SO WHO WAS THIS OLD LADY, ANYWAY?

Saturday night, at The Reporter’s going away party, I told this story and everybody said I should put it on the blog so here goes. When I was a little girl, my dad didn’t have a phone in the barbershop. Customers just showed up and waited their turn. About every two or three months, my dad would get this phone call at home from an old lady. I can’t remember her name so I’ll just call her Ms. Selby. She would call at night, not late, 7:00 p.m. or so, and she’d say, Mr. Sherrell, this is Ms. Selby and I’m sending the boys down tomorrow for a haircut. Dad would always say okay, Ms. Selby, send them on down. The first few times she called, he didn’t ask any questions, he would just wait the next day for the boys to show up but they never did. This went on for 20 years or so. As time went on, Dad tried asking her all kinds of questions like, Mrs. Selby, what’s the boys’ names, how old are they, are they walking to the barbershop or are you driving them down? But she never would answer his questions, just kept saying she was sending them down and then she’d just hang up. After about 20 years, the calls just stopped. Dad said she sounded old in the beginning so he just figured the calls stopped because she died. His theory was that the boys were probably grown when she started calling and that she was senile. Back then, they didn’t really call it Dementia or Alzheimer. But, on the other hand, she remembered Dad’s number and called him by his last name. Dad tried to look her up in the phone book, no luck. He asked his customers about her, no luck there either. West Plains was a small town when I was a kid, I mean, everybody knew everybody, but nobody knew a Ms. Selby.
Somebody at the party Saturday night thought maybe she was a ghost. What do you think?