Give It Up for Stella Hawkins, Y’all.

K. Jackson
Aug 23, 2017 · 4 min read

How does an astronaut cut his hair? Eclipse it. Right? I know. I texted pretty much everybody in my phonebook the other night with this joke, and only one person answered back with the punchline. Give it up for Stella Hawkins, y’all. But Stella wouldn’t stop texting me after she won the eclipse joke contest. I said one little congratulatory thing and all of a sudden Stella Hawkins is my best friend. Stella is younger than me so she probably thinks that just because she got the right answer means she is going to get a free puppy. Well, I’ll tell you something, Stella Hawkins. I know you and your husband Alan Hawkins have real plans to get a new puppy sometime in the next year if you can get over your whole hating animals thing, but I have plans, too. Big plans. I plan to call in to your puppy-naming show when it happens and to get the right answer so you can come and redo my house. Call it even.

I used to work with Stella Hawkins at the Bedford Historical Association. She actually was there when I first started — she was part of the interview. I remember being in Greendale at the time, working at McKinnon’s when I got the call from Pauline Smith, the executive director of the Bedford Historical Association. It was cold, so cold that there was a thin sheet of ice on the ground when I slid outside to talk with Pauline, and I remember being relieved at the weather as my breath blew out smoke because I could blame my nervous voice shake on the temperature. Pauline heard me say “cold” and she turned up the heat, “Oh, just go on back inside, then,” she said after 3 minutes of talking with her. “I thought this was a phone interview,” I said to myself, and I ironed flat my voice, “No, no, there’s no need to, I’m fine right here. So, how many people are in the organization?” And she let me play for awhile.

I met Stella on a Tuesday. It was a pretty day, sunny outside and I was wearing the suede Mary Janes I had gotten at Salon151 in Brooklyn, though the rest of my clothes were ill-fitting. I never have been good in work clothes, never have known what to buy, what to wear — I continually choose the wrong thing, and for some reason I always feel like Danny Devito’s Penguin in that Batman movie when my wardrobe is waning. As I waddled up to the BHA’s office, however, I stopped to soak in the scene. Bedford is a small seafaring town, and the Historical Association sits on a city block one street up from the water. Aside from the Visitor’s Center, the buildings that grace the grounds are an old jail house, a graveyard, an apothecary, and an art gallery, among others. The BHA’s offices are tucked away in a small, gray gingerbread house on the corner of Tucker and Vine streets, and standing in the middle of the road as I did that day, looking up at the site of my future office, I breathed in brine and wondered what questions Pauline might ask. Pauline was working frantically on a grant when I walked in the door for a pollinator garden that would take shape in the next year or so. “Heeey!!!” she said as she took my resume, “Stella, come in here and meet KJ!!!” I could see Stella coming from the back room, from the little mossy office that looked like a harmonica had been attached to the rest of the building. “Stella is our PR and graphics person, and Stella, this is KJ. KJ lived in New York. She was an actor.” (Was, was, was is going to kill me.) Pauline, I would come to find out, was the spirited and many-faceted linchpin of the organization who had a little geyser in her blood and could fold people into the Association as easily as she creased the seams of the eleven million hundred thousand letters she sent out every year. She flitted like a hummingbird, the fastest and most furious of the avian kingdom. “I’ll just be in here for a second,” Pauline informed us the 3rd minute of the interview so she could field a call from Janet Simmons. I was happy about that; I wanted to get to know Stella a little better, so I asked Stella a question I believe I asked her about 4 times during that interview — every time Pauline went away — “Where are you from again?” “Porter Mountain,” she answered all 4 times, probably thinking that I looked absolutely radiant for my 98-year-old feeble-minded age. I left that day not knowing whether Pauline would even remember we’d met, and wondering whether or not Stella could look past all my stupid questions and my stupid outfit enough to think I was cool. I was trying to be nice, and she was nice, too — business nice. Stella just seemed so — so together for having so recently graduated into her Huggie pull-ups. It’s hard to believe she won the punchline contest.

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