From the recording Sarah Barker & Gypsy Twang
Ada Kokojan was a lovely little Bohemian lady whose parents migrated to northwest Oklahoma from Moravia. I knew her when I lived in Enid, Ok and was married to her grandson Jerry Allen. She had a beautiful singing voice, and used to sing the Ave Maria in church. When she was in her early 40s, her husband Joe died suddenly while taking their daughter Jeanette to school one morning, leaving behind a wife and two teenage children to run the family farm. Ada never remarried, or even dated anyone else.
I didn’t know this at the time I wrote the song, but when I sang and played it for Jeanette the first time, she told me her mother had had a recurring dream in which Joe would appear at the foot of her bed and she would ask him, “Joe, where have you been?”
When her mind began to slip, she went to live in an assisted living center. Many times over the years, she had voiced a fear of living in a nursing home, but there was no other choice, as she needed 24 hour care. That was when I wrote this song for her.
Lyrics
She turned back and caught her reflection in the looking glass down the hall
Her thoughts took a backward direction as the clock fell away from the wall
Who was this face in the mirror? Somebody she’d never seen
Just as the image grew clearer, she fell back inside her dreams
Framed in the glass, key to the past
Drifting back up through the years
Hard times she’d known, love she’d been shown
Ain’t it funny how it all disappears?
Her youth and her beauty had faded and left her this dark empty space
The child in her heart masqueraded by the tracks of the years on her face
A lifetime of blessings and sorrows blown by like dust in the wind
She never prayed for tomorrows; please take me home once again
Framed in the glass, key to the past
Drifting back up through the years
Hard times she’d known
Love she’d been shown
Ain’t it funny how it all disappears?
She thought of the people and places she’d loved when she was a girl
Sweet recollections in traces, all that was left of her world
When she sang the Ave Maria, the children were young way back then
She said, “I just want to see ya. Tell me Joe, where have you been?”
Framed in the glass, key to the past
Drifting back up through the years
Hard times she’d known, love she’d been shown
Ain’t it funny how it all disappears?
Hard times she’d known, love she’d been shown
Ain’t it funny how it all disappears?