We have eaten
the cake
that was in
the freezer

and which
we were definitely
saving
for our anniversary

Forgive me
it was absolutely disgusting
so stale
and so freezer burned

And I wish I could leave it at that.  But I can't.  You all may remember said marriage-challenging debate surrounding the taking in of a stray wedding cake by my wife.  Ok, so it was our wedding cake, but I contended that eating horrifically bad year-old cake was not worth taking up a quarter of the space in our freezer for 365 days.  My wife said, "it's tradition."  So obviously I lost the day, and the subsequent days as well.

Well we made it folks.  A whole year of marriage.  Time truly does fly.  And upon returning from our anniversary getaway to Boston, which included a come from behind win at Fenway and subsequent gluttonous dinner, wifey took the white whale of a chocolate cake out of our freezer to defrost.

The imbedded popsicle sticks let you know it's fresh!

She did the slicing while I was in the other room.  She says it wasn't that hard to cut.  I wonder what the definition of "that" is.   We each took about a two-square-inch piece of cake, with minimal frosting, and placed it on our tongues.  It tasted like licking a vaguely chocolate flavored cave wall, with a distinct sawdust aftertaste.  But we ate it down.

"It's horrible," says my wife.  "I know," I reply.

My feet are buzzing.  They want to do the 'I told you so' dance so badly.  But we've been married a year now, and I've learned some things.  I've learned that my wife wasn't arguing that the cake would taste delicious come the following May, she was arguing that she could force me to keep a completely pointless space-filler in our freezer for a year simply because she's my wife.  And she was right.  She knew the cake would taste like a chunk of carbonized Han Solo, but it was never about the cake.  So to celebrate my 'rightness' over the pointlessness of the cake, is to have been lulled into a sense of false security regarding my place in our marriage.

So I choose to focus of the positive.

There is a gaping hole of glorious empty space in our freezer.  I could fit the entire box of Pop-Ice Freeze Pop's in there!  I could store a solid half a pig in there (the bacon half of the pig of course).  Sometimes, when I'm all alone with my thoughts, I think that I could crawl into that freezer void and curl up like an eskimo in a papoose in an igloo -- I may even invite my seal friends over to snuggle.

Which is to say that I like my new freezer flexibility, but I am ever vigilant to the potentially hidden pitfalls of mid-marriage traditions. (like friggin 'push presents!' are you KIDDING ME! The 'push present' is, and I can't emphasize this enough, your newborn child!)

My goal is to try to immediately fill the empty space with something mutually agreeable.  The problem is that it has been so long since I last had the opportunity to put something new in the freezer,  I've forgotten all of the icebox possibilities. Like a traveler who didn't keep up with his Spanish,  I've lost the vocabulary necessary to execute my plan.

And then I hear it, the tip-tapping of the 'I told you so' dance, coming from her tiny feet on the ceiling above me.