Golden Dreams

Opie covered herself head to toe with her bedcovers every night. She tucked herself in tightly, her covers on the left and on the right shoved under her body. Always afraid, she hoped beyond hope that on this night the cocoon she had built around her body would keep her safe. The door to her bedroom was locked, and she had shoved the dresser in front of the door. Sleep came soon, but for her, sleep was a state she described as her twilight, when sleep was not deep enough. Her sleep most always kept her partially awake and aware of every moment. It was a wakeful sleep, one that her reality required. It was shallow sleep that allowed chance of dreaming. All to keep her safe.

Opie’s unsound sleep on this night enabled her to hear an all-too-familiar sound, a horrific sound that had always enveloped her with fear. The sound of the opening of the “locked” door and the dresser moving across the floor interrupted her safe twilight. Now she was fully awake with her “flight or fight” response kicking in to protect her. She knew what would happen next. It had happened hundreds of times before, maybe even thousands of times. And because she knew this moment well, she knew she could neither fly away from it or fight it.

Her Daddy would get into her bed and rape her. He would groan through anal sex and release his ejaculate all over her. Then he would do her the “courtesy” of wiping the sticky wet off with a towel and, if she was lucky, leave her bed. The nights that he stayed in her bed all night were the worst. She did not fall asleep again on those nights, but just remained quiet and still and small all night long as she wished for the light of the morning sun.

As her Daddy was doing all those terrible things to his teenaged daughter, Opie did what she had taught herself to do years before. She became very small, very still and very silent, and she willed herself to another place, a fantasy place where everyone was loved well and kept safe from all harm. She went to that imaginary place every time he got into her bed. Her mind cooperated and took her there, because to stay present in these terrible moments would have destroyed her soul, permanently scarred her spirit and murdered her life dreams.

Opie survived those years, left for college, married early and never went back to the house where it all happened. Outwardly, she seemed happy, full of energy, accomplished, creative, gifted, intelligent, compassionate, loving — all put together. She was the life of every party, the center of attention and the one others would turn to when they needed help. But that was her outer demeanor, the self that everyone could see.

Inside, her wounds remained, wounds of the soul and spirit that she had decided would never heal. She held the wounds inside herself and nursed them as gently as she could. She paid attention to the wounds because, at times, they still ached and throbbed with unresolved, deep, relentless pain. Complete healing would not come for Opie no matter what she did or how many places she searched for a miracle cure or a healing balm.

So she did the things that always worked, plunging herself into her career, her marriage, her creative projects, her social activism and willing herself to reach perfection in everything she did. She received her undergraduate degree and then headed with her husband to seminary to work on a masters degree in theology. Women did not do such things in those days, but she faced off time snd time again against systemic discrimination against women in ministry. Opie was a dreamer if she was anything. She finished that degree with high honors and then left the country with her husband to East Africa — Fort Portal, Uganda to be exact. What a thrill it was to enter that country after the brutal dictator Idi Amin had been deposed and expelled from the country! As they traveled Uganda’s dusty, rocky roads, she saw the ominous signs of genocide, the destroyed roads and bridges, the starving children wandering aimlessly in the streets, clothes in shreds without shoes, without parents, without a home. She didn’t witness those things only as the horrors they were, but also as places and people who desperately needed compassion, care and renewed hope.

She poured her life into that magnificent country, and her passion began to fill her empty void and wounded spirit. From her front porch in Fort Portal, she could see Rwanda’s Mountains of the Moon. She could not take her eyes off the splendor of those mountains that were at one moment snow-capped and in another moment graced by rainbows clearer and brighter than she had ever seen before. And when the night sky was at its darkest, the brilliant stars danced through the skies, as if comets and shooting stars moved only over that mountain and nowhere else on earth! Her thoughts wandered from ecstasy to pure joy and then to the melancholy that was her constant companion. She had never been one to care much about stars, but in this very place in the vast world — on the equator where everything is clearer and brighter — she pondered the wonder of the stars on nearly every clear night. They were to her a wonder. “Six thousand stars are visible to the naked eye,” she thought, “but there are actually more than a hundred billion stars in just our own Galaxy!”

She knew that because she had looked it up in a huge book on astronomy (with a thousand pages) she had found hidden away on a dusty bookshelf. Learning details about stars and comets and meteors, though — even learning about the entire galaxy — was insignificant compared to the splendor of the ink black Ugandan sky filled with brilliant, sparkling stars.

But it was time now to breathe the night air one more time and then go in. The mortar fire had begun for the night, gun shots and the sound of machine guns from Tanzanian soldiers who were occupying Uganda. A peacekeeping force, they insisted, but there was no evidence of peacefulness, only the sounds of looting and destroying and killing. Their occupation of Uganda was not peace. It was a an evil rushing in to fill the void left by the ousting of Uganda’s murderous president and dictator, Idi Amin.

