Last year I forgot to mention my grandfather’s birthday until after it passed. (Some grandson, eh? The guy gives me fodder for years’ worth of blog posts, and that’s the thanks he gets.)
I won’t be quite so daft this year.
August 13, 1974.
Here, the guy who kept the calendars pats himself on the back for a change.
Perhaps it was discomfort or modesty that led him to label his quickly sketched cake and candles, as though their identities were unclear.
(It is kind of a bare-bones cake, without so much as a single rosette, though the same was probably true of whatever cake my grandma actually baked.)
As we’ve previously established, this was a couple years after my grandpa’s first heart attack. I imagine each birthday felt a little sweeter to him after that, even after he’d settled in to his new lifestyle.
I don’t think I’ll dump any more of my overwritten quasi-analysis onto this calendar entry.
I’ll just wish my grandpa a happy birthday, offer him a slice of plain scratch-baked cake, and thank him for keeping the calendars.
Allow me to add the overwritten quasi-analysis…
“64 in 74” is your grandmother’s writing, probably her rallying cry to her hubby and his ticker to keep on keepin’ on.
Interesting that there is an erased question mark after “This Is a Cake(?)”.
I don’t know the deep significance of 1 1/4 pounds (that’s your grandfather’s writing again) for sure, but I have an idea that what he wanted for his birthday (or maybe what his wife actually baked him – we don’t know the chronology of the drawing) was something slightly better/bigger/more special than a “pound cake”. That’s how his mind worked…