OTHER PEOPLE'S BIRTHDAYS

This  
This is the beginning of a new project.  It came to me around nine-thirty one evening, a terrible time to have an idea because it is just too late to do anything about it right away.  My creative juices were left to simmer overnight, excruciatingly, and my desire to begin the project right away was further foiled by an incident with a faucet handle that was accidentally torn off, resulting in a minor rainstorm in the kitchen . . .

I'll spare you the messy details of a Saturday that was more exciting than we planned (or wanted).  I had hoped to embark on a baking experiment over the weekend in celebration of George Washington's birthday, but George got a little lost in a frantic quest to find our water main, and by the time our home was restored to (mostly) normal, a birthday party for a long-gone president had completely vanished from the to-do list.

Mark was slightly perplexed that it had made my list in the first place.  Maybe what puzzled him most was that I was pitching the idea to him at nine-thirty on a Friday night.  I think my eagerness to have birthday parties for people I don't know and have never met also took him by surprise.

"Does this sound weird?" I asked him after outlining the idea in detail, hoping for reassurance.

"Um . . . a little," he said.

But the question I was asking myself was one I liked.  What kind of parties could I concoct for people I know only through the books they wrote or the legacies they left to the world?  What if I reached back through history and presented each one with a birthday cake?

This is not the birthday cake George Washington would have had, but today isn't even his birthday.  This cake marks the birthday of an idea.  Since Washington would have been 282 years old on Saturday, it's also a nod to him.

And this is the beginning of a project called Other Peoples' Birthdays.