adventure, or at least returning to the comforts of home, I was applying for jobs at the strip mall next to my aunt’s apartment complex.  Lucky me, I got a job at a sandwich shop, hired on the spot by a dirty old man.  I was painfully aware from the very beginning that it was going to be a long summer.

Day after day, I checked the mailbox.  I couldn’t believe how desperately I needed that letter.  Food could not satisfy me, sleep was restless, I physically ached for that letter.  My aunt recognized my state and inquired every day if “it” had come.  One day after work, I checked the mailbox and once again it was empty.  I headed upstairs to wallow in my lack of existence, and there it was, on my pillow.

“Dear Elle…it was hard to believe you would be gone when I woke up.”

What sweet candor!  He said he was sorry for taking so long, but he’d been so busy with mundane things that weren’t worth writing about, but he’d finally gotten a job.  I soaked up every word, every trifling detail.  It certainly wasn’t a love letter, he’d simply written about what was going on in his life and inquired about mine, but still, I could sense little nuances of affection.  I read the letter over and over, and once I was full, I immediately wrote back.

“Dear Elle…” he and Brenden were working together at a door shop.  “I listened to your message at least five times.”

“Dear Elle…” he was going to youth camp as a counselor.  “Good-bye still stings.”

“Dear Elle…” the band was recording a demo.  “When I got home from work, as soon as I saw your letter on the kitchen table, I completely forgot how hungry I was or how badly I had to pee, and gobbled it up.”

Sometimes two letters would come in one envelop.  Sometimes, the letters were so thick, he had to make a new crease for the envelope flap to close.  I missed him and was also jealous of him.  His summer was so full of, if not fun, then at least distraction.  My summer, however, was full of mayonnaise, and slathering mayonnaise onto a roast beef sub is not a helpful distraction for love-sickness.  By now, it was becoming more and more apparent that we were, indeed, in love.  As the summer progressed, it only seemed to get longer, stretching out ahead like an endless desert highway.  At times, I really wondered if I’d survive.  I was gone, fallen, right over the cliff, in love.  But would it be the same come August, when my plane landed, and we saw each other again for the first time?

I was even more nervous now than I was on that first sweaty date.  Summer was finally over (thank God!) and I was on my way back to Lukus and another year of school.  I have never been so impatient for that fat Indian dude to get his bag out of the overhead compartment so I could get off that stupid, stupid plane!  I wanted to scream, “Get out of my way!  I have a really hot guy waiting for me that I haven’t seen in three months!  Three months people!  MOVE!”

My parents had come to pick me up and they’d unselfishly invited Brenden and Lukus to come and greet me at the airport with them.  Finally, Fat Smelly Guy got out of my way and I tried to quickly, but casually, make my way up the concourse from the plane.  I saw my parents first, then Brenden sitting off to the side, then a tuft of blonde hair above Brenden, but nothing else.  I gave my parents the obligatory first hug-offering, really just waiting to get to the important people (or person).  Then of course, I hugged Brenden.  Then, there he was.  Tall, tan from a summer working outdoors, and with something new: a beard.  How very manly!  We hugged, and while I tried to make it quick, and no more special than the other hugs I’d just doled out, the fact was, those arms around me just set the whole world right, redeeming an arduous, miserable summer.

My parents took us all out for coffee and we caught up.  Then my parents headed back to their place and Brenden had things to do, and we were alone.  Alone!  And yet, we had no idea what to do with ourselves.  We just walked and talked, unsure of when we’d get around to holding hands, or sitting with an arm around the other.  Our relationship had developed very strongly, but without us being around each other.  We were kindred spirits, of like mind, but where did physical affection fit in?

In fact, we weren’t even “officially” boyfriend/girlfriend yet, and those terms that we had mocked from our pedestals began to mock us with a “So what’s it gonna be?  Are you his girlfriend, or aren’t you?”  It took a couple of weeks of us interacting in person again before Lukus finally asked me to be his girlfriend.  It seems silly now to think of needing something so official when our relationship was already plainly defined by our actions.  But it was partly his upbringing regarding relationships, and the seriousness involved that made things more complicated sometimes.  Things were a little awkward at first, tinkering around our relationship boundaries.

Dating has got to be one of the most difficult processes of life.  I don’t think anyone gets it right, and the few who do, end up paying for it later in their marriage, because at some point, someone wasn’t completely honest about something.  Within a couple of months, we had our first fight.  I have no idea what it was about, but I do remember that I was carrying my laundry basket of dirty clothes in the school parking lot on the way to my parent’s house.  Suddenly, in the middle of our argument, Lukus yelled, “Well, I love you!”  I dropped my laundry basket, pajamas and underwear spilling onto the pavement, and I yelled back, “Well, I love you too!”  And it was all out in the open, dirty laundry and all.

What I would come to realize many years later, was that that moment would be a snapshot of the rest of our lives together:  fiery, tumultuous and full of passion.  There’s a clip in the movie Ratatouille of two French lovers on the television.  They are yelling at each other, and the woman pulls a gun and shoots at the man.  Then, they instantly grab each other in a passionate kiss.  Our friends told us that they were watching that movie for the first time, and when it came to that clip, they immediately looked at each other, burst out laughing and said, “That’s Lukus and Elle!”  Yep, vinegar and baking soda, dynamite and matches, Bonnie and Clyde; that’s often us alright.  But I can think of much worse things to be, like bored, or distant, or dishonest.  At least I’ve never tried shooting Lukus before, but then again, we have our whole lives ahead of us…