Someone very familiar with Miss Brown once told me that they, as a family, did not do birthdays with cake, balloons, candles and song.
That did not mean that they neglected the date.
It simply meant that instead of prettily wrapped presents, balloons and song, they went out for either a crab dinner or a zichar feast instead.
I couldn't find any pictures of the crab dinners in Miss Brown's personal picture collection.
Neither could i find any of their birthday zichars.
I, however, did find these.
You can imagine my surprise.
"I thought you said you guys didn't do cake?"
As it turned out, they did.
But only for one person.
With only one kind of cake.
Nobody remembers when exactly it began, not even the person in question, but the earliest picture we have in Miss Brown's collection shows her son to be about eight, or nine years old.
There're four or five more pictures that come after that, then there's one that shows her son all grown up- white shirt, trousers, hair slicked back- looking to be about twenty years old.
There're two constants in these pictures.
One is the cake.
The other is where all these pictures are taken.
I once asked why- in a time when there were many new varieties of birthday cake out there- they always chose black forest.
The person in question didn't know why.
It just appealed to everyone, he said, what with its chocolate sponge, its fresh cream, the thick blueberry spread, the chocolate rice bits and the ganache cherries.
And because there weren't any new suggestions, they just bought the same cake year after year after year.
It's really beautiful to look at these pictures.
One gets reminded of the home they used to live in.
One gets reminded of the dining area next to the window where these pictures were taken, and where the big glass table used to be.
In these pictures it is either Miss Brown who stands next to her son, or it is her husband.
In some of them she's watching as her son cuts the cake by himself.
In others they're holding the knife over the cake together.
There's a picture of her husband and her son blowing out the candle(s) on the cake together.
There's another one of her and her son laughing together as they look down at the cake on a raised box in front of them on the glass table.
We don't know the conversations that took place at that point in time.
Neither will we know what happened before, after, whether they ate the cake right away or if they put the whole cake back into the fridge for another day.
But there is the cake.
There is the memory.
And that's them together all celebrating a birthday together as a family.