All the ingredients, the mix and eggs and oil and sugary blue and green frosting, were fashioned with love and care by the baker at our local supermarket into the perfect cake. A rectangle of show-stopping perfection.

My wife picked it up and we hauled it to my mom and dad’s place. My mom had prepared the bestest of birthday dinners. Beef and noodles, deviled eggs, French-style green beans, heat-and-serve rolls, and her world-famous, to-die-for hash brown potato casserole with golden brown corn flakes on top. These are the delicacies that have padded my ribs for forty one years now, and they’ve never tasted better.

To top it all off was that gorgeous cake, which my eight year old insisted say “Happy Birthday Daddy.” And so it did.

Early yesterday morning, a friend of mine from Chicago sent me a note on Facebook telling me she couldn’t write on my wall so she was sending a message instead, wishing me a happy day. I changed my settings to make things easier for others, and more birthday wishes began rolling in. Some from relatives, others from older friends, and one in particular from someone I’d never met. She lives in my town and is married to another friend, a guy I used to do a lot of miniature skirmishes with at the Friendly Local Gaming Store. She’s a blogger and if memory serves we’d hooked up through that medium initially. So she left wrote on my wall and told me to save her some cake. This is not uncommon; I’ve written this myself on other walls in jest, knowing that the possibility of actually getting any cake, even via the wonders of expedited shipping, were nil.

That was her mistake, for as-of-late I am a man of action. I wrote back that we should hook up later in the afternoon at the aforementioned FLGS. She was game, figuring her husband and I could spend some time talking gaming shop, and she could eat cake. So after dinner, we packed up the three remaining pieces of cake and headed out.

The look on her face was priceless, a mixture of unhinged reticence and bafflement. And she ate her some cake, by golly. Another piece went to my old GM Steve, who also sent me a note on Facebook, and we let the gamers in the back room roll d100s for the last piece, a corner monstrosity the size of a brick. The nice thing about cake is it doesn’t leave a stain on your character sheet.

Cake with friends, old and new. That’s my kind of birthday . . .

[photo credit]