Birthdays were the topic at our Senior Breakfast Club at the Big Boy Restaurant. The talk drifted to all the usual jokes about growing old… Most of it centered around the loss of a body function or your mind . Or how the celebration interrupted nap time. Or heat from the candles driving you back from the cake. That kind of stuff. There were a lot of laughs about the condition we are in and memories about the good old days… what we could remember. What we didn’t remember, we made up.
As I drove home, I was reflecting on all the birthday celebrations I had attended over the years. My thoughts gravitated to the usual staples of birthday parties…cake and ice cream. A few days earlier, I had overheard a conversation in which a person was talking about eating a birthday cake that had thick caramel and the problem of it sticking to his teeth. I got an image of what that mean to an older person and the cartoon idea came to me.