"I like birthday cake. It's so symbolic ...
it's the emblem of childhood and a happy day."
-- Aimee Bender
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| Birthday cake 8-18-14 |
"I think they're going to force us to eat lots of cake
and then take an unreasonably long nap."
-- Veronica Roth, Insurgent
My husband's birthday was yesterday.
And it got me thinking.
And it got me thinking.
One of my earliest, deepest-seated memories from childhood is from when I turned four.
My birthday is in mid-July and everybody was in the sun-soaked back yard for a cookout -- my sisters, my parents, both sets of grandparents, and our yellow hound dog, Penny.
There's a jumpy Super 8 home move somewhere that documents the following events as they transpired that day -- it's like watching the Kennedy assassination with the sound turned down.
I was wearing a frilly yellow party dress and a cardboard Indian headdress lined with black and white stand-up feathers -- a look which sums me up pretty damned accurately.
I was gleefully riding on the whirly-bird with my sisters, spinning and laughing, when my parents brought out my birthday cake and called everybody over to the picnic table.
It was a bakery cake from Bake-A-Teria, where we always got our birthday cakes, with sugary white icing, my name and the number of years that had elapsed thus far since my birth, piped in baby blue.
I scampered across the lawn. My mother lit the candles. I inhaled a deep chestful of air. I clamped shut my eyes and leaned in to blow out the candles and make my birthday wish when Penny leaped from the grassy knoll onto the picnic table and devoured my entire cake, candles and all, in a series of giant, hungry, chomping, slobbery bites.
I was shell shocked. Stunned. The grownups laughed and tried to make it okay. But it was not okay. It was so, so not fucking okay.
And it wasn't about the lost cake, necessarily. The real tragedy was about the lost wish. Because without a birthday cake there are no birthday candles, and without birthday candles there can be no birthday wish.
Then there was the time we were driving home from Bake-A-Teria with my sister Alicen's birthday cake. It was in the era before children had to be strapped into seat belts and Alicen was standing, holding onto the back of the driver's seat head rest. Her cake, in it's box with the see-through cellophane window, was on the seat behind her. When Dad had to suddenly hit the brakes, Alicen lost her hold. She let go and fell backwards and plopped directly onto her cake, crushing it with a precise imprint of her ass.
My parents served it anyway, with candles. I remember its sad lopsided-ness, the jokes about the butt-print in the frosting. But even a crushed birthday cake can still be wished on and eaten.
When a cake is gobbled by the family dog, the wishes are gobbled up with it.
Birthdays require a cake with candles. It's that simple. Although, if the birthday boy or girl requests it, a birthday pie can be substituted for the cake. Candles, however, are de rigueur if any wishing is going to happen.
A birthday cake needn't be fancy. It can be homemade or bakery-made, from scratch or a boxed mix, decorated or plain, round, oblong, square or divided into individual cupcakes. What really matters is that there's enough cake for at least one candle to be stuck in and blown out and wished upon.
I don't remember much about what I got for childhood birthday gifts. But I do remember what I wished for. Most years I wished for a pony and a swimming pool.
Except for when I was four.
That year I just wished someone had tied up the goddamn dog.
