I'm seven years old and I'm in the living room with my friend Hannah. She's come over for the afternoon to play. My father is across the room, looking out the window, hands clasped behind his back in a characteristic pose.

Suddenly, the sound of a loud, low, long Bronx cheer fills the room.

"Did your father just let one?" Hannah asks.

"No," I quickly say. "They're building across the street. It's from there."

Five years later, I'm in the den with my father, my older brother and his baby son, Joey, who has just learned to get up on all fours. My father is on the couch, my brother in the big yellow vinyl chair and I'm on the floor with the baby. Joey in his favorite new position, rocking back and forth on his hands and knees.

My father turns to my brother with a smile and says and says, "You do that to your wife, eh?" I look to see how my brother will handle it. He calmly says, "Yeah," and drops it.

Not Crude - Just Senile

Humiliated, embarrassed, mortified. These feelings are probably not all that uncommon in childhood but in my case, they were generated by my father's behavior. No, he wasn't crude, rude or uncultured. He was just senile.

There was the time at my 10th birthday party when he walked through the room behind the table laden with ice cream and cake and a boy asked me, "Is that your grandpa?"

And the time, when I was about 13, that he told me my mother was hiding a lover in the house.

And the time my new friend Barbara was sitting in the den reading a movie magazine when my father commented that she was fat. I glanced over to see how Barbara was taking it, but she had the magazine in front of her face. "Barbara?" I asked. She didn't move. I tried again. She lowered the magazine to reveal a face contorted with tears of shame. My shame matched hers.

My father was 64 when I was born. Even though she'd had six other children, my mother, 22 years his junior, didn't know she was pregnant with me until her fifth month. She was 42 and her youngest child was ten. When she stopped getting her period, she thought she was going though the "change of life."

My father never told me this, but I get the feeling that in the Central Asian culture from which he hails, having lots of kids (he had six others before he married my mother) and having them late in life was a sign of virility. I wasn't planned - but then neither were any of my siblings. Planning children was not something people like my parents did. Their preferred method of birth control was withdrawal - something that obviously didn't work.

The Bad - and the Good

I don't for a second regret my parents' "mistake" and unlike other children who are told they were "accidents," I didn't take that fact personally. When my mother used the word, it was always with affection. But I can't say I really had a father.

Good memories of my father: Him teaching me to play chess when I was five. Lying on the other bed in my room at night, telling me stories of staring down lions and tigers and elephants in the jungles of India. Teaching me how to tell the difference between hard and soft boiled egg by spinning them. Showing me how to eat a saucy chicken and rice dish my mother made in concentric circles from the outer rim of the plate so it wouldn't be too hot.

I had only 15 years with my father and for all of them he was, to me at least, an old man. For the last several years, he was senile.

This was the early 60's, before Alzheimer's was a household word. I don't know if he had Alzheimer's or just your every day dementia. I do know that by the time I was about 12, he sometimes forgot who I was or where he was or what year we were living in. He was not in control of his faculties, both mental and physical. Once, he disappeared and we found him wandering, lost, a few blocks away. He spent most of the day sitting in his chair by the card table, staring out the window, reading the Bible, or in the earlier years, playing solitaire (which we called solitary.) By the last year or two, his face and his expression were a blank, possibly reflecting the slow but relentless emptying of his mind.

The early 60's (and the early teen years) were not a time in which we let it all hang out. I kept my father's condition a secret. Not from family but certainly from my friends and school mates. When I was invited to someone's house to play or do homework or just hang out, I would hesitate to accept the invitation. After all, I couldn't invite them to my house. Luckily, the friend with whom I spent the most time in those years lived right next door so she unavoidably had contact with my father. In fact, it was him who got us together when we first moved to that house. We played at her house 99 percent of the time, no questions asked.

I was not the type of kid who easily admitted longing - either to myself or to others. But I know that in my heart I longed for a "normal" father. Someone who worked and drove a car and told jokes and threw a baseball around. Like my friends' fathers. A man who related to me as a daughter. Someone I could introduce my friends to without being embarrassed.

Life Lessons

I can't write about my father without describing the man he was before I met him: Generous, handsome, fun-loving, cosmopolitan, well-traveled, speaker of eleven languages, player of games, knowledgeable about the cosmos. Hearing about him as a younger man makes me know more poignantly what I missed by being born late in his life.

The bright side?

Maybe I grew up with an old, senile father for a reason. Maybe being different helped me to develop a critical eye or a compassionate heart. Maybe it's the reason I can't pass an old person on the street without a smile or a greeting. Or the reason I fought hard to keep my mother out of an old age home.

My friend Chantal, coordinator of the Marriage Center believes my lack of fathering has something to do with the fact that one of my passions in life is parenting - thinking about it, searching for and sharing answers; giving myself and others in words and ideas what I didn't have in reality. And in so doing, repairing the past.

There was definitely loss involved in growing up with an old and senile father - but maybe there was also invaluable gain.

Copyright Ruth Mason, 2000