About the same time – on March 12 – and about 125 miles north, at Albany Hospital, a young second-generation American woman named Caroline Walther Lange gave birth to her first son, a healthy, curly-headed blond. Every recent descendant of immigrants in those days wanted to be an American, so he was named William, instead of his father’s Wilhelm.

Just this week, three of us – Mother and I and our younger daughter, Martha – went to visit him on his hundredth birthday. He lives in his own house (though that soon will be changing) with his second wife, three months older than he, and whom, with the usual Lange-family lame attempts at humor, he calls the Old Lady. Mother had lovingly stewed a pot roast and made a cake cleverly composed of a dozen cupcakes that wouldn’t require slicing. We carried it all in a cooler six hours to Syracuse and stuck it into the oven there.

He doesn’t communicate too well anymore, but his mind is as sound as ever. As we talked, I couldn’t help but think of all the events his life has spanned, including those of his first year.

The first heady days of the aeroplane were in full cry. The Army bought a version of the original Wright Flier for possible military use. They couldn’t have known it, but Eddie Rickenbacker and Baron von Richthofen were only six years away. Louis Bleriot flew the English Channel from Calais to Dover. And the Silver Dart, a Canadian aeroplane, gave the British Empire its first flight. In March of 1909 the keel of the RMS Titanic was laid in Belfast, Ireland. Robert Peary claimed to have reached the North Pole with Matthew Henson and four Inuit in April 1909, and became a national hero. Nicholas II of Russia had eight years left on his throne, and no inkling of the catastrophe ahead. (Dad’s lived longer than the Soviet Union!) The last of the great Native American war chiefs, Geronimo and Red Cloud, went at last to the Happy Hunting Grounds.

A firstborn son named after his father and grandfather, Dad was the apple of his parents’ eye (Fifty years later, when Mother and I presented his mother with our firstborn, a daughter, she said, “Well, maybe next time you’ll have a boy.”). At the age of ten, however (he recalled to me some years ago), he was running pellmell downhill in Albany’s Lincoln Park with his cousin Peg and fell hard. Next day he became quite sick, and later delirious. Spinal meningitis. When he revived, some days later, his mother handed him a note reading, “You cannot hear.”

But he was still the fair-haired boy, both literally and figuratively. He finished high school and trade school. In those days deaf boys were taught trades so that they might earn a living. The most popular was printing. He became quite good at that; in later years he published a monthly newsletter in his own shop in the cellar and taught me to set type, too. It was clear he wouldn’t make a go of his father’s pharmacy, so he matriculated at Gallaudet College in Washington, DC, and “joined the deaf world.” Gregarious and good-natured, with a bent for practical jokes, he was popular with his fellow students and eventually married one. He’s currently married to another.

He was a good father: made us tiny targets out of cigar box tops and taught us to shoot his BB gun in the hall of our fourth-floor flat; mounted a huge steamer trunk on a dangerous-looking platform over the stairwell; built a magnificent double-bunk bed for me and my sister; and fashioned a trailer hitch and a two-wheel trailer for my high-speed, old-fashioned tricycle. He worked at a meat packing plant; I remember him leaving long before daylight on winter mornings. We spoke to my mother and him in sign language, and they spoke orally to us. If there was another deaf person in the room, they used both: the predecessor to closed-caption television. After a few gory years at the packing house, he began spending evenings studying, and in 1943 was ordained an Episcopal priest, a missionary to the deaf.

If there’s any personal relationship in this world more difficult, glacial, and intractable than father-and-son, I don’t know what it is. (Mother-and-daughter, maybe; but I think they’re more volatile and liable to change.) There usually are male egos involved, conflict, and not least, testosterone. Even the acknowledgment of a father’s approval is dangerous because it implies an obligation to accept disapproval when offered. My old man was raised Dutch Reformed and conservative; was deeply censorious of Democrats, Catholics, homosexuals, female and gay clergy, liberals, and Irishmen. Climbing out of that bog has not been easy; and now that I’m out, I sense that, having reached one hundred, he doesn’t care about any of that anymore. Because of the manner of his deafness, he’s always needed a visual horizon to maintain his balance. With his eyesight and legs fading, he needs to hold onto solid objects to get around. We discuss only simple things, and if he can’t understand my sign, I spell the word a foot from his nose.

But he’s still a powerful man. When we hugged as we left, he squeezed long and hard, as if it might be the last time ever. And for the first time ever, I was not impatient for the hug to end.