Mom and The Birthday Cake

I was thinking the other day about Mom, which is strange but not strange, because Mom left us about twelve years ago, but Mom is still with us, so strange to think about her and yet not so.

I don’t know who reads my stuff, but I suspect a whole lot of you are younger than I am, which is what happens when simple math and demographics and all that conspire to remind me that I’m about 75% through the journey, do what I may to postpone the inevitable.

So, younger than me, you may either be (1) happily going about your business, with Mom and Dad going about theirs (either working or recently retired); (2) working through the challenges of elder care; or (3) in that stage when your parents have passed on.

I’m well into that last stage, and well aware that the last shreds of immortality my parents may possess will soon fade as I, too, leave the world, transferring the last of my hazy memories of them to the next generation. So it goes.

So, thinking about Mom, I begin with this little story that has to do with a birthday cake, candles, two women in their 80s, a high-strung young lady, two brothers who really should know better, a sister who manages the family events, and the family home.

This would be twenty or so years ago, because Mom died at 93 in 2010 and that was twelve years ago. Sorry to repeat myself, but I’m getting old, too.

Mom had developed a long friendship with my older brother’s mother-in-law (1), in the way that “that generation” (2) could do it, having lived through the Depression and World War II and on into widowhood. Their birthdays fell on the same month, to boot (3).

By this time, they had reached the delightful point in the journey toward second childhood where questions and answers are often unrelated, but it doesn’t really matter any more. To explain: The prior year, I attended a birthday party at a ritzy restaurant for Mom and a bunch of her 80-plus cronies (organized by she who manages the family events but who couldn’t get to this one in time because she had developed a medical crisis on the way home from Canada and so sent her semi-ex husband (which would make him my semi-ex-brother-in-law — see Note 1) instead). He and I, middle-aged, were by far the youngest folks at a table of about ten. The entire two-hour conversation consisted of double- and triple-ordering food (“to get it right”), along with a series of questions that would be followed by answers that might have been for other questions but certainly didn’t have anything to do with the original query, following which all the guests would be perfectly content except for he and I, who, after a few of these, decided it was best not to try to sort anything out. I told him after the event that my brain was so scrambled I was afraid to drive home.

Back to this birthday party. Random conversation would be the order of the day here, too. She who manages everything had determined it would be great to celebrate both Mom’s and in-law’s birthday on the same day, and she had ordered two of what to her were ordinary but to us brothers, extravagant, birthday cakes, enough sugar and frosting for the entire neighborhood.

One of these cakes had oodles (4) of chocolate shavings piled loosely on top of gobs of chocolate frosting, a concoction easily about a foot tall. (For you literary types, this is the Chekhov moment(5).)

So there we were, gathered around the family dining room table in the family home, and the great moment had arrived when there would be Cake Brought Forth From the Kitchen and Happy Birthday and such - when, to her horror, the one who manages everything realized there were no birthday candles in the house.

Surveying the available serfs at her disposal, she concluded that neither my brother nor I could be trusted with such a complex task (6), so she sent her daughter of the high-strung disposition out in search of candles, advising her to “stand not upon the order of her going but to go at once.” (7)

Thus duly instructed, the high-strung young lady proceeded to the nearest store and returned with the candles, during which interlude the rest of us engaged in the kind of birthday conversation I described above.

Our niece having returned, my brother and I went into the kitchen “to help.” We watched as she placed the candles on the chocolate-encrusted cake and lit them.

At this point, I noticed a brief spark flare from one of the candles. My brother must have noticed it as well, because there followed one of those brotherly eye-to-eye exchanges that both queried and affirmed. The power of a glance. Put to clumsy words, it goes like this: “Did you see what I saw?” “I did.” “Do you suppose those candles are…?” “I think you’re right.” “Should we say anything?” “Nope.” “This will be a hoot.” “Yup.”

He and I followed our niece as she triumphantly bore the magnificently-lit cake into the dining room. One of us carried the unchosen cake, still an imposing collection of vanilla frosting and swirls and such, and placed it a little ways away from the action, where it could bear witness (if cakes can do that, and with envy as well) to the events about to unfold.

My niece placed the cake in front of Mom.

Mom took a deep breath and blew.

The candles went out — and then didn’t. They relit.

By this time my sister probably figured something might be up, but it was too late to do anything about it, because the in-law elder declared (in that querulous voice we all will one day have when our vocal cords have checked out for good), “You’re not blowing hard enough!”

Whereupon Mom took that “I’ll huff and puff and blow your house down” breath and blew as hard as she could.

Some of the candles went out, some might even have tilted a bit under the blast. But all those chocolate shavings lifted and scattered themselves to the ends of the earth, or at least to the corners of the dining room. The other cake looked like a bride caught standing too close to the curb on a muddy day.

