The first few days in May were usually busy days in my family. My birthday is May 3rd (I’ll be 31 this year), my little brother Kevin’s is the next day (we’re three years and one day apart — he’ll be 28), and my best friend from fourth grade on, Royce, has his birthday on the 5th (he’ll be 31 also).
While I’m sure there were some times when Kevin and I had separate parties, there were many, many years of joint parties also. Often my mom had the unenviable task of handling these more or less on her own, too — dad was flying in the Air National Guard, and his “one weekend a month” happened to fall on the first weekend, so he often had to leave mom to handle two excited little kids while he went off flying.
One year, on a whim, I entered a “guess the number of jellybeans in the jar” contest at the Anchorage Chuck-E-Cheese, and wonder of wonders, I actually won! The prize was a free birthday party, so that year Kevin and I had our parties officiated over by a giant rat. As Chuck-E-Cheese is a pizza parlor, mom and dad had an idea that “seemed like a good idea at the time”, and when the pizza arrived, they popped birthday cake candles into the pizza instead of into a cake. We laughed, blew them out, and started gobbling down slices of pizza.
Unfortunately, what parents hadn’t thought about was the heat of the pizza. While the candles were sitting in the pizza, not only were they melting from the top down due to the flame…but from the bottom up, too. I can’t really recommend a pepperoni-and-candle-wax pizza. It’s a bit more chewy than pizza is supposed to be.
iTunes: “Teclo” by Harvey, P.J. from the album To Bring You My Love (1994, 4:58).