For those of you who insist on happy endings, there is an advisory out here. Gabe (my dog) and I were lounging around, putting a few more touches into the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_monuments_of_the_Gettysburg_Battlefield article (most of the credit for which must go to editor BoringHistoryGuy) on wikipedia when Gabe suddenly looks at me and says, “If you are going to pick-up Kassie birthday cake you had better get cracking!” So I zoomed over to Fry’s to get the cake I had ordered the day before. At that time I’d talked to a confident young woman who took my order but said that the cake decorator, who was not there at the time, liked to have a theme to design on. So I said, “Well this is for a friend at the dog park, so how about some dog prints? And perhaps a chocolate dog pile or two.” The young lady laughed and replied that the prints were a good idea but she would not vouch for the piles. Anyway, I arrived to pick the cake up and met, and photographed, the young woman who made the cake, piles and all. It is a masterpiece of design and execution, but I will let the pictures speak for my thousand words. So I grabbed the cake, a few candles (a “3” and a “1”), a box of matches and headed out. PLAN A I knew that Kassie would be at Bingo at St Clement’s of Rome church hall at 6:30, so I arrived there at 6:15 so that I could chat with the powers-that-be to figure out how best to do the birthday deed. HA! Little did I know. I walked into the hall and was presented with (I later estimated) about 300 bingoers with around 22,562 years of bingo experience between them all, and already the place was a hive of activity. It turned out that they actually started at 6:15 and in Sun City, punctuality RULES. To a simple fellow such as myself it was overwhelming. However I quickly pinpointed the men (all men) in charge by their identifying blue shirts, stashed the cake in the kitchen fridge (melting is always an issue in AZ) and set about devising a plan. The serious and not particularly friendly gents on the stage informed me that under no circumstances could a birthday thing happen - that there were too many folks here, blah,blah, blah and that such happenings had been outlawed long ago. PLAN B It turns out that there is a break in the middle of BINGO night and that this would be an appropriate time to do a cake-card-song event. So, we dog folks chatted amongst our selves and decided to do it then. The more cosmopolitan of the Duffeeland crowd had obtained BINGO cards and a marker and had joined in the fun. If “fun” is the word to describe an occasion that seemed as solemn and sacred as anything else that might go on in St Clement’s. Anyway, others of us just hung out, sometimes annoying the borderline paramilitary attendants scattered around the hall, in my case socializing with a couple of less-than-serious players, more interested in learning how to use one of the women’s new I-phone (about which the other women said, “I got one too, she’s going to teach me how to use it) until break time, at which point we broke out the cake, minus any candles or matches because any fire was totally verboten (seemed logical enough), sang The Song, drank coffee (thanks Dottie) and then either took off or dug in for Round Two. A delightful evening, all told. There is a rather sad and all-to-familiar ending to the story. Perhaps two years later Kassie went down to Florida to visit a friend and was there when the friend’s ex showed up with a gun and killed both of them. The pictures are here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/60188803@N00/albums/72157710515251396
In the words of the legendary wrestler and WWE superstar Ron Simmons (who was less than accomplished on a microphone): "Damn!"
