By Neal Wooten
My birthday is a few days away. It will be my 58th…in a row. I haven’t skipped any, although I am getting to that age where all I want for my birthday is to stop having birthdays. Enough is enough. Can’t I call “time out” or something?
When I was four years old, Mom asked me what kind of cake I wanted for my birthday. She always asked me and my siblings. No matter how financially strapped we were, or even if we had electricity, Mom always made us the cake of our choice and served it with ice cream. Always. If you’re wondering how she made a cake with no electricity, I would have to say, “I don’t know. How did they make them during the Jurassic period?”
I’m not sure where it came from, but I said I wanted an orange cake with orange icing and orange ice cream. In case you’re wondering, it wasn’t an Auburn thing since this was long before I decided to go to Auburn. So, that’s what she made. The next year I had the same request, and the next and the next. Eventually, she stopped asking since she knew what I’d want. Hence, this silly family tradition was born.
So, every birthday since my fourth, I got an orange cake with orange icing served with orange sherbet. I can flip through old family pictures and find so many of me at different ages seated in front of that orange confectionary wonder with candles. When they stopped making orange icing, I was none the wiser. Mom simply used food coloring to achieve the correct hue. The tradition carried on.
You might read that last paragraph and think I meant every birthday “as a kid” after my fourth. Nope. I mean every birthday. Every one through high school. Every one through college. Every one through my years of living away. Every one, period. In fact, she messaged a few days ago and wrote, “You want me to make you dinner for your birthday or just the orange cake with orange icing?”
Did I mention I’m about to turn 58? But it doesn’t matter how old you get, how mean you get, how much you bench press, how many nights you spent in jail (just an example…sort of), or how much of a big, bad, bald, burly biker bloke you might be, when your mom makes you cake and ice cream, you’re a kid again.
So, even though I wish my birthdays would stop coming around so fast, I’ll face each one with the optimism Mom instilled in me. Some people get blue on their birthday; I get orange.
