These are cupcakes Evan’s mom stayed up late Thursday night to make for his day care class. Man, they look sparkly in this picture – guess I got the right angle, because I didn’t photoshop any of that yummy sparkliness into it. Apologies in advance to the other parents for the icing that will inevitably wind up on their kids’ clothes and faces and hair.
For Evan, it’s just another day at the office – this morning, in between bites of a breakfast that he specifically requested (banana slices and green beans – not mixed together, though), he was busy playing with his cat. He’s completely oblivious to all of this birthday business.
Which is funny – I remember my second birthday with absolutely vivid detail. It’s literally my earliest memory that I still have. I spent it with my folks in New Jersey, at my mom’s father’s house. I don’t remember what other awkwardness and tension was going on, but I think this may have been the first time my mom met her new stepmother (boy, is that a running theme in this family or what?). My grandparents got divorced at a time when it wasn’t routine, wasn’t fashionable to shrug it off – if anything, it was absolutely scandalous. My grandfather stayed in New Jersey, and my grandmother brought the children (my mom and her sister) to Fort Smith, Arkansas. (The connection there is that her sister, my great aunt Helen, lived around here, and probably helped her get settled and start over again.)
So when I was two, my mom and dad and I went to New Jersey, where I fell in love with a whole new flavor: the tomatoes my grandfather was growing in his garden. I ate tomatoes nonstop during that visit. If I wasn’t potty trained by this point (and I know Evan isn’t), I hereby apologize to my mother’s ghost for what I’m sure my diapers looked like at this point.
At dinner, on my second birthday, I was hopping up and down, running up to the table going “Tomatoes! Tomatoes! Tomatoes! Tomatoes!” In a most undignified fashion – like a two-year-old. Which my grandfather’s wife apparently felt was incredibly inappropriate and probably more than a little bit annoying (again: two-year-old). Especially while she was trying to say grace.
And so she hauled off and slapped the snot out of me.
You could’ve heard a pin drop. The look on my mother’s face wouldn’t just have melted stone, it probably could have sublimated it directly into a gas.
Admit it, you’d remember this sort of thing too.
Let me stress at this point that despite this, I never really thought of her as anything but, well, a nice old lady. Very prim and proper (how she wound up with Eddie, who’s probably the closest antecedent in the family tree to myself, I have no idea – he and I were/are a lot alike). I got along with her just fine after that, and I don’t remember being particularly upset at the time – I think I just shut up and sat down. Ate my dinner (which included copious amounts of tomatoes). Cake later.
Seems like we left pretty soon after that. Not that night, but a day or so later; I don’t remember if this was ahead of the original schedule or not.
We didn’t go back until I was 14, which was just a few months before my mom died. I went back one more time, a couple of years later, by myself (by that point my dad was dating, and I do remember catching a whiff of “you’re invited, your father isn’t”). That last trip to New Jersey with my mother, I recall, was the first time she or any other member of the immediate family had been up there since I was two – talk about a family rift.
And all of this over tomatoes and an almighty slap.
For Evan’s second birthday, I’m taking him to the zoo, so we can hang out with lions and penguins and giraffes and zebras, and be reunited with the rest of the monkeys. I’ve invited my dad along to make it a three-generation triple threat, but he’s had some health issues lately and it doesn’t seem likely that he’ll make it. We might stop and see him on the way home, depending on how everyone feels at the time.
It’d be cool if this all becomes a memory that he hangs onto well into his 30s, or even later…hopefully for different reasons! 😆
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