Thursday, April 7, 2001.

I spent the day driving &

visiting with Grandmother,

Jamie, & other relatives I had been missing.

Something Grandmother said

sparked my memory of the first girl

that I can remember having a crush on.

I tell Grandmother her name was Hope.

Grandmother guesses a name or two,

which I quickly dismiss, before she says:

"Hope Janes?" & I know this is the right

answer as I'm suddenly a little boy again

in the Christmas time of his 6th grade school year.

I've gone Christmas Caroling with the church,

mostly because I like to spend time with Jason Brooks,

but also to see our other friends: Jody? Jodie?,

well J Vandercook anyway... John Hoskins, who never

seems to show up for these things... & all those others

who passed through our lives without me really paying

attention.

We're standing in front of a tiny house in Saline, &

when the door opens to signal that it is time to sing,

with Jason & I standing still & silent & cold & bored,

the person standing there in the chill Christmas

light is not the old woman that we expected,

but the very picture of youth & girlish charm.

She looks like a deer caught in headlights...

Jason & I both swear that she was looking right

into our eyes... She has lipstick smeared around her

mouth, as though she'd been practicing for adulthood,

but with her swirl of blond locks, she looked like a young

Madonna, or so Jason & I said afterwards.

I don't remember singing to her or her mother,

who was so much older that I remember thinking that

she lived with her grandmother & that she must have

a sad life or at least be as messed up as me.

It was all Jason & I could talk about after we got back

to the church & drank our hot coco that someone had

prepared for us, though it didn't taste good to me; I swallowed

it down & we again discussed that look in her eyes.

The next day was a Sunday & amazingly enough,

the little girl, who was a year or two younger than us,

I think... was there, across the main aisle from us...

Just stareing at us... We thought this the grand beginning

to a junior high romance... I even made a gift for her in

shop class... A tin heart with three strands of color coded

wire twined together as a necklace, with her name

hammered into it: HOPE.

I never saw her again...

Never gave her my tin heart...

Never really forgot the look of her eyes -

like the look of the girls in The Virgin Suicides.

Only a split second later Grandmother tells me

that Hope Janes died when she was in the 8th grade.

I couldn't breathe & tears threatened to fall as Grandmother

explained that Hope had broken her leg, but when it didn't get

better she went back to the hospital where they found that she

had cancer running all through her & she died...

My morbid thoughts force me to question,

was she alive when I met her?

Saw her & her haunting expression?

Of course she was!

She was part of my existance...

She died, just as I too will someday die,

but the thought of it all happening without

my knowledge leaves me saddened & thankful,

though hope is now only a memory.

- For Hope Janes -

The 1998 Random House College

Revised Edition Dictionary defines "hopeless" as:

1 providing no hope; beyond hope; desperate: a hopeless case of cancer.

2 without hope; despairing: hopeless grief.

Amen