My Ninety-Five-Year-Old Mother Teaches Me a Lesson

When I walked into her kitchen the other day, my ninety-five-year-old mother looked baffled.

“Do you know how to make a toasted cheese sandwich?” she asked. “I can’t find a recipe anywhere.”

I thought she must be joking. But her kitchen counter was strewn with half a dozen cookbooks, and she seemed to expect an answer.

“Have you ever made toasted cheese sandwiches?” she asked me. “Have I?”

My mom has been cooking for nearly eight decades. She’s prepared perhaps 50,000 meals in her lifetime, mostly at home, but also in high school and college cafeterias.

When I was only nine or ten, she taught me to make toasted cheese sandwiches, to spread the butter to the edges of the bread, to keep the heat low so the cheese would melt before the bread crisped too dark. And she showed me how to flip the sandwich to the other side at just the right time.

Now, sixty years later, we switched places.

“First you butter the bread,” I told my mom.

As we made the sandwich together, she began to remember. And to laugh that she had forgotten how to do what she had done so many times.

“I’m going to tell your dad about this,” she said. “And you tell your brothers and sisters. You can tell anyone.”

She flipped the sandwich onto the plate.

“People need to know what it’s like to be old,” she said. “And learn to laugh at themselves. Then they can be happy at ninety-five.”

More and more, I’m teaching my mom what she’s already known.

 But she’s still teaching me.