in praise of silly gifts

George's gifts yesterday reminded me of others that I've been given. I wanted to share.

    As a senior in high school, I dated a boy who was very serious. He wore what I would later realize was probably a hand-me-down (from his dad) Burberry trench. He was on the debate (and speech?) teams. His wardrobe rarely varied from white oxford shirts (on the crisp side) and very gently worn jeans--his almost-failed attempt to be cool. I'm not saying that he wasn't cool, because he was. He had that lovely, fair-haired (and sparkling-eyed) boy look, the almost (and I think he would hate this?) David Hyde Pierce ethereal face and compact body, combined with the most well-developed mind that I'd ever encountered. Indeed, I had no idea just how very intelligent he was. I had no idea just how much of many things he was until later. Anyway, while we were dating, he gave me these two little wind-up toys, heads with no bodies. We played with them unendingly. I've moved them a dozen times since then, always remembering.

    High school. Band trip to Nashville, just a couple of weeks after I'd met the one who would eventually disrupt my carefully-ordered world. I was miserable, and determined to make miserable the life of anyone who dared attempt to get in my face. My friend Joel was the only exception. My constant companion during the trip, he kept me happy, and, even more importantly, he kept others away from me. The item in the photograph is a picture viewer; our big social event over the week that we were in Tennessee was to visit Opryland, and upon entering the park, an employee took a photograph of Joel and me. We were given the option of buying the viewer as a memento of the day. Despite my protest of 'never wanting to remember anything about the Godforsaken trip,' Joel bought two: one for me, and one for him. It turned out to be one of the best pictures I've ever had taken, and a truly unforgettable gesture from a truly wonderful friend.

    This is a combination of two memories. The first is from high school, starring my friend E. He was all the things that I wasn't. Popular, funny, socially adept, rich, gorgeous, cool.... And yet, for some inexplicable reason, we were friends from when we were in 7th grade. We weren't stay-over-at-each-others'-houses friends, but we were my-parents-recognized-his-voice-when-he-called friends. (They called him "the polite E--" to differentiate from the E-- that I dated, who they called "the other E--." Decidedly not a ringing endorsement for the other E--, who didn't last long enough to matter anyway.) E seemed oblivious to my defects and always treated me with great respect, even when I felt like a social misfit. He continues to do so, and I will always adore him for it.

    One day we were eating lunch together--just the two of us, alone at a table, which still seems amazing to me--and, upon finishing his salad, he reached over and stabbed me in the leg with his fork. The point was not to impale my leg with the utensil, but to emphasize something that he was saying. The effort that this required bent the tines of the fork, which I immediately slipped into my backpack. And kept. And keep, still.

    My best friend in the A2 days was a guy from the educational center. He falls easily into the category of "failure to treasure" [the whole quote is from Prue Leith's Leaving Patrick: "That she had been so blind to his misery and unaware of his leaving seemed to her a crime for which the only consolation was the rightness of the punishment. She deserved to lose what she had failed to treasure."] He asked me, one afternoon, why I was so down. My answer: "No reason to be up, that's all." The next morning when I came in to work, there was a mouse on my desk. An adorable stuffed mouse. For my collection of stuffed rodentia. From my friend Andy, who lived in the city but worked in A2, who went out and found that mouse and brought it back to the office after a long day of work, because he knew what it would mean to me. And it did.

    The last, and most important, of these trinkets is The Shark. He was a gift from a short-term boyfriend who's turned into a long-term friend. The reason for the shark aspect was an apology for a 'shark bite'--I wonder if he would remember that? If you look closely at the photograph, you will see that he's picked up some extras along the way. The ribbons around his, er, waist?, are from a Christmas gift from last year. And what looks like a spear in his mouth is actually a bar pick from the last time that I went out drinking, the night that I drove home (in the wind and rain) more from memory than because I could actually see what I was doing. Not smart, and not something of which I'm proud. But another part of me, like the Shark and he that gifted him. The morning after that drunken night, I scavenged the change area in my wallet at the bakery—custard doughnuts were the only thing that would save me—and found...a black plastic spear. I honestly had no idea from whence it had come, at first. As the morning progressed, and I began to feel more like myself, the memory returned. Financial advice; discussions of vultures preying on the terminally ill; horses and basketball; 'what might have been' with only one lingering glance, and then that overwhelming sense of, 'my God, I love this guy and have for nearly half my life, thank God we didn't fuck it up.'

    Thanks, y'all, for the silly presents over the years. Of course there are many, many that aren't pictured or mentioned here. These few just happened to be particularly memorable and/or photogenic.