Today is my dad’s birthday, and it’s always hard to find the right gift for him. He likes (the?) great books, and some of the better pain medications, and products sold at Costco, but I’m never sure which of any of those things he already has. Some years I have opted for an assortment of farmy cheeses, to pair with any of the above. 

For my birthday parties, he used to make hats –at least, he made hats for one of my birthday parties, and there is a picture to prove it, so it became, in my mind, a tradition. My friends and I—or cousins, or neighbors, or anyone who could be rounded up for a summer birthday–would pose in our homemade hats, and then we would sing, and eat my grandmother’s buoyantly named Happy Day Cake. My birthday parties tended to end in hat-disfiguring tantrums when the cake part was over and everyone stopped focusing on me, but that is not his fault.

At the beginning of our current pandemic, my own children were sufficiently deprived of stimulation to allow themselves to be conscripted for several elaborate birthday projects for my friends. How my father, whose ingenuity inspires us all to be creative when we would rather play Smurf Atari [personal note: ask one of the children to update this reference] would love one of these birthday signs! We are still in negotiations with his condominium association about where such a sign would be allowed. In the meantime, I wonder if my mother would print this page and fold into a birthday hat.