My father, Billie Gene Hicks, died on March 3, 2024. This is a blog about the love of his life.

Written on the back of the photo in Dad’s ungainly script: At Paula’s Retirement Party, 2013

March 14, 2024

                  When I was just a sorry teenager lamenting my lot in life, my father was embarking on a great adventure of romance and love. This is the way the story goes, and it is a little different depending on who is telling it, but in my experience Dad and Paula’s stories about their meeting always aligned. Any mistakes are all mine, and I apologize for them.

Most of photos are from later years because Dad and Paula’s photos burned in the fire that took their house in Talent, Oregon.            

So, then to the story. Paula Daystar, my father’s beloved wife, wound up living in Ashland from her home in Denver, from her home in Oklahoma, and she was a forthright lady, in charge of her own life, having made it through two partners, with two kids, and working as a nurse practitioner not a small feat. And Paula was a fearless woman, and she had recently watched the film Out Of Africa, which shares the life of Isak Dinesen (Karen Blixen), a woman all on her own, living her life and running everything on her farm. Paula identified, though not living on a farm, but raising two children and having a professional career, well, that’s a ton of work.

                  One night Paula’s friends suggested going out on the town, such as it is Ashland, and Paula felt excited. “Perhaps tonight I will meet someone…I just have that feeling,” she thought. Paula had her older son Jake settled with Shane his friend and co-babysitter for Bree, and her young daughter who was in bed, when Paula got the call: her friends had decided to stay in.

                  Disappointed, Paula was playing Trivial Pursuit with her son Jake and Shane, when she felt a calling. “I’m going to the movies,” she announced, and while Shane and Jake protested about the game, she prepared to leave. No one knows why she felt this urge to see a film that night.

                  Meanwhile, back at 190 Wistful Vista, as my father styled it, Bill was getting my room ready for me, more specifically, he was laying tatami mats, and preparing to drive to Dunsmuir to meet my train. Suddenly, he realized that where he really needed to be was the theater, so he headed down the icy hill (and he may have fallen on his journey—he told this story different ways), and then there they were, Paula and Bill, at the Varsity theater, watching the film  Koyaanisqatsi: Life Out of Balance. Hey, this is a weird film, and you should Google it.

            All during the film, Paula felt that there was someone watching her, someone she was supposed to meet.  She could feel the gaze of this person on her in the dark theater. Who was she supposed to meet? All during the film, Bill was watching Paula, wanting to meet her. After the movie ended, they found themselves in that weird alley next to the Varsity theater.  Paula was looking at a poster when a very attractive man approached her to ask what she thought of the film.  As they proceeded down the alley, he asked her, (Would you like to have a drink?” Paula says Bill asked, and “Would you like to have some tea?” Bill says he asked. I would believe Paula. Paula saw her grandfather’s eyes looking back at her from this man’s face, and she gave it a chance. After all, wasn’t this night about chances?

            And so they went to the bar at then then Mark Antony hotel, now Lithia Springs, the largest and fanciest building in Ashland, the same place my mother woke up in and made her choose Ashland as her home, and then there was the beer.

            “What would you like?” the server asked, and Paula responded with “A glass of white wine,” a perfectly acceptable response, but when Bill ordered a dark beer, a Negro Modelo, Paula switched her order, saying, “You like Dark Beer?”

            Then Bill, fidgeting and nervous, started fiddle with a cigarette, and he could see Paula’s expression. ”Is it OK if I smoke,?“ he asked

“it’s OK, “she said, thinking to herself,” there must have been another person looking at me in that theater! Oops!

Then Bill said, “I can see that makes you uncomfortable,” and he stowed his cigarettes away. I don’t know what they said to each other that night, or how their connection was forged, but it was.

                  They had that drink, and then Dad sort of stalked Paula, calling her at work, but then there were other dates. As for me, I remember finding a whole page of geometric Paula doodles on the notebook pad by the phone. But the thing about Paula was, this was something I had never seen in my Dad. I had seen lust and convenient relationships, but what Paula showed me and my father was love, love, love over time, love in every year and minute and circumstance, and love everlasting and love, love love—and I can never thank her enough for offering that acceptance and love to my father, a man with challenges built in, but her act of doing that and showing up at that theater so long ago is one I can never repay. This is a love story for the ages, and I some thankful I got to see it play out. And even if the grand conclusion is sad, we should remember: their love.

                  In his last year, my father asked me to send him some poems, and so I wrote some and sent some I’d found. The one below is one I cherish, and while it may be overused in end-of-life celebrations, it sums up what I think my father found with Paula, the years Carver called “the gravy,” for after Dad’s many relationships and failed marriages, in Paula he found his true happiness.

Late Fragment

 by Raymond Carver

And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth.

Thank you, Paula, for giving my father the love and care he needed and for being an amazing mother. Special thanks to Tucker, too, for teaching my father why having a dog is essential in life. Go Ducks!