My grandpa, who I call “Papa,” turned 98 on Sunday. While I go to New York every few months to visit him, I haven’t especially timed it around his birthday before. Given that he almost died in November, he made it clear months ago that if he should still be here, he wanted me there to help him celebrate his birthday.

At first, he said, no party. But there are a few people who knew, and asked if they could come, and the next thing you know, we’re having a small party. So what to serve? Papa, who is pretty-much housebound these days, picked the restaurant. He said we’d pass around the menu, everyone would order what they’d want, and we’d order in. The restaurant he picked was Mama Mexico, a very good (non-kosher) Mexican restaurant not far from his apartment.

He had a few bottles of wine lying around, and I ordered a cake. But when I first arrived on Thursday, Hillary, his wonderful care-giver from Trinidad, told me that he had made a funny request. For hors d’oeuvres, he wanted shrimp cocktail.

I have said multiple times on this blog that my family never kept kosher. But I still found this hilarious. The only thing that would have been even funnier, my friend Ilana remarked, was if he had kept kosher all his life, and then he requested shrimp cocktail.

My grandpa is so of the old world. He was born in Odessa in 1910, and has a PhD in Geography. He immigrated to Vilna, married and fathered a son, and taught at the university there. Then the war started. He had always wanted to immigrate to Palestine, but his wife didn’t want to. He always claimed that he would have been more religious, but after his wife and three-year-old son were killed, that seemed impossible.

After the war, he married an old Vilna acquaintance who also survived, my grandmother, and adopted my mother, who had been saved by her gentile nanny.

He has often spoken about what he calls his “quarrel with God,” that began one horrible day that he spent in the Lukishki prison yard. And yet, he remains a traditionalist at heart. He has left explicit instructions that if the rabbi at his shul is unavailable, no woman rabbi should officiate at his funeral. When he first joined his egalitarian, Conservative shul on the Upper West Side, he told me the women there all wore kippot and tallitot, and they looked ridiculous. When I told him I was considering getting a talllit myself, he was so happy that I have become more observant than anyone in my family, and then offered to buy it for me. Consistency has never been his strong suit.

So when it came to his 98th birthday, a day he certainly never thought he would reach, why shrimp cocktail? Why not shrimp cocktail, I guess. While I have even adopted a “no traif” policy in my own home, I was not going to deny my Papa anything he wanted on his 98th birthday. He wanted shrimp cocktail, he was going to get it.

For those here who care, Hillary, who placed the order, asked for wild shrimp rather than farmed. It cost $30 more.