Miss Manners^®

DEAR MISS MANNERS: Our wedding cake has been sitting in our freezer for three years. I don't know what to do. On our first anniversary we took a trip. I totally forgot about it until a couple months later when I was looking for something in my freezer and it dawned on me. I am too superstitious to throw it away. We have a great marriage, but that cake is taking up so much room in our freezer. Please help me.

GENTLE READER: No, thank you, that's very kind, but -- oh, wait. You didn't mean help you eat it. Whew.

Unlike a good marriage, a good cake does not improve with age. Miss Manners has never understood why it is assumed that food can be used as a souvenir.

Yet there it is, and you can't just toss your wedding cake in the garbage disposal, splattering symbolism all over your kitchen. Miss Manners suggests inviting your relatives or members of your wedding party to dinner, and bringing it out with great fanfare. You will need another dessert, as they are not likely to eat it, either, but they will push it around their plates, leaving you with crumbs to throw out and the sense that you did the cake proper honor.

DEAR MISS MANNERS: I know a lady who will be turning 75 soon. Her 94-year-old mother offered to have a birthday dinner in her honor at a local restaurant.

The purpose was really twofold. First to commemorate the birthday, and second to get all the children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren together at one time to celebrate the event. Reservations were made and people were called and invited.

Three days later, the lady decided that she didn't want the party, but would rather have the money that would have been spent so that she could travel.

I believe that her elderly mother's intent was to use the opportunity to get the family together for a sit-down dinner, which seems to be harder and harder to do these days. Based on a conversation that I had with her mother when she called canceling the dinner, it was obvious that she didn't originally give the lady a choice of the money or the dinner, the lady just came up with this on her own. What is your opinion of this lady's actions?

GENTLE READER: That this lady certainly keeps up with the times. Looking upon the generosity and kindness of others as convertible into spend-able income -- preferably without the nuisance of having them around -- is, Miss Manners assures you, a relatively modern form of rudeness. In the era in which your acquaintance was growing up, she may have been just as ungrateful and callous toward her mother, but she would not have expected to profit financially from doing so.

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DEAR MISS MANNERS: My colleague and I are perplexed about a set of napkins she has purchased. In one corner of each napkin, there is what appears to be a buttonhole.

Neither of us has ever seen this on a napkin, and we were puzzling over what its use might be. A horrifying possibility occurred to us -- could it be that the manufacturer intends the buttonhole to be used to secure the napkin to the uppermost button on a diner's shirt?

GENTLE READER: Miss Manners is sorry to inform you that your horrified guess is correct. Contrary to what our parents and grandparents told us, the world was not perfectly behaved before our generation came along and spoiled everything. The napkins were incorrect then, and there were also sloppy eaters who were indifferent to that fact.

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DEAR MISS MANNERS: I am a writer, and occasionally my publisher sends me on book tours. I am struck by how many people, fellow travelers, expected me to tell them all about myself simply because we happened to be sitting together on an airplane, in a restaurant or in a waiting area.

"What are you doing here in Orlando?" they ask, and if I give a friendly but vague and brief answer, they continue to ask questions until they have my whole life story out of me.

It happens over and over! I was almost -- but not quite -- rude the last time, but it didn't work anyway: A gentleman in a restaurant ended up demonstrating to me his new Palm device, including taking out the folding keyboard and explaining how everything worked.

I've tried subtly aghast facial expressions; I've answered, "I'm here on personal business." Nothing works.

I'm a friendly individual, but often, especially when traveling, I like to be alone and anonymous. Once you tell someone you write novels, they have to know everything about you, and then they quite often have to tell you all about themselves. Do you have any advice for me?

GENTLE READER: You already have all the advice you need, from your publisher and television and radio hosts. All you need to do is to turn it upside down.

As Miss Manners trusts they have been telling you, you should never give monosyllabic answers to on-the-air questions, but use them to chatter on in an animated fashion. In-the-air questions may be handled in the opposite way. If your replies are all "Yes," "No, and "Huh?" (that last asked rhetorically before you excuse yourself to return to your book or nap), your rating as a conversationalist will plummet to the point that you will have to be dropped.

DEAR MISS MANNERS: My parents taught me to write thank-you notes, and so I am prompt about sending them when my friends or family send gifts or act as my host. However, as I have grown older I have noticed that friends of my own age are much better at sending thank-you notes to me than my own elder relatives. I don't think age should be the excuse, because one relative I can think of who is diligent about thank-you notes is 92 years old! (My mother, of course, always sends me thank-you notes.)

I have read lots of letters in your column from people who complain that their younger relatives do not send thank-you notes. Ironically, those are the relatives who do not trouble themselves to express their own thanks to me.

My uncle says that as the younger generation, I am subordinate to them and they have done so much for me that thanks for anything I may do for them isn't really necessary.

Is there some rule of rank that if the gift is from a younger relative, you don't have to send a note? I know they have done a lot for me, but I would like at least an acknowledgement that my gifts were received. (A lot of my relatives live out of town.)

GENTLE READER: No, there is no such rule. Politeness is not a commodity that can be dropped once you have filled your quota.

However, there is a restraining order out against your uncle, barring him from making etiquette pronouncements. Miss Manners knows, because she just issued it.

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