50 Years Ago, Seems Like Yesterday

The Happy Birthday Cake

Mike Pellecchia

When I went to college I packed everything I needed in 2 suitcases

because that was the limit on the plane

4 months later, end of freshman semester, went home for Christmas.

I planned on opening the closet in my bedroom and re-visiting all the stuff I had carefully packed and stacked in my side of the closet in the former bedroom of me and my brother. Years of MAD Magazines, baseball cards, record collection, board games, gizmos and gadgets of a kid growing up.

August had been my first time leaving home and December was my first time going back. I was hitch hiking along the interstate; a big semi-truck trailer let me out near an off-ramp in Knoxville. Couple minutes later I was in the back of a warm police car pulling into the Knoxville jail loading dock. I was waiting on a bench to be processed along with a bunch of people who had been busted, possibly for smelling bad, having long hair, or something worse. When they asked what I was in for, and I told them, they all moved away from me on the bench. Busted for thumbing a ride was not cool to anybody. With my one phone call, I reached my father who sent bail money and bus fare. Somebody from the jail knew someone at Western Union so they could go get the money dad had wired while I was still locked up. Seemed like a routine situation for the KPD.

As if that wasn't exciting, when I got home to my former bed room, my stuff was gone from my side of the closet. Pretty much my life to that point, except for the two suitcases that went to college with me.

I asked my younger brother, who was in high school, where my stuff was.

“Mom threw it out,” he said rather matter of factly and in a defeated tone. “She needed space for her clothes.”

He was right. Mom had been on a serious clothing binge since that summer when I went away to college in Texas.

Fashion had been changing, pant suits had been coming out, and she was trying out all the different colors that the new fabrics were coming in.

Christmas eve, she had visions of seeing or being the Virgin Mary, and they were not pleasant. My father and three brothers encircled her as she became increasingly unconsolable. Family Christmas, enveloped in the commercial cheer and churchgoing of the 1950s and 1960s, unraveled from that point.

My friend Joe was gonna pick me up. We’d be working Christmas Eve in his dad’s bakery, so that when his dad opened at 7 a.m. there would be plenty of donuts, cakes, cookies at Richard’s Bake Shop on Christmas Day.  On a main street in the picturesque town of Wethersfield, it felt like a Christmas movie all around. The town was populated by doctors and lawyers mostly, in their big old colonial houses, but there was also a clock-punching population working shifts at the state prison there.

While I was squirting jelly into the donuts, Joe set a cake over to the side. I iced it with the words “Happy Birthday Jesus.”

We went over to the big city up the road, Hartford, where the Christmas lighting spectacular was in Constitution Plaza. It brought people from all over the state. We brought a folding card table and offered free slices of Happy Birthday Jesus Cake.

We stood out there in the rather bitter cold for awhile doing this. Offering slices of cake to the gaily dressed families who wouldn't take it and wouldn't let their kids take it.

We could hardly believe it. No one wanted any Happy Birthday Jesus Cake.

We felt like bearers of bad news. We felt like thieves. It was just a white frosted cake, but Joe's dad Abe, back at the bakery, could have sold it, and we couldn’t give it away.

On the way back to the bakery I sat in the passenger side with the cake on my lap, some slices cut and placed in napkins, the rest of the cake frowning back at the two boys who still had a whole night of work to do.

There wasn’t much to say.

Samuel Clemens had already said all there was to say about stuff like this. His old house on Farmington Avenue was dressed to the nines this time every year, and his writings live on for their sharp humanity.

Just before he sold the aforementioned house and moved to Europe, he wrote this letter to the editor of the New York World:

“It is my heart-warm and world-embracing Christmas hope and aspiration that all of us-- the high, the low, the rich, the poor, the admired, the despised, the loved, the hated, the civilized, the savage-- may eventually be gathered together in heaven of everlasting rest and peace and bliss-- except the inventor of the telephone.”

It was  Christmas 1890 and Samuel Clemens was flat broke. He had invested all his money in the Paige Typesetter instead of the telephone. Just about a dozen years earlier, Alexander Graham Bell had offered him all the Bell Telephone stock he wanted for $500 and he turned it down. The "Happy Birthday Jesus" cake was not that, but people find something in saying no, which they often don't find in saying yes.

I rolled down the passenger window as we crossed the bridge over the Connecticut River, on the way back from Hartford to Wethersfield. A gust of cold wind made me reach for the zipper on my windbreaker but it was already pulled all the way up because we were in a Rambler American with a dodgy heater fan. I mentally gauged the space between the rails on the bridge versus how fast we were going on this icy Christmas Eve road mess in Connecticut. The snow tires were slipping on the icy bridge as I craned my head out the passenger window with the heft of a Happy Birthday Jesus cake swaddling between my elbows trying to squeeze them out the window as the wind blew across the river. I didn’t want pieces of cake to catch on the bridge and freeze. I hung out of the car and aimed it like a basketball. I wanted the whole thing to go into the river.

Richard Harris singing "MacArthur Park" was on the AM radio in the car. That big orchestration sounded great on AM radio.

When it said "I'll never have that recipe aga....a...a...ain!" I made the shot. Thought I heard it land on a chunk of ice in the river.