There was much sorrow and frank talk, of course, at the weekend’s memorial service for Peter Kingston. But county supervisor Shirlee Zane’s husband was too good-humored and fun-loving a guy for there not to have been some good laughs, too.

Shirlee recalled a marital incident that’s just too rich not to share.

Shortly after she’d slowly ascended to the stage within Sonoma Country Day School’s Jackson Theater, Shirlee pointed out to the large, mournful crowd the string of beautiful pearls she was wearing. She explained how to came to own them.

She and Peter were “magically joined by our love,” she said, but they did have their occasional tiffs. During an uncommonly unpleasant one, she said something to Peter and he retorted, “And you can say that to your fifth husband!”

 That evidently took Shirlee’s breath away. “By the way,” she told the crowd at the memorial, “he was my second husband.”

Anyway, the time approached for Peter to make up with the presentation of flowers. But Shirlee, after confiding with a friend at the Council on Aging, informed him that the fifth-husband remark would not be made right by flowers. She suggested that something that comes in a velvet box would be more appropriate.

Thus the pearls.

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