Memory whole, pt. 1: The Bicentennial

You may (or may not!) be old enough to remember the bicentennial. Maybe not as a rising senior at a high school in Texas (that would kind of be the plot of Dazed and Confused), but maybe as a seven-year-old whose birthday is July 4. No? Maybe that's just me.

Well, on that august occasion, some of my cousins made me an exploding birthday 'cake.' I use the scare quotes because it was really firecrackers (M80s or whatever) embedded in cake and frosting. The picture below is of my cousin Mike lighting the 'cake.' I'm the extremely thin little boy, with my sisters, Lisa, center, and Angie. And I'm sure that none of us are wearing 'sunscreen.' I don't believe that that concept had been invented in 1976!



And lest you are interested, it blew cake and frosting EVERYWHERE! I don't seem to have a picture of that. But, yes, it did. We are actually standing too close, in hindsight, and I don't remember this, exactly, but Mike must have been really 'frosted.' It was a pretty short fuse.

I know that any number of readers of this blog (it does have readers, no?) have heard this story. But here's proof of a sort.