After my cousin from South Dakota hung up, the phone rang again and it was another relative, this time from California, the same 78 year old lady who called me earlier in the month and read me all those riddles I couldn't get. She lives in a nursing home, has done for 11 years. It is very nice and she likes it a lot.

She was calling on the 25th to tell me that she had gotten a new phone number that I would need on the 26th so I could call her on her birthday. We chatted for awhile and finally I asked her if we do all this talking today, what will we talk about tomorrow?

"Just a minute," she said. "Okay, I'm back. Do you like riddles?"

Oh, shoot, she forgot we already did the riddles on August 2. Well, I wasn't putting up with that. "No thanks this time," I said.

And this morning I dutifully called the new phone number and there she was and we pretended like we didn't just talk yesterday. She told me caffeine makes her stop breathing and Mexican food makes her throw up and we didn't do the riddles.