Cheaper by the dozen

Most people have a birthday.

You know. One day.

Tony doesn't really have a birthday. It's more of a birthday season. It's kind of like Hannukah.

There's a whole bunch of celebrations spread out over maybe a week and a half.

In fact, if our 12-year anniversary, which just happens to be today, October 26th, didn't come so soon after Tony's birthday, I think he'd try to drag it out until Veteran's Day or possibly Thanksgiving.

Anyway, we had a birthday observance this past weekend in San Leandro with five generations of Tony's family. No seriously. Five generations. His niece was there, along with his great niece, his parents, his brother and his grandmother. Five Generations. Do the math.

Then, thank our lucky stars, Jeffrey came over last night and polished off the cake, which was tasty, if somewhat unexpected in the context of a large, extended Italian family. It was from a Chinese bakery, and it had melon balls on it.

Seriously. Melon balls. And grapes! There were grapes in between the two layers.

Jeffrey took one look at the leftover cake in our fridge and said "Oh, yeah! This stuff! With the melon balls! We had this every year for my birthday!"

So I guess for him melon balls on cake are pretty routine.

But the grapes, those kind of took him by surprise.

Then this morning in honor of the big anniversary, I made everybody pumpkin pancakes for breakfast. And Lord help me, I couldn't help but wonder what they'd taste like with melon balls.

Kurt "big daddy" True
26 october 2005