Paula Hosey passed away over the weekend, just shy of her 53rd birthday. The news was difficult and a sharp pain to my heart. She was the first girl with whom I used the phrase “go steady.” It seems a little silly now using those words in fifth grade, but we did. Those were the days when anything was possible and we, and all our friends, lived with hardly a worry or a care.
Back at Galewood Elementary, fifth grade I think, for Paula’s birthday I wrote her a poem and got her a flower. It was March, forty some years ago, when I trudged through snow over to her house. When I knocked on the door, the house was filled with her girlfriends and I had stumbled into a birthday sleepover or something. I can vividly remember realizing that one leg of my pants was scrunched up on top of a snow boot. When I bent over to straighten that leg, I realized to fix it I would have to expose my long john underwear to all those girls -- a fraction of inch, mind you. I stood back up and left the pants where they were -- and I probably turned red, because that’s what I often did back then. No one else likely noticed or cared, but they did all coo about my poem and flower. I felt pretty cool and the walk back home was a little warmer.
In fifth grade, you don’t go steady for long. We were always friends and sang together with friends in an act that tried out for our high school band's variety show; the Band Bounce. Just after we all started high school, Paula’s family had to move. I wrote another poem for her which I don't remember besides the last line which was something creative like “I sure will miss you, Paula.”
A couple years after though, I did get to see Paula again when a family camping trip took us through Williamsburg. And recently, we had been in contact on Facebook.
For many many years I had a journal containing my poems. Most of them were not very good; either sappy and lovelorn or an obvious attempt to impress a girl. It contained that last poem I had written for Paula. On that page I had drawn a square where I was going to stick her last school picture. I never tracked down a picture and all those years later it was just a square with “Paula” written inside it.
When I got divorced a second time, I moved out of the house in a hurry. That is not a story for today, but I grabbed my possessions on the fly, deciding what was important and what to simply abandon as I loaded my car. That journal of poems, a hard bound, unlined book with no writing on it’s spine, escaped my attention. Weeks or months later, it was an abrupt, strangely physical sense of loss when I realized that I was missing all my poems.
Ever since I heard this weekend that she was gone, my heart kind of feels like an empty square with the word “Paula” written inside.
