🎉 Happy B’day Mom! Threw a party at Spencerville’s castle. All pals came. Miss u tons. Imagine cheese pizza & donut towers! Love u always. 🐾❤️ Jasper

Listen to the story here

I opened one eye and then the other, not particularly in that order, to the caramel-colored light of a Spencerville dawn, which is a lot like a Parisian dawn if Paris was exclusively populated by pets with a pension for human-like shenanigans. I sighed, my breath a soft murmur amidst the tranquility, the peace of it all striking me as almost offensive given the day’s agenda. It was, after all, Mom’s birthday back on Earth, and here I was, a small but exceedingly charming Chihuahua-Jack Russell mix, tasked with throwing a celebration in her honor, minus the guest of honor.

“Jasper, my man,” I muttered to myself, stretching each of my four legs with the grace of an understudy in a canine version of Swan Lake, “today, you throw the soiree of the century.”

The concept of time in Spencerville is as loose as the morals in a romantic farce. Still, one adheres to the social construct of time zones, breakfast hours, and the inexplicably universal rush hour. I trotted down the pristine streets, past the Doggy Bagel Deli where the scent of everything bagels loomed like the memory of a past love—intense and mildly oniony.

First on the to-do list was a trip to The Barking Boutique for decorations. I passed Nigel, the beagle with the airs of a British aristocrat sans the accent, and Reo, who painted the world in monochrome with his black-and-white vision. They were in on the caper, wagging their tails with the enthusiasm of tail-waggers born and bred.

“Gentlemen,” I began, “today, we are more than mere dogs. We are purveyors of mirth, architects of remembrance for the greatest human—my mom.”

Their nods were agreement incarnate, solemn as a vow.

The Barking Boutique was a cavalcade of ribbons and hues. We selected the finest streamers, balloons that defied gravity with the same audacity we defied our earthly bounds, and a banner that read “Happy Birthday, Mom,” the sentimentality of which nearly induced a collective doggy tear.

We ventured to Pup-Tastic Pizza for the cuisine, because what’s a party without triangular food segments? I discussed the menu with the chef, a poodle with a penchant for culinary drama.

“No peanut butter, Maurice. The very whiff of it sends me into existential dread,” I emphasized, recalling my peculiar allergy.

“Understood,” Maurice replied, his eyes gleaming with the fire of a thousand ovens. “We shall craft a gastronomic symphony, sans the legume of your discontent.”

Onwards to Doggy Donuts, where the proprietor, a dachshund who defied the stereotype of her breed by being an optimist, offered us her finest selection. “To sugar or not to sugar,” she pondered, which wasn’t really a question because, in Spencerville, sugar was a philosophy, not an option.

The hour of the party approached with the inevitability of a plot twist in a film noir. The Northern Choco Chihuahua Castle, our chosen venue, stood before us, grand and chocolatey, the edifice itself a testament to the canine ability to dream in cocoa solids.

Reo and Nigel decked the halls with the expertise of interior designers born of a union between aesthetic perfection and four paws. The pizzas arrived, stacked like the layers of our complex canine emotions, and the donuts, ringed like the circle of life, minus the traumatic wildebeest stampede.

As the guests arrived, a cornucopia of breeds and temperaments, we regaled them with tales of Mom—her kindness, her warmth, and the way she could make a two-headed sea monster toy seem like a worthy adversary in our gladiatorial bouts of play.

The party, much like a jazz improvisation, found its rhythm. We barked and reminisced, we napped and awoke to nap again. Laughter, or its dog equivalent, filled the air with the resonance of a well-tempered clavier, if said clavier produced woofs instead of Bach.

And as the sun dipped below the horizon, painting the sky with the colors of a well-earned doggy treat, I knew we had honored her, the human who made each tail wag seem like the first, each head tilt an ode to curiosity, each cuddle a novel without an end.

“Happy birthday, Mom,” we howled, our voices a chorus across dimensions, a birthday serenade transcending the cosmic divide, hoping that somewhere, on her slice of earthly existence, she felt the love of a little dog named Jasper, who carried her in his heart like the most precious of bones, buried not in the ground but in the soul.

Share This Story: