Hopeless
2014; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 7; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/thr.2014.0024
ISSN1939-9774
Autores Tópico(s)Diverse Educational Innovations Studies
ResumoHopeless John Meredith Hill (bio) I could say straight out I was hopelessly in love with Pammy Jensen for ten years & it might be true. Fourth grade stays in the mind as the onset of my long sorrow. I saw her kissing Joey Pilcher in the cloakroom at Lincoln, Joey, my neighbor who didn’t know the meaning of enamored, though to be fair he’d not played much Scrabble. I believed I knew about love, kind of, sort of, as we Midwesterners, many of us back then, tended to say about things. Modesty was a cardinal virtue & nice & fair were words we embraced. At night in my childish prayers I asked God, really the ceiling, to bless Mom, Dad, Grandma, Great Aunt Bess & on down the lineup card. Now it makes me smile to think of that Irish nanny to rich Pennsylvania families batting clean-up. Because this poem is grounded in Iowa, it must be the case Pammy was long-limbed, blue-eyed & blonde because it’s true, but that’s beside the point because love is blind. In fifth grade I sent her my best Valentine & signed it “Dithy.” Yes, I was a stone dork. I’d determined I needed a moniker, my first name kind of lame. [End Page 250] (There’s a word I wasn’t using in the Fifties unless referring to “Shep” Sheppard, our phys. ed. teacher who’d lost a leg on Utah Beach.) When I told my mother about the card & my nom de plume, she bit her tongue too late to stifle a snicker. Mine was a very nice childhood, privileged really. If I was slow to grow up in some ways, so what? In eighth grade I learned Phil Meers was feeling up Pam down in wood shop during lunch hour. I took up tennis & pounded the fuzz off the ball with my “Pancho” Segura. In high school things got out of hand completely, what with Pam doing or having done to her this & that. She’d grown up so fast college was no longer necessary. She found a job in an office, signed a lease on an apartment. I saw her one last time the day of her wedding. This was the summer after the British Invasion & Pam looked lovelier than ever. I kissed her in her big white dress full on the mouth & wished her all good things. I’d had a few Buds by then. Not much later I walked out to my car & crossed the river to sleep with a girl I never loved. [End Page 251] John Meredith Hill John Meredith Hill, a retired Peace Corps volunteer and graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, lives with his wife and their large dog in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, and Provincetown, Massachusetts. Copyright © 2014 John Meredith Hill
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