This year we gave my dad a book called Happy Orchid for his birthday and some special orchid food and an actual orchid. This is because he has now realised he likes to grow things. He says he likes having things he has nurtured around and about the house. He has even slipped the unslippable: the bougainvillea. I also bought him a book about topiary in case he wants to eventually sculpt his bougainvillea into a beautiful peacock, but that book is stuck at customs. Before my dad used to kind of leave growing things to my mum. She is particularly good at this. Once her friend gave her the seed pod of a baobab tree. She simply stuck it in the ground among the lettuces and the snapdragons and now every time there is a thunderstorm and a lot of lightning, a baby baobab emerges. I am sure this could be explained by a clever scientist, but each morning after a storm, it seems like a mini miracle to me. She has given away lots of baby baobabs because there is no space for them all in her garden.
Of course we really wanted to give my dad a kitten for his birthday, because a few days ago his actual cat, Oedipus, died. And he was very sad. Because he loved this cat, who was born in a hole in a tree in my parents’ garden. And, untrue to his namesake, Oedipus did love my mum, but even more especially loved my dad. He definitely didn’t want to kill him, even accidentally. In fact my dad was the only one who could get near that cat. No one else. Not even me. Not even the vet. Actually the vet got quite upset when the cat attacked him, even though my dad always wrote WILD in the space for temperament on the form.
But sadly this cat used up its gift of nine lives very quickly. Once Jack was sitting by the window in the kitchen on a normal Tuesday and suddenly Oedipus came flying passed him, having jumped from the top storey or perhaps even the roof. Another time when my cousin’s dog came for tea, Oedipus ran straight through a glass door and then up a tree without even stopping. Oedipus was actually more like a very untame tiger, than a domestic cat. Irreplaceable. And we couldn’t get my dad a kitten because of what Hamlet said to Horatio about the funeral bak’d meats too coldly furnishing forth the marriage tables. When he was upset about his mum getting remarried so quickly to his uncle.
Anyway, happy birthday Dad. Happy death day cat. And happy birthday Jack and Thea. And happy birthday me, because we are all born within days of each other. In different years of course, but none of us, especially not Thea, feel even a second older than 10.