The Forget-Me-Not Cake(Len Daniels) The Forget-Me-Not Cake


In 1975, on a Friday night in February, I traveled from my apartment in Reading, Pennsylvania to southern New Jersey to visit with a buddy I met a short time before. He was just getting over a divorce much the same as I was at that time. We met at his home and went and had dinner at a local restaurant. During dinner, we talked about our lives and generally got to know more about each other. When we finished, we decided to visit a local nightclub to cap the evening off. We had a few drinks and danced a little, until we met a couple of unattached young ladies and introduced ourselves. They turned out to be my now wife, Anne, and her girlfriend April. It seems as though Anne, who lived in New York City, had driven down to spend the weekend at April's apartment, and tonight they were supposed to attend a dance in the apartment complex where April lived. The only problem was that the dance was to be held the following weekend, and here they were all dressed up with nowhere to go. They subsequently decided to visit the same club that my buddy and I were enjoying.

As the night wore on, we all seemed to be hitting it off quite nicely and about 2:00 AM we decided it might be nice if all of us had breakfast together, which is what we did. We got a booth together in the restaurant and ordered. While waiting for our food, we exchanged pleasantries as though we were teenagers again. It was during this time that I found out many things that Anne and I had in common. For instance, although I am six years older than Anne, we share the same birthday, and I even remarked that in all my years, I had never met anyone with my birthday. The next amazing thing we shared was that we both smoked the same brand of cigarettes at the time, and both drank vodka cocktails.
An unfortunate but amazing thing was that we both lost our mothers, whose Zodiac signs were both Aries, to a very similar illness.
Another similarity that we shared was that both our fathers were Aquarius, and they both remarried other Aries ladies.
The real clincher came when I showed her a picture of my twin girls at 6 years old, sitting on Santa Claus's knee and wearing dresses that their grandmother had made from scratch. These dresses were made with one of Anne's patterns. When Anne saw this she almost flipped. I guess destiny works in strange ways.

There were other less explicit similarities that we realized as we spent more and more time together. After spending almost all our free time together, with me traveling to the Big Apple or Anne coming to visit with me in Reading, we decided that it would be easier if we got married, so we mutually decided to make the big move. She had never been married, since she was very much involved with her fashion-designing career and probably didn't have time to commit. I, on the other hand, had been wise enough to bow out of a partnership that was going nowhere. I couldn't believe that Anne was giving up all her working years in New York, to come down to rural Reading, Pennsylvania to marry me. This made me feel very proud and firm in the belief that we could "do it for life" as it were.

We "courted" for almost three months and on April 13th of that year, we decided to have an engagement party at her apartment and invite all her family and friends in and around her home. Since this was also our birthday, we decided to have a double purpose cake to celebrate it and our engagement together. Anne ordered the cake but unknowingly didn't realize that it wouldn't fit in her refrigerator when it arrived on the day of the celebration. She then thought of her friend that lived across the hall. He was a bachelor with a job that would take him away from his apartment much of the time, so his refrigerator was empty most of the time anyway. She asked him if it would be all right to store the cake in his "fridge" for a few hours. He agreed and we carried it across from Anne's apartment. This all took place long before the actual party. Anne and I then started to get the apartment in decent shape and get ourselves cleaned up to welcome our guests.

At the appointed hour of 2:00 PM, the guests started arriving. I had only met a few of them previously, so most of them were strangers to me. Anne made the introductions and we started to party on. We had all the little niceties of a fine cocktail party, finger sandwiches and alcoholic beverages and more.

At about 5:00 PM, Anne decided to go over to her friends apartment to get the cake, We were all so engaged in conversation and good feelings that we never even saw her quietly slip out of the room.

The next thing we heard was a scream and a few expletives coming from the direction of the front door. We all jumped up and ran to the door. There, lying on the floor, was the broken cake box with the flattest cake I'm sure any of us had ever seen. Anne, on her way from her neighbor's kitchen, crossing the hall and then entering her apartment apparently stopped abruptly, to close the door, but unfortunately, the cake didn't so it kept moving, right out of her hands and onto the floor. Anne dropped to the floor immediately, sobbing that she ruined the party. We all reassured her that it wasn't as bad as she thought. all the guests then got their plates and started spooning the cake off the floor while Anne protested. We then scraped up what was left and cleaned up the mess.

Towards the end of the party, all the guests agreed that this party would probably be the most memorable of any that they had ever attended. Anne and I were happy with the outcome, and I know that we'll never forget it.

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