THE BEST BIRTHDAY CAKE EVER

Gentle Readers,

Last night I had the pleasure of watching my now 30-year-old son blow out the candles on his birthday cake, and it was the most creative cake I've ever seen.

Because 30 makes my son an old man, the young woman who made the cake, Lindsey, decorated it to demonstrate how ancient he now is.

The cake wore prunes laid out in the shape of Florida because that's where old people go to live. There were two old golf balls, a double entendre if ever I've seen one. The front of the cake sported one of those plastic pill holders that old people use so they remember to take their medicine and it was filled with blue M&Ms to represent a certain little blue pill. An old creature, was it a dinosaur? can't remember, donned an adult diaper.

I can't even remember everything that was on that cake. I just know I couldn't stop laughing when I saw it and neither could anyone else. What a creative young woman our Lindsey is. And how loved my son must be that people wanted to celebrate his birthday with him. His girlfriend said she'd never had a birthday like that.

The closest I ever came was one year when a nurse I assisted at a nursing home made brownies with peanut butter and chocolate chips for my birthday. They were homemade although she, like me, worked 7 p.m. to 7 a.m. three or four nights per week - and it was hard, physically demanding labor - and she, unlike me, had three small children. I don't know how she did it all, and I never saw her lose her patience at work. Once when her husband called her at work and criticized her because the house was dirty, she just got very quiet.

I know how she felt. We never do enough. We're never good enough.

But last night at that birthday celebration, everything was more than good enough.

Love,

Dumped First Wife.