Imagine if you’d kept every gift you ever made or bought for someone. Imagine if everyone else did the same thing. I’d be missing half my cd’s, three quarters of my books, almost all of my clothing, and almost all of my furniture. Actually, all of my furniture, except my couch. Even my beds and chairs and tables have been gifts. My favorite stuff—my bedroom suit, my dining room table and chairs, the lamp on my bedside table, my cedar chest/coffee table were all gifts to me, and they all have stories. My pots and pans were wedding presents to my parents. There’s not much in my house that wasn’t given to me or to other people. I like it that way.
I’ve spent the better part of seven years working for the church or working for almost free. As a result, I’ve gotten very creative in my gift-giving. Give me a blank cd, poster paper, some markers, and a ruler, and I can make a tailored gift for almost any occasion. And I have. I have made photo albums, happy thought cards, really bad water-color paintings, and cd’s for pretty much everyone I know and love. Even when I go out and buy something, I try to personalize it for the person receiving the gift, except for wedding presents, because the couple already knows what they are getting.
Giving gifts is an important expression of our mutual affection, I think. Granted, we’ve let those traditions get kind of out of hand, if you ask me. I can’t imagine knowing that someone in my family went into hock to give us all fabulous and expensive Christmas presents. I mean, what’s the point? I have every single thing I need. In fact, I’m in the process of going through all my closets trying to get rid of the excess. I think about people who don’t have any excess to get rid of, and I feel guilty. Something like a billion people live on less than $1 a day, so who am I to horde my stuff? Who am I to expect all new stuff at Christmas, on my birthday, or some random Tuesday? Yuck.
I can’t remember what I got for most of my birthdays. I mean, there are some exceptions—like I remember that my grandmother gave me her old high school ring when I turned 13. I remember my mother gave me the ring her parents had given her when she turned 21 on my own 21st birthday. My mom and dad gave me a Ronald McDonald doll that blew a whistle on my 3rd birthday. My mom and dad gave me a portable cd player for my car on my 18th birthday. And that’s really about it. Sounds crappy, huh? Maybe. But my favorite parts of my birthday weren’t my presents. They were my cards. I have them, believe it or not, all of them. Mom and Dad were great about writing notes, letters really, in all my birthday cards, from the very first one down to the ones I still get every year, on my birthday and at Christmas.
Those letters are the best gifts, ever, hands down. Their wisdom and their love are a gift to me every single day of my life. I went through the whole pile a few months ago, and even as a small child, my parents were writing to me about how much they loved me, how proud they were of me, what their hopes and dreams were for me and the world they were passing on to me. Those letters are full of pride, love, and hope. They are worth more to me than any gift I could have ever unwrapped. And even as a little kid, before I knew much about anything, my sweet Momma was putting them away in a box for me. She gave me two presents—she kept those letters for me, knowing that one day I would need them, want them, and understand them for what they were—her and my father’s advice, encouragement, and hope for me. She wrote them, and saved them, twice in the blessing.
I can’t imagine what my life would look like had Mom and Dad just signed their names to the bottom of my cards. Sure, I would have probably kept them and looked over them from time to time. I would have appreciated them, just the same. But these gifts of their words to me are priceless. And in the case of my Dad, they are the words he left to me, just to me, as if he knew that he’d better get it all down on paper, because he wasn’t going to be around for the long haul. He sometimes apologized for not understanding everything I was trying to say, or for being so quick to fix things, or not always listening when I needed him to just be quiet. He reminded me to be brave, called me a treasure, and let me know that he believed in me, even on days when I really screwed stuff up. I go back to those letters, and to the letters my mother still writes me on my birthdays and at Christmas, and I remember that my parents’ love is their gift to me, and my life is a gift back to them, and I want to be good at being that gift.
The gifts you give are sometimes the gifts you want—I always find myself looking over things in a store, and wondering if the person I’m buying the item for will like it as much as I do. Bizarre, but I would never buy something for someone that I didn’t like, unless they specifically asked for it. My mom thinks it a silly habit. She even asked me once why I always make or buy things for other people that I like. I explained that while I know that seems kind of catty and selfish, it’s just how I function. Plus, I like the idea of giving someone a gift that I like, because if I’m buying instead of making, me liking the item in question seems to give it a more personal touch.
Gifts that belong to your heart are another matter entirely. We all bring gifts to the table. Some of them are easy to overlook, to make excuses for, to be shy over. For instance, I love to sing. I sing in the shower, I sing while I’m cleaning my house, I sing in my car at the top of my lungs. I hum in the pool, swimming laps. I like the way my voice sounds. I like that other people like how it sounds. But I’m oddly reluctant to sing out in front of people, even my own family. I am sometimes afraid that I like singing more because of what people say about it than the fact that I’m pretty good at it. I want to sing because I’m good at it and it makes me feel good, and not because of the strokes I get when I do it. I want to give that gift of song for the pleasure of giving it, not for the pleasure of having it received in a way I deem acceptable. That’s the hardest part of giving anything, be it a gift of the hand or a gift of the heart, I think.
My friend Ryan has a gift of listening to me, even when what I’m saying makes no sense at all, or is utter bullshit. When I talk to him, I feel like I’m the only person in the world he’s paying attention to, at the moment. He hears every word I say, and sometimes, he hears the words inside my head. That’s one of the things I like best about him. And he gives pretty stellar feed back. None of the typical “let me fix this for you” stuff. Ryan and I have talked about heavy things, some of the heaviest. We have no secrets from each other, at least I don’t think so, anyway. Not one time, in any of our conversations, even the really hard ones, has he ever said “Stop talking” or “You’re out of your rabbit-assed mind, Rachel”. We don’