Yesterday was my older sister’s birthday.

I feel like it’s probably going to come across as weird when I say that I called my sister at 12:45 a.m. and yelled, “CONGRATIONS! IT’S YOUR BIRTHDAY!” into the phone.

But it’s not odd, no, no. It’s just family.

Years ago we crammed three parties into one for our extended clan, big sis, our cousin, and myself  recently achieved a college-degreed. One party, one giant sheet cake. Several of us kids agreed to pick up in the local cake maker’s home, hoping we could maybe get an extra swipe of frosting when no one was looking.

Well, that was my agenda.

In still-kinda-farmtown Huntley, Illinois, the cake maker was well known and we had received some delicious cakes in the past. Delicious, yes. But often oddly-decorated. Her frosting roses were sometimes labeled “interprative.” You kinda had to be very specific with her on the phone about what you wanted. You had to make her write it down and read it back to you, usually.

Upon first glance, the cake looked like an enormous frosted tombstone, textured with a bloody red rip down the center. There was a splurty red squiggle in the left corner too. To our further surprise the center of the cake didn’t quite say “Congratulations!” No, it was pretty close but there were some letters missing. But you know, uh, A for effort and all that.

The siblings on Cake Retrieval Patrol looked at each other nervously, recognizing the spelling error but the party started in two hours. What can you do? There was no point in demanding that she fix it – the cake maker thought it was fine as is. And on the plus side, the bloody, red cursive frosting was so erratically smeared that it was almost illegible anyway.

See? Always a sunny side.

After our guilty cake parade to the dining room table and the big reveal, Mom was not happy.

Not. Happy.

We all gathered around it, nervously musing on how to do something different with it. Maybe scrape something away and try to make a new shorter word? Could we… the day was hot. We didn’t have central air. The red frosting was beginning to run in blood rivulets.

Flash forward:  inspired by the cake disaster, Mom, Eileen, and Andrea all enrolled in ten week cake-decorating class and were often surprised by their odd results. They giggled a lot in class. As homework, they kept making clowns made of vanilla frosting crawling up Budweiser cans in the fridge. Apparently beer cans area a good smooth surface for practicing your frosting clowns. (Everyone does a clown cake at some point. Be practical.)

While visiting my folks one weekend, I opened the fridge to find this little delightful combination of two things I enjoy:  beer and frosting. I never really thought of actively marrying these two but I recognize a winner when I see it.

“Oh yeah,” Dad explained over his newspapers. “Those are Andrea’s beer clowns. Don’t drink those.”

For weeks after that particular frosting homework was completed, beer clowns kept showing up in the fridge and they would eventually getting pummeled by leftovers in aluminum foil or sharp-edged Tupperware, clown heads crushed by the pickle relish jar. It was sad how they always ended up in violent deaths near the crisper.

Mom, Eileen, and Andrea were the only three students in their large class not invited to the advanced cake decorating class and I am not making this shit up.

My family has frosting issues.

Anyway.

Back on that triple party day, standing around the “Congrations cake,” I think it was Eileen who said it first:  “Ma-ba-bsn.”

We were so nervous about presenting Mom with the bloody ‘Congrations’ cake that we barely noticed that the three honorary college degrees were smeared together almost as one word in the lower left corner. It almost looked like it could be the artists’ signature in that corner. Michelangelo of the cake decorating community.

But it was what Mom had requested and she spelled out over the phone, acronyms of our three degrees:  Andrea’s Master of Arts, my Bachelor of Arts, and our cousin’s nursing degree:  Ma-ba-bsn.

Well, fuck.

Mom was furious. We skulked underfoot offering to be helpful, until Mom begin chuckling. Suddenly we all started laughing about the silliness of everything. Someone turned to Andrea, and said, “Well Drew, you know, congrations and everything.”

We kinda lost it after that.

Ten minutes into the party, we greeted arriving guests at the door giggling, “Congrations to you! Come check this out! And ma-ba-bsn, as they say.”

Well, what the fuck are you gonna do? We gathered to celebrate triple victories in an often impossible world, so why sweat the stupid stuff like a cake with a crushed jaw that can only mumble partial words?

Fuck it all and just cebate.

After accepting my hearty congrations the other night, big sis and I chatted for the next two hours about our lives, things that excited us lately, you tube videos, and I whined about my book club book:  the book was too long, the author’s journalistic integrity was in question, his perspective biased, and plus he used big words which hurt my brain.

We laughed about a few things from our four decades together on the planet, but most of our talk the other night was somber. There was a death in our extended family last week. We talked about relatives we love, the ones we barely know. How it hurts to love these odd strangers sometimes. This eventually brought us to reflect how our parents are aging, and how we both still need Mom and Dad to be our parents sometimes. They claim that they have retired from parenting but we’re not letting them off the hook so easily.

I sometimes call Mom to remind me how to bake a potato.

I think all of us kids are afraid of being orphaned by these wonderful friends of ours. And yes, we do spend some time bitching about how they can also drive us crazy. But you know what? We love that part about them too.

Listening to her voice in the dead of night, I remembered small details about Andrea that come back in laughter and pauses, little vocal tics that I know really well. Yet, we don’t talk that often over the phone; we both get busy and forget.

We know each other better than siblings in other families do, because she and I have also been friends for many years. And there have been some difficult years between my big sister and I. We have suffered in our friendship and we have both grieved. But it’s a friendship that evolves. It’s complicated sometimes; it’s family. And it’s easy to lose two hours jabbering with an old friend who still thinks I’m hilarious once in a while.

Andrea and I got off the phone around 2:45 a.m. It was a week night; both of us had to work the next day.

Did I mention we’re night owls?

Night owls with frosting issues.

Well, what the fuck are you gonna do?

Ma-ba-bsn.

Someone grab me a beer clown from the fridge.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 5th, 2009 at 7:49 am and is filed under Gratitude. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.