A Puzzling Birthday Experience

I’ve always been a big birthday person and love to celebrate birthdays of coworkers, friends and family, as well as my own.

And I’m also really into chocolate.

So one year when my son was about eight, I went to the local Publix and ordered myself a chocolate birthday cake. (I still think they make the best cakes anywhere.) Because it was kind of embarrassing ordering my own cake (and later picking it up), I just asked the bakery woman to write Happy Birthday on top of it and purposely didn’t give my name. (The year before, a smart-aleck cashier had said, “Happy Birthday, Diane” to me (reading from the top of the cake) as I paid for it in the checkout line, and it was pretty humiliating because it was so obvious that I’d bought my own birthday cake.)

My parents came from out of town to visit on my birthday that year and my dad and I went to Publix to pick up the cake. Imagine my surprise when I got it home, took it out of the box, and saw that written in icing on the side of it, in HUGE letters, was: Happy Birthday, Diane!

It freaked me out! How was that possible??? My parents swore they didn’t have anything to do with it.

After hours of intense speculation, I got a birthday phone call from my best friend (who lived in another state). After I went on and on in amazement about the tale of the cake, she finally admitted that she had called the bakery long-distance after I mentioned to her a few days earlier that I’d ordered a cake there and was embarrassed to have my name put on it, and asked them to write the words on the side of the cake just to mess with me …

I’ve never been able to think of anything wackier than that to pay her back!

(See another blog post about that same friend at Funny Friends: Laughter is the Best Medicine.)