My brother and I were failing spectacularly at containing our chortles (8), Mom had a puzzled look on her face, the candles relit, the niece was mortified, my sister swooped in to grab the offending torches even as the in-law tried to huff and puff as well.

In short, the best birthday celebration ever.

I tell you all this to tell you something else.

The best stories are those that are often funny afterward. These stories are what keep our folks alive.

Those of you who have lost, or who are about to lose, your elders, know what I’m talking about here.

When you’re younger, you might have grown impatient when you heard words like, “She’s got her mother’s eyes” or “He’s got his father’s temper.” Of course you’re your own person. “Why describe parts of me as though they belong to somebody else? I’m unique!”

Yes we are. But when parents or other loved ones are gone, you’ll no longer have their voices, unless you strain for them in memory or are blessed with recordings. And while you’ll have memories, these can fade as well.

But here’s one thing I have.

Dad once told me he had “club thumbs.” Short, squat, certainly not slender. I have them, too. They’re aggravating as anything when you’re trying to play the piano. Your hand span is shorter than you’d like. And they’re thick on the keys.

Dad went first, in 1999. I often thought he went because somehow, perhaps, he knew that he belonged to the 20th century and wouldn’t make heads or tails of this one. Sometimes I feel that way, too.

When Mom went, some ten years later, it was tough to stand in church and deliver the eulogy. But I squeezed my thumbs in the palms of my hands. Dad was with me.

That’s what you’ll come to know, those low times when you’re wishing you had your parents back. You’ll realize you have them with you, in your eyes, or the tilt of your head, the shape of your face, the club-shape of your thumbs. These things are your physical memories, your bits of them, and you take them with you everywhere you go.

And there’s this.

Take a look at your fingerprints.

We’ve long known our fingerprints are unique. We probably haven’t given them another thought.

We should.

You see, our fingerprints are formed when we’re in our mother’s womb. Our before-birth movements, touching the walls and structures in the womb and bathed in amniotic fluid — that’s what creates the unique whorls and arches identifying us.(9)

You etched yourself on the walls of your mother’s womb just as surely as she etched the contours of her womb on the ends of your fingers.

That is how you take Mom with you, everywhere you go, long after she has left this earth.

So if ever you’re feeling low, or lonely, without your parents, go stand in front of a mirror. Or, in my case at least, squeeze your thumbs. But above all, look at the ends of your fingers, and be both comforted and amazed.

Your mother is always with you.

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(1) OK, if you’ve got a better way to work this one out, let me know. I think other cultures do a far better job describing relationships than we do in our Americanized English. So give me a break. At least it wasn’t “my older brother’s mother-in-law’s sister-in-law’s grandniece.” Carry this on too far and you end up off the planet altogether.

(2) Isn’t every generation other than your own “that generation?” Probably not. Seems like “that generation” meant the ones that launched all the ones that followed — baby boomers, Millennials, and the wave of “gen’s with letters” (kind of like the “wave of ‘Egg-kings’” in “1066 and All That” - GenX / Y / Z. What’s next? Gentoo? (No, wait, that’s Linux.)

(3) Where “to boot” comes from is anybody’s guess, being a phrase about a thousand years old and having nothing to do with footwear: see https://idiomorigins.org/origin/to-boot

(4) Oodles. What a great word. Unlike the ancient “to boot,” it’s been around only about 150 years, nobody knows where it came from, but it’s fair to say that you could pick up a Martian and say to it, “what do you think ‘oodles’ means,” and it would answer, “A lot.” See https://idiomorigins.org/origin/oodles

(5) And for just about everybody else reading this, from Anton Checkhov, the famous “gun” quote: “One must never place a loaded rifle on the stage if it isn’t going to go off.”

(6) By this time, my brother and I were in our forties. “Grown men,” as the saying goes — though the rest of the family would never apply that phrase to the two of us.

(7) Oh, my. I must commend my sister pointing me to this wonderful mixing of Shakespeare and the law. She brought this bit of hilarity to my attention through the wonderful case (still taught today) of “Cordas vs. The Peerless Transportation Co,” which blended case law with a wacky mix of Shakespearean phrases to dress up the story. The judge writing the opinion was named Carlin (go figure), and the phrase in question derives from Macbeth: “Stand not upon the order of thy going but go at once.” For those of you with an unquenchable thirst for the slightly extraordinary made even more so, go here: https://courtroomcast.lexisnexis.com/acf_cases/10020-cordas-v-peerless-transportation-co-

(8) We have Lewis Carroll to thank for this one (see: https://idiomorigins.org/search-request?search_text=chortle), and oh my goodness, looking up “chortle” led me to something else I did not know, the concept of a “portmanteau word.” How lovely: https://idiomorigins.org/origin/portmanteauportmanteau-word

(9) So I got all serious, but that was my intention all along. Here’s a quick source: https://www.sharecare.com/health/fetal-development-basics-pregnancy/how-fingerprints-formed-in-womb