Happy Birdday!

All hail the cherry-custard birthday pie.

Growing up in the Thompson family (even though my mom always said my "real" father was J. Paul Getty) you got to design a dinner menu of your favorite foods for your birthday dinner. Every year on my birthday for as long as I can recollect, I'd eat two of my favorite things: barbecued spare ribs and my mom's cherry-custard pie. I have been known to go to extreme lengths to eat these foods on my special natal day. Or to enjoy them as near to it as I possibly can.

Several years recently I've been in Guatemala on my birthday, birding with my friends from there and visiting from the U.S. In those years, I substituted Guatemalan food for the ribs and Gallo cerveza for the pie. As soon as I got home, we'd have the March Thompson family birthdays, and I'd get my fave foods.

This year I'll be away again, so my dear mother baked me the world's most amazing pie early, and I ate two pieces for breakfast this morning (time shift acknowledgment, I am writing this on March 1 for posting on March 3). OH MY LORDY THAT'S GOOD PIE.... and if you were here, reaching for the last piece or even for a bit of the crust left on my plate, I'd warn you about losing a limb. My mom makes the word's best pie crust, there's just no debate.

My mom sometimes burns the birthday pie to appease the dark kitchen gods.

So happy bird day to my fellow March thirders: John Kogge, Ron Tuffel, Valerie Butler, Holly Wallinger, Ton Loc, Alexander Graham Bell, Jessica Biel, Jean Harlow, Snowy White, Robyn Hitchcock, Ira Glass, Jackie Joyner-Kersee (same year!), Herschel Walker (same year!), Seomoon Tak, and L'il Flip.

And thanks to Catbird, mi madre, for the pie! I love you!

—#1 Son.

BOTB and Elsa "Catbird" Thompson