98

Monday was my father-in-law's 98th birthday.

We took him and his friend C. a lunch of kibbeh baked in a tray, yogurt soup, raw vegetables, stuffed grape leaves, string cheese, olives, taboulleh. C. brought a small cake, with lemon curd in several layers, beautifully frosted in plain white with the inscription: "100 - 2!"

He wasn't at his best. The day before he'd gone out to a restaurant, invited by close friends, and whenever he does anything like that it exhausts him for a couple of days afterwards. When we arrived he was unfocused, and not terribly interested in what was going on; he held out as long as he could without using his hearing aids because it's easier for him to just tune everything out. "Phone calls all morning!" he announced, as he made his way from the bedroom to his chair, groaning. "Everyone's calling! How did they know?"

While J. talked to his father, reading him congratulatory messages from friends and family he'd quietly contacted a few weeks ago, I tried to make some space to work in the terribly cluttered kitchen. On the counter, there were half-consumed tubs of yogurt (that's how he swallows his pills), bread crusts, piles of paper napkins, clean dishes that hadn't been put away, pots and pans, big carafes of water and tiny plastic cups that the nurses bring pills in. And innumerable other objects and food items; you don't want to know about the refrigerator. We had fixed all the food at home; I put the soup on the stove and heated it very gently so the yogurt in it wouldn't curdle.

One of his good friends and neighbors arrived, smiling and a bit bent over, with a plate tied with a ribbon on which rested a pile of perfect, just-picked grape leaves. She handed them to him; he said a curt thank you and remarked, "My birthday was supposed to be a secret. How did the word get out?"

"Well, happy birthday!" she said.

"It was a happy day for my father, not for me!"

She scolded him for saying that and grimaced at me. I took the plate and apologized softly, "It's not a great day - he'll be very happy about this tomorrow," but she wasn't upset. The very old are crafty and clear-eyed; nothing fazes them. She shrugged and advised me to put the plate in the refrigerator before she said a cheerful goodbye and left.

"Come out of the kitchen, Beth," he called. "I don't want you to work, but I can't do anything to help."

I told him not to worry, that I'd be right over. He was asking J. to explain who a message was from; J. shot me a glance as if to say he couldn't believe his father couldn't place this person; I couldn't believe it either. It's the sort of thing he's always remembered, even when other facts were dropping through the cracks. Even more telling was the fact that he wasn't even embarrassed about it - he used to be adept at covering up his occasional memory lapses. Not today.

Leaving the soup on the stove, I picked up a bud vase with several garden roses in it and took it over to him. "I brought you some real roses," I said, handing him the vase. "This one came from a bush I transplanted from your house in Pomfret. See, they smell good!"

He dutifully sniffed at the roses and handed the vase back to me; I put it on the tray near his chair. His June birthday is always associated in my mind with bouquets of white and pink peonies and Siberian iris - the garden flowers in bloom in Vermont right now - and with wild roses. When he came to my garden, he always used to wander around looking at the flowers and bending down to smell the hardy roses, and he always said the same thing, with a satisfied smile: "They smell 'rose'." Other sensory experiences were exclaimed like that too, without the English "like" - "It tastes strawberry!"for his favorite flavor of homemade ice cream, or "It tastes coffee!" for the little cups of Arab coffee we'd sometimes tease him into drinking, even though he said it kept him up all night. He valued roses as a gift, mainly because they were expensive, I think, but always said he preferred garden roses that hadn't had the scent bred out of them - and that was because the smell reminded him of Damascus.

He didn't say anything this time, but that was all right; J. and I had both realized we were performing a ritual that might be mostly for ourselves.

C. had arrived, so we all sat down and ate, first the platter of vegetables and cheese, out of which my father-in-law picked some Lebanese cucumber wedges, but nothing more. "There's yogurt soup," I told him when I got up. "Do you want your kibbeh plain with rice, or in the soup?"

"In the soup!" he said emphatically. "That's the only way to have it!"

C. was still eating stuffed grape leaves. "These are good," she said.

My father-in-law shook his head dismissively. "These are made with rice only, not meat."

"They're still good," C. said, and turned to me - "Did you make them?" I shook my head no, grateful I hadn't.

"The ones with meat are better," he said, as if to put a final period on the discussion. He looked over at C.:  "You aren't going to pick any grape leaves for me at your place this year, are you."

"I don't want to get poison ivy and it's all over there where the grape vines are."

He seemed to have forgotten already that there was a large stack of new leaves sitting in his refrigerator. "I guess I'll have to come and do it myself." We all smiled, and this time he seemed to engage with us. "We have a saying in Arabic," he went on. "Only your own nails can scratch your itch!"

He took another spoonful of the soup and raised his eyebrows in my direction. "This is very good!" he said, approvingly. When he'd finished I asked him if he wanted more, or if he wanted some rice or taboulleh. He shook his head. "No, this is what I wanted, I am finished." The rest of us ate some more, and then brought out C.'s cake and a bowl of beautiful big cherries she had also brought; I made three cups of tea; J. took some photos.

