Today is Dennis's birthday and I will be making chocolate cake with butter cream icing and coconut on it for the forty-sixth time. He is a few years older than that but someone else was making the coconut cakes before I came along. Sometimes I wonder if the coconut is a ploy because he knows that very few other people like it and he doesn't want to share. This year I have purchased some six inch cake pans to make him a little cake and I'm using the rest of the batter for cupcakes with no coconut. He can have the other all to himself.
Our neighbors in Oklahoma City (the ones who so kindly made me the bowling ball lamp for my birthday) may have been trying to give us a hint on one of Dennis's birthdays. We woke up that morning to find the yard full of plastic forks that they had stuck in the lawn overnight for a birthday surprise. I think they used one of those jumbo packages of two-hundred and fifty. They still had to eat the cake with the coconut on it but I let them have real forks.
Other people have made him cakes too, on occasion, like the time he was teaching a Young Married Sunday School department when we were at Putnam City Baptist Church. There was often a theme. Our family always sat in the balcony with a good view of the platform where the choir sat. There were a lot of people from our class in the choir and Dennis always sat in the same place, on the end of the front pew where the people in the choir had a good view of us too, even though they were supposed to be paying attention to the preacher, of course.
Dennis, who has never been a light-weight, had a habit of getting about eight inches from the seat when he sat down, then instead of gently sitting, he kind of plopped. On this particular Sunday when he came back from taking the offering and plopped instead of sitting on the pew, there was a very loud cracking sound, the bench was a goner, and Dennis shot up instead of sitting the rest of the way down. He moved to another pew for the rest of the service. In his defense, the pews were very old and he had been doing his plopping thing, loosening it up, for years. For some odd reason all the sheet music in the choir suddenly came up at once to make a shield in front of faces and the music was bouncing up and down in unison. Not that anybody was laughing, of course.
The next Sunday happened to be Dennis's birthday and the class graciously brought him a cake. It was decorated with a bench made from tongue depressors, the seat of which was broken in two, and it said "Happy Birthday Captain Crunch."
We loved leading that class. We started out with a small group of newlyweds, none of whom had babies yet, and stayed until it was a large group and almost everybody had at least two kids. Last month we got an invitation to the wedding of one of those "babies". It seems like only yesterday that we were having class fellowships at our house that lasted until late at night and it was not unusual to have two or three babies sleeping on pallets under our pool table where they were safe from being stepped on. Dennis (but not me!) has gone through a lot of birthdays since that time.
The same people gave him probably his most defining birthday gift, ever, the year he had been broadly hinting--- okay, asking---for his weight in gold for his birthday. That Sunday, with several guys pushing and pulling, they rolled in a pallet piled high with bricks that they had painstakingly painted gold. I'm not sure if it was quite his weight, but close.
So, I'm off to make the cake. Given my track record with cakes, we'll see how it turns out. I've had plenty of practice with this one, but the new cake pans may change the equation. Well, he needs some kind of surprise on his birthday, so we'll see. I don't think the little cake will hold all the candles, though.
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