My dad (whom the Boy calls "Poppa") has a closely trimmed beard of snowy white. One year he shaved it off and it was like revealing a stranger, a usurper of the familiar, and he couldn't grow the beard back fast enough.
This has nothing to do with my son's birthday cake.
Every year for the Boy's birthday, I go to Dairy Queen to order a special-made ice cream cake. I give them a picture, something recent, a nice picture, and through the miracle of technology, this picture ends up on the top of the cake. On the day, everyone oohs and ahhs over the picture on the cake.
This year, DQ tells me I have to go somewhere else to get the picture done.
So not only do I get bounced from store to store and end up at the place that is quite possibly the farthest away from my house without actually leaving the city limits, the well-trained Dairy Queen staff of 17-year-olds totally botch the job and give me a very sorry looking cake done in blue when I asked for green, with balloons drawn on the cake where there should have been none, and the picture slapped bumpily over most of the balloons. And the picture is torn.
I seethed.
Took the cake.
Left with the Boy.
Called the manager when I get home. He offered to refund the money. What else could he do? Yet it still seemed hardly sufficient.
A couple of days later the Boy and I go back to DQ to get the our refund. Boy and I have a cone while we're there. He got a dipped cone. Like a Dilly Bar, he said. Most of the soft serve went into his mouth. The rest was like an extra set of lips, white ones surrounding his red ones.
Me: You've got quite the moustache.
Boy (pushing his face all the way into the cone): Now I've got Poppa's beard!
No comments:
Post a Comment