C. put a huge kitchen knife on the table beside the cake; she said it was all she'd been able to find in the drawer. We waited; he didn't seem to realize we were waiting; I picked up the knife and handed it to him: "Here, why don't you make one cut and then we'll serve it." He took the knife in both hands and made a cut through the middle of the cake - "Like this?" he asked.

"Perfect," I said, and we all clapped. "Happy birthday."

We all ate small pieces of the cake, which was delicious. Suddenly my father-in-law raised his head and said, "I wish William were still alive. He should be here!" We asked who William was; he didn't seem to mean his youngest brother, who was certainly very much alive, if not present. "My childhood friend William," he explained. "He was my best friend - he was killed not that long ago, you know, in the civil war in Lebanon  - and on my birthday my parents would send a cart to his house and he would ride in it with me back to our house for a special dinner. Like a coach! Our families lived near each other, in the Protestant section."

"Is that your earliest memory?" his son asked.

"I remember William, and the Orthodox patriarch, who I liked a great deal and who alwaysy looked for me as he passed our house on the way between tea at his sister's and the afternoon service at the Orthodox church. Those are the earliest memories." He went on eating, taking careful small bites of the forbidden cake, and then looked up again, grinning. "On the day I was born, my father's friend met him in the street. 'Where are you going?' he asked. 'To the hospital,' my father said. 'I have a new son.' 'Then let's go measure his head!' said his friend - he was a sort of poet-philosopher and was one of those men at the time who believed the size of a person's head meant...you know...and the two of them went together and measured my head - and it was..." he waved his hand, laughing... "all right!"

We all laughed: proportionately, he has the biggest head of anyone I've ever known, and it seems to be in no danger of diminishing.

Comments

[Scott]

Today I visited an elderly man who may, or may not, be on his last bed. There in the hospital in a chair next to him his wife was wrapped in a hospital blanket so that I thought she may have been admitted, too. What is that called in child-birth? There is a French name for it. The man was perfectly alert while receiving his second transfusion, and he was wondering what he had done wrong (to the dismay of both myself and his wife). I reminded him that, like everything else, parts tend to wear out with age, that's all. Anyway, being in this frame of mind, I want to know about the refrigerator and, of course, more bio on C.

[marja-leena]

Another fascinating piece on your father-in-law, with his cranky tired side revealed along with the moments of pleasure over the soup and the cake, and always his storytelling recallong fond memories which make him happy. What a 98 year old! Thank you, Beth.

[rr]

(o)

[Jean]

How beautifully you describe it. I could see and hear it all. What brought tears to my eyes was not his frailty and fading faculties, but the remembrance of his childhood friend. Memories of love are all there are by the end, I guess. Thank you for sharing this, Beth. Such occasions must be bitter-sweet for J and you.

[Pica]

(o)

[beth]

Thanks for adding that story to mine, Scott...I hope (and am pretty confident) that you were able to assure the man that he hadn't done anything wrong. What a sad thing it is, the way so many people feel sickness and death must be a punishment for something! If religion created that guilt, maybe it can work now to take it away. I hope he gets better so he can work on that notion a little more!! Thanks Marja-Leena, rr, Jean and Pica, for knowing this is indeed a bittersweet time - it's also always amusing and a privilege to be involved with someone like this! It makes me contemplate what my own old age might be like, too, which is both sobering and good, I think, to think about while we're young enough to see clearly what character traits help, and which ones don't.

[the sylph]

lovely!

[Fred Garber]

Thanks Beth!

[Natalie]

I love this post, Beth, as I love all your stories of your beau-père (vraiment un beau père!) He reminds me a bit of how my father was in his last years (died aged 101), the way he didn't give a damn what anyone thought of him, and how he responded to gifts and food.

Please give my best wishes to him, even if we don't know each other, I feel connected.

[beth]

Thanks, Sylph and Fred! Natalie, I'm glad you had all those years with your father and that he grew into a person who was entirely himself - my grandmother did the same; she died at 92. I will try to figure out how to explain to mon beau-père that you and many other people he's never met care about him...it will be one more confusing thing for him about that very strange thing, "the internet."

[Leslee]

Wow. 98 - that's amazing.

[language hat]

Amazing indeed. I'm always grateful for these father-in-law posts; may there be many more!

[Tall Girl]

I loved reading this. It was almost like meeting your father-in-law. You write it with humour, love, respect.

[beth]

Leslee, LH, thanks. Lots of years, many fewer posts, but still quite a lot!

That's an idea - I wonder if I could eventually compile 100 sections?

Tall Girl, thanks so much for reading and for your comment! There are a number of other father-in-law posts in the archive, all of which will eventually be collected under the title "The Fig and the Orchid." There's a start to that if you click the link by that name at the near-bottom of the sidebar.

[Dick]

A wonderful account, Beth, & strangely moving throughout in its simple depiction of a man wearing his years with such dignity. May we all be so fortunate.

[beth]

Thanks, Dick. You are right -- I hope for that good fortune too.

[Peter]

"The very old are crafty and clear-eyed; nothing fazes them."

Yep!

[Saif]

You have set high standards for practical manifestation of humanity...