Dinner tonight (my son's annual birthday choice--it's the same every year): lobster, artichokes, lime ice, sugar cookies. Apparently he likes prickly food.

As an extra-special birthday treat, my friend Linda (the boys' ex-babysitter) just showed up with twelve homemade whoopie pies. Are these a local Maine phenomenon? I never had homemade whoopie pies when I was a kid. My western Pennsylvania great-aunts were devotees of Chex party mix and jello-and-cream-cheese-and-canned-pineapple-and-little-colorful-marshmallow desserts. It was the follow-up to heavy Polish food served from slow cookers and the precursor of penny-ante poker and cans of Miller or Cherokee Red cherry soda, depending on your age and sex. (I never saw a lady with a can of Miller. Ladies drank a lot of weak coffee and talked about their bunions and their ancestors and what they wore to get married in. Only tough-minded ladies like my great-aunt Esther took part in the poker games. But then she had, as a middle-aged, heavy-smoking, gravel-voiced divorcee, taken the brave step of marrying my great-uncle John, who used a lot of Brylcreem and showed up with a big new car every six months and wanted to teach me me how to bet at the dog races: unfortunately my mother put her foot down. . . .)

My son has spent much of his pre-lobster-eating evening wearing his Cardinal de Medici costume and singing along with the Ramones' Rocket to Russia while reading a biography of Jackie Robinson. What could be more festive?

Eleven years ago this very night I was home from the hospital thinking, Oh my God, what made me think that two boys was a good idea?