ODOM

ODOM
At Quail creek, I usually sit with Jean and Ray Odom for breakfast. I enjoy his wit and sharp memory. Ray is 94 years old and recites poems verbatim. He is a retired Lt. Col. (Army), and a West Point graduate, as is one of his two sons! He relates stories of their military travels, during his 30 years of service, in such vivid detail, that I can almost “experience” the event,
It is interesting,. His wife’s memory is shot. Jean doesn’t know what day it is. She is four years younger than Ray. Her conversation is repetitive -day after day - she talks about the same thing. But, what the heck, on November 23, they will have been married for 69 years! They go places as a team(primarily to their doctors). I have never seen one without the other. I am frustrated because I can’t communicate with him. He wears an expensive hearing aid, but “the battery is dead!”. So, Jean repeats what I say to him, and he reads her lips. This is a slow going conversation, so it is short and infrequent.
This morning at breakfast, the discussion centered around whether today was June 30th or July 1st? Out of the blue, Ray recited “Sing a Song of Sixpence”, verbatim.
“Sing a song of sixpence,
A pocket full of rye
Four and twenty blackbirds
Baked in a pie.
When the pie was opened,
The birds began to sing;
Wasn’t that a dainty dish,
To set before the king?
The king was in his counting house,
Counting out his money;
The queen was in the parlour,
Eating bread and honey.
The maid was in the garden,
Hanging out the clothes;
When down came a blackbird
And snapped off her nose.
I asked Ray when he learned that . He said, “In the first grade! RCL 7/1/09.