beautifully marked in currants

March 18, 2007 | Filed Under ordinary 

yesterday was ernie’s birthday and we have the leftover cake to prove it. “can we eat cake for breakfast?” henry asks. globs of green sugar sprinkles in irregular heaps on the icing (sprinkled by jude) are the pieces of choice. i always forget to make small cakes that will be eaten in one or two cake eating sittings; the main event with the lighting and wishing and blowing of candles, and another time later on, maybe in the dark before bed, or the next day after lunch on plates in the yard, the dog sniffing the grass for crumbs.

instead i make the cake as large as the recipe written by women with pudgy stomachs that lean over the counter, giving them a flour line on their aprons when they back away, or by men with round red cheeks who eat seafood regularly and know how to fry butter brown without burning, have written it using two round cake pans (slow) or a thirteen by nine white ceramic dish (fast). and then the cake abounds and is often thrown away after being poked at for a few days with a variety of utensils, henry with a spatula, jude with a butter knife. there is also no place to keep leftover cake, especially when it’s made thirteen by nine fast style, except for on the counter, which means that the regular dragging of kid sized chairs to the counters is increased.

on friday the boys woke up around five so by evening they were too tired for early birthday dinner for poppy. they gave him their present and ate hot dogs and tater tots before crawling into bed and in and out of dreams about the cake and the bouncing house of the next day. so we made early birthday dinner for ernie since the actual day would be too hectic for slow cooking and eating. as usual, i made the vegetables and ernie dealt with fish and the bleeding meat. last night the kitchen still smelled of scallops as the weather has turned cold again and everything has been closed back again.

ernie’s birthday was green and cold and busy. i taught in the morning and tried to take a nap with jude when i came home but henry was repeatedly asking for string cheese and granola bars so it was an annoying interrupted sleep. later we went to a family music festival where i took pictures and looked for my kindermusik students and drank/crunched on free slush. ernie took pictures too and followed the kids from the bounce house to the free slush to the drums and to the bounce house again. before we left for the festival henry was found standing on a stool in the bathroom combing his hair so that “he’d be handsome for the bounce house.” two hours of jumping and slurping and banging on drums. it’s nice to go somewhere that is as tall as the kids and no taller, somewhere that they feel like they are the reason for all of it, and where those feelings are rightly validated. it must be what people feel when they go to disney world or land.

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