By The Power Of Grayskull!

How old were you when you took your driving test? Sixteen, maybe? Seventeen or eighteen? My brother Tom took his yesterday. He's turning 27 in three months.

Luckily, he passed---can you imagine the humiliation of failing your driving test at 26, after you've been learning (on and off) for ten years? Way worse than failing at sixteen because you drove through a stop sign. Yeah, whatever, I drove through a stop sign the first time I took my driving test, don't make a big deal of it or anything. Come on! It was really hard to see where the line was!

Anyway, Tom passed his driving test, which was a nice little accomplishment to sneak in before the end of 2009, and so to celebrate, my mother made him the world's most awesome cake.

Yep, that's a He-Man cake. Yep, Tom is 26. Allow me to explain.

In the mid-eighties, my brother was obsessed with He-Man, like a lot of little boys in the mid-eighties were. He had bins and boxes full of He-Man action figures, and it was these bins and boxes of He-Man action figures that my mother---furiously nesting in the summer of 1989 before Luke and Susie were born that September---decided to donate to a local orphanage. Tom hadn't played with them in years, she reasoned, so someone else might as well enjoy them. And that was how Tom, my dad, and I returned to Hong Kong from England (my mother was too pregnant to fly so we'd taken the annual trip alone) to a spotless apartment, meticulously-arranged bedrooms, and....a large hole in the closet where Tom's bins and boxes of He-Man figures used to be.

Tom, as you can imagine, threw a fit.

"But you haven't played with them in years!" my mother protested.

It didn't matter, apparently. He loved those He-Man action figures. They were his He-Man action figures. He no longer owned Battlecat, Skeletor, or Man-At-Arms. HIS LIFE WAS RUINED. HE WOULD NEVER BE HAPPY AGAIN.

Tom got over it in about two weeks, but it has taken my mother more than twenty years to stop feeling guilty about throwing out his He-Man action figures. In fact, I still don't think she's stopped feeling guilty about it, and baking the He-Man cake is just another attempt to atone.

Of course, there's probably some lucky orphan in Hong Kong who's made an absolute fortune selling mint condition He-Man action figures on ebay for the last ten years---including some to my mother, I bet, who tried to buy back a few online a couple of Christmases ago---but you know what, that dude doesn't have a He-Man cake and a driver's license, does he?

 Well, alright, then: he probably has the driver's license. Let's face it, he probably got it ten years ago.