Kay

 Our friend and neighbor Kay died yesterday, the day after Valentine's Day. She was her husband's valentine, and he held her hands until the end, when she slipped through his fingers in answer to an inexorable and exacting summons. This little world of Alamos is suddenly quieter and diminished. Geriatric diaries can become raddled with a litany of departures that leave friends standing in the airport lounge and not expecting anyone coming in on the next flight. 

Kay could sometimes be like a small stone in one's shoe. Sometimes you just had to sit down, remove the shoe and ask what exactly would you like right now? Missouri had given her some bracing edges which she deployed with great relish and telling effect. Dave's equanimity was always exemplary - legendary maybe - but Kay would always look over her glasses and grin at the others in the room after a particularly vigorous dressing down of anyone who had excited her impatience. All in good fun and no offense taken.

She was a confirmed atheist and so never felt the need to discuss further any spiritual encumbrances imposed by ideas of divinity. But at the end she agreed to see a local pastor, an apparently kindly woman who would come for an hour, speak quietly with Kay, sometimes play the guitar. On one of her last visits Kay looked up in her owlish way at the woman and asked, "Are you always this serene? Or are you just fuckin' crazy?" With Kay there were never any two ways about it.