Birthday Parties

Birthday Parties

Noel Laflin

5-9-17

When my dad hit his ninetieth birthday, some years ago, we thought it appropriate to throw him a party.

Friends from church, as well as the old neighborhood, all showed up to his Leisure World home in order to pay their respects.

The only hitch to the day was dad’s confusion as to his actual age, since he thought it was his eightieth birthday and not the ninetieth. He became ever so prickly if you tried to tell him otherwise. We thought it best to just let him be any age he preferred that day.

That confusion began a few years after my mother’s death, a decade prior, when dad just became stuck in time. And although short term memory was pretty well shot, long term recall was clear as a bell, which was fine for greeting old friends and neighbors that he had known from decades past.

My job that day was to be the advance man outside the door and explain the situation to arriving guests.

Folks cooperated beautifully and made no mention to actual age that afternoon. Cards were read aloud to dad, as macular degeneration had done in his eyesight, and if a nod to ninety was in the text, we discreetly changed the figure to eighty, or left it out altogether.

By the time his ninety-first birthday rolled around, there was no party, as he was in hospice care. He would leave us six weeks later.

However, children from a nearby school did show up at his room in the skilled nursing facility, bringing flowers, and singing him a happy birthday tune.

An elderly chaplain from the Salvation Army also stopped by, spoke to him kindly, patted his hand, and gave him a teddy bear.

Wisely, or perhaps, luckily enough - on the part of both young and old alike – there was no mention of age.

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