Pearls

Bea is in a talkative mood today.

This afternoon our health aide encourages Mother to come up with another song. “When she gets the first line, she just goes,” Lisa tells me.

Lisa calls these blasts from the past "pearls."

Here is the little ditty:

“Annie doesn’t live here anymore.
Aren’t you the guy she waited for?
She told me that I’d know you by the look in your eye…”

“That’s my favorite line,” Bea says with a twinkle in her eye and pauses so we can fully savour the meaning.

“She said you’d wear a yellow shirt and polka-dot tie."

"Must have looked awful!" the reciter comments under her breath.

"You answer that description
So I guess you’re the guy.
Annie doesn’t live here anymore.”

When I enter her bed room with dinner, Bea asks how I had liked her speech. I did hear part of it, having noticed a distinct change in tone to the running dialogue coming from her side of the house. The speech was about real estate, in Washington, DC.

Bea chats with people well into the night. One of her visitors is college roommate Miggits Campbell’s brother Ben, who died last year.

Bea had many beaux before meeting my father ...