Dad's 200th Birthday.... Happy Birthday Dad!

A Special Birthday Part 1

Sarah shut the door behind her and shed her coat in the hall before joining Sean in the kitchen. It wasn't every night his parents visited. In fact it was almost 10 years since the last occasion. She unpacked her shopping on the island that stood in the middle of an ultra modern kitchen and proceeded to take over the cooking.

He looked up, smiled and continued what he was doing, preparing half a dozen baby potatoes and accepted his reduced role with abject humility. Within minutes the roué was made and she was adding in the freshly bought and sliced vegetables to the soup. The ham sat bubbling away in a pot of boiling water the carrots & cabbage were likewise cooking in pots on the electric hob. Within minutes the room was filled with the aroma of white parsley sauce thickening slowly whilst being stirred by Sean. It was all coming together nicely. "Pigs Bum" was what her daughters called the meal of ham and cabbage and the dish had been stuck with that name within the family thereafter.

Sean slipped into the apartment's living room and laid the table for four, the finest delph and cutlery produced in honour of the occasion. He gave each piece of silverware a rub of the cloth and a close examination so that they lay shiny and un-smudged by human hand on the antique white laced linen table cloth. Not every day you celebrate your Dad's 200th birthday. The carrot cake, his father's favourite and homemade, stood as a centrepiece on the table with just a solitary candle, in recognition of the impossibility of squeezing on another 199 onto the small cake. Of course they would be doing this all over again on the second of May when Deidre, his mother, would also have reached 200!

He arranged the chairs so that his mother and father sat together at one end and he and his wife at the other. The brown wooden teak table and chairs, he recalled, had come from his parent's home almost 50 years previously. Fortunately he and Sarah had just moved into the apartment and hadn't got around to buying furniture so the decision to give them a home in the apartment was relatively easy to make.

"We don't entertain much anymore" his mother said at the time. "You and Sarah are welcome to have them. The table has just become a dirt collector. Your father seems to open the post and just leave it there. ......Go on, you'll be doing me a favour to take the lot to a good home". Sean hummed and hawed for a while before collecting the suite, knowing just how much it meant to his mother, but in the end it came home with him.

He glanced at his watch, almost time. He retreated into their bedroom where he shed the jeans and slipped into a pair of white slacks and the only pink striped shirt that he owned. He'd wear it open necked tonight. Sarah was already in the room and had donned her "Jackie O" gold skirt and blouse. Her brown and amber stone necklace hung from her smooth white neck and was partly hidden by her cascading blonde locks. She smiled reassuringly at him. The sort of "I approve" look that referred to his dress sense, which had erred many times in the past but this time was on the money. He had just time to run a comb through his hair when the buzzer sounded and they made their way into the dining room. His Dad and. Mum were already seated and smiled warmly at them as they took their seats.

He couldn't help himself thinking of just how well Dad looked. I mean, 200 is a seriously old age, even in the year 2206, yet Brian looked 65 years old tonight if not even younger. The few grey hairs that flecked between his dark strands of hair merely served as a border to his ears and gave him an educated academic look, which was eerily true as he had been a lecturer in electronic engineering during the final years of his long working life. But where many academics could spout theory and eulogise from afar about the beauty of science and the elegance of formulae Brian had hard practical experience that illustrated the real strength of mathematics in the workplace. He'd worked at sea before lecturing so he knew the true brilliance of mathematics applied in the real world situations.

At times his life had depended on it, as had those of the 30,000 crew and passengers he was responsible for when navigating some of the largest luxury cruisers of the day around the world. Cruisers that plied their trade across places like the Bay of Biscay, the Horn of Africa, the South China Sea and the East Indies. The East Mediterranean and Black Sea along with the British Isles have been found to be the most dangerous seas in the world and he had traversed all of them all relying on his sharp brain and cool headed calculations.