As a result of the so-called peacekeeping the Tanzanian soldiers had brought, the Ugandan people were still suffering. Idi Amin’s genocide had actually continued at the hand of the soldiers who murdered and maimed the people as well as Uganda’s beautiful wildlife. It was an opportunity for the soldiers to poach, getting not only food, but also ivory and animal skins, decimating the country’s animal population that was already endangered. While orphans wandered the streets, widows wailed in mourning, and families buried their dead, Opie could not help but wonder if they could still look up into the sky to see the shimmering stars and the promise of hope. She whispered a prayer and hoped beyond hope that they could. She hesitated to go inside that night, but the gunfire increased and the country was, after all, under a nightly curfew.

In her work room, she began to prepare for her girls group, something that she looked so forward to. The girls would be there the next day. It delighted her to watch the girls learn and laugh together. Their engaging smiles always lit up her heart and brought her a day full of joy. The group was long, sometimes three hours long, because the girls had to walk a long distance to get to Opie’s house in the highest hills of Fort Portal. Every week they would come — Chinaza, Masiko, Miremba, Natukunda, Ayotunde, Ayumu and Ekundayo — from the makeshift girl’s home in town, the place where orphaned girls lived.

On this day, the girls talked about their dreams for the future and Opie was surprised that they even had dreams anymore with all the chaos, upheaval and death that had hovered over them for years, probably since they were born. She saw clearly that the dangerous world these girls had lived in had no power over them. They were filled to overflowing with hope and peace, lots of joy and bright dreams. The girls talked about so many things that day and then they ended the group by telling how they got their names and the meaning of their names. Opie was not at all surprised at the meanings the girls shared:

Chinaza — God answers my prayers

Masiko — hope

Miremba — peace

Natukunda — God loves us

Ayotunde — joy has returned

Ayumu — one who has a dream and a vision

Ekundayo — my sorrow has turned to joy

As the girls told their stories and shared the meaning of their names, they shared bitter tears of grief, with lots of exuberant laughter sprinkled in. The conversation weaved in and out of heartbreaking sorrow and inexpressible joy. Each girl felt both emotions. Each one shared golden words and created golden moments for each other and especially for Opie. The meaning of Ekundayo’s name — my sorrow has turned to joy — was the exquisite gilding atop all the gold. In spite of every dreadful thing the girls had endured, their sorrow really had turned to joy. And their dreams were safe and golden, tucked into their hearts forever.

Exhausted by the emotion of the day, Opie welcomed the nightfall that moved swiftly to cover the light of the day. She had learned that on the equator, night really did fall — quickly like a descending curtain. And the rising and setting of the sun was the same. If she wanted to watch the sunset, she had to hurry to get to the front porch. So on the night after the day of golden names, she rested on the porch, waiting for the sunset, yellow and pink, orange and gold.

She stayed out that night until the night fell and the stars came out. She thought of the orphan girls, her friends of the heart, and how they were destined to live in the reality that they would never see their parents again in this life. Opie was always lonely when the girls had to leave and, as she looked up at the stars, she was overcome with the sense that she, too, was an orphan, enveloped in the old sadness that she could never completely subdue. So looking up into the stars and the bright moon, she felt comforted to know that her friends and loved ones in America were under the very same moon even though 7,563 miles separated them. That thought had been her strength on many nights, in her loneliest times. Yet, when she nursed her grief of being so far away from her family, she sometimes thought of her Daddy. She would think about those 7,563 miles of separation and feel glad that he was that far away from her.

She also thought on this night that he could not destroy the golden moments she had shared with the girls. He could no longer attack her soul. He could no longer take credit for murdering her childhood, because he didn’t! With all of his disgusting brute strength that violated her over and over again, he had not murdered her childhood. She had lived it — from child to young woman, to grown woman, to elderly woman — she had survived. She had persevered! She had persisted! And she had held her golden dreams close, as her treasure, through all the years.

As for him, she seldom heard from him as the years passed on. But she found herself at times with other memories of him, not the terrifying memories, but the better memories of his laughter, his spirit of fun, his singing and his child-likeness. Those were the attributes other people saw in him, and Opie had begun to see them too, even to value them. Eventually, memories of him no longer brought her pain. Instead she thought of the many times he made her laugh, singing at the top of his lungs as they drove in the car or making her fiancée sing Christmas carols in “harmony” on their porch well after midnight. She thought of the hilarious stories he told in his bizarre accent of broken English with a little Greek thrown in when he couldn’t think of the right English word! She thought about how she and her two brothers made fun of him. And she thought of her wedding when he walked her down the aisle taking the center and pushing her into the pews on the right. “That was him,” she would tell her friends, “always demanding the very center of every place he went.” And she laughed to herself at the thought that her personality was a lot like his. They both wanted to be the center of attention.

So in some very significant ways, Opie made peace with him long after he died. He had not murdered her dreams after all. In fact, beginning in her very early years, he might have taught her how to dream in the first place through his jovial, whimsical, capricious ways! She had no doubt when she really thought about him; he was a take-a-chance dreamer.

Opie dreamed too, many times through her long life. She dreamed, and her dream became reality! She dreamed again, and her dream lifted her higher! She dreamed yet again, and her dream touched another person with compassionate love. She dreamed again and again and again and again and again . . . and one day she clearly saw the full, technicolor video of her life story. Her dreams had been golden, and in ways big and small, her golden dreams changed her world!