Only if the old dish is back

A son has been trying for a month to take his father to a new restaurant in Riyadh, and the father has a condition.

He will go if they can get the corner table on the terrace, at nine, on a Thursday, and if the kitchen will cook the lamb the way his own mother cooked it, which no menu in the city has carried for thirty years.

The son starts phoning. He finds a place with a terrace. He asks about the lamb. He is solving the problem he was handed.

But the problem he was handed is not the problem. Nobody needs a particular table and a dish that no longer exists in order to eat dinner. The condition was built to be impossible, and an impossible condition is a gentle way of refusing without ever saying the word.

Saying the real reason out loud costs something. Perhaps the father is worried about a menu he cannot read without his glasses, or a room full of people half his age, or a bill his son will pay in front of him. Name any of those and the son might fix it, and then there is nothing left to stand behind.

So the request goes out, and the quiet hope is that the son tires of searching and stops asking.

It is worth checking first whether the condition is real. Some people truly cannot sit indoors, or cannot eat certain things, and then the answer is a different restaurant, not a cleverer argument.

When it is not real, the only thing the son has learned is that his father is uneasy about something. That is worth more than any terrace. The next step is not another phone call. It is a slow, patient conversation about what is actually in the way.