The Bee’s Knees.

Delphia thinks I’m the bees knees, and possibly the cat’s meow. I am a “nice man,” she told me on the many occasions I helped her break into her house. Today I noticed a big dumpster in the driveway of her old place, where her immortal ‘66 Chevy used to sit. Her house has a new owner with Jenn-Aire dreams, I guess.

In the months before Delphia left, she regularly showed up on my stoop to tell me, in the sweetest and most embarrassed way, that she was locked out of her house. “I hid an extra pair of keys outside where no one would ever find them,” she explained often. “I guess I hid them too good.”

On these many neighborly missions, I learned much about Delphia. She was convinced people were stealing parts from her car, and she was pretty sure it was some nefarious plumber she’d hired 12 years ago. With my trusty screw gun, I’d remove a storm window to get in her house, which seemed to be stuck in the 1960’s at the latest, and then she would show me her reluctant car. “That car always starts. Someone’s taking pieces of it at night,” said Delphia repeatedly and angrily. She reported the incidents to the police and was disgusted at their disinterest in catching the scavengers.

Though I originally thought she was experiencing paranoia, another interested neighbor told me that people were taking pieces of her car. Members of her church, noticing her unreliable memory, disabled the vehicle under cover of dark so she wouldn’t accidentally drive to France for a quart of milk.

I enjoyed my conversations with Delphia. She shifted abruptly into unrelated subjects with no pretense of a segue. At a certain age or misdosing of medication, segues are just a luxury anyway.

That car meant everything to her. Her late husband, though a good man, long refused to let her buy the car, even with her own money, which she’d saved from her job at the drugstore that employed her for more than 20 years before a chain bought them out. The 66 Chevy, Delphia told me, meant independence for her, and she spoke of the thing as if it were magical.

After one mission to assist Delphia she left a cantaloup and a thank you card at my door. About a week later I saw a fire truck at her house and stopped to investigate. She had discovered that the county would come help if you locked yourself out of your house, and I guess she was too embarrassed to ask me to break in through the porch again.

“If I’m home,” I told her, “I’m always willing to come help. Don’t think twice about it.” I gave her my phone number.

“You’re a nice man, and so handsome.” Her eyes might have been going, too. But the memory was better that day, “Did you get my cantaloup?”

For a few weeks after the fire truck visit, I would catch a glimpse out the window and see Delphia walking purposefully and briskly. I don’t know where she was going, and I’m not convinced she could have told me. Then one day she again knocked on my door to help her get in her house, but this time I couldn’t help her. She had locked the porch window, assuming that whoever was picking apart the Chevy was coming after her next. She decided to call a locksmith later.

That day Delphia was more chatty than usual. She told me when she planted the flowering bush in her yard, how her father always seemed to like her sister best for no apparent reason, about her upbringing on a farm in Tennessee and the adventure of moving to the big city. The details came in fast forward, like an undercranked movie. There was no difference between yesterday and forty years ago in her stories, and why should there have been? Delphia was the same person. Gertrude Stein was right. We are always the same age inside. Eventually she came up for air and looked at me.

“I think I’m losing my mind,” she said, and I scrambled for a response, some blather to mask the awkwardness. I asked about her doctor and her medications, but she just stared back at me with naked fear that looks the same on a face seven or seventy-nine. “I’m so scared.”

“You seem plenty sharp to me…it will all get sorted out…don’t worry yourself sick,” I heard myself saying. Sometimes I’m better with a screw gun than I am with conversation.

About a month later, Delphia vanished. A month after that, the Chevy disappeared. But I heard good news about her. She’s in an assisted living facility with a roomie, and her medication is working; she’s quite independent and lucid.

“She thinks the world of you,” another neighbor on Delphia’s former go-to list tells me.

Somewhere, in an unknown assisted living community, I am the bee’s knees. I might put that on my resume.

Update 2/17/06: Delphia’s house is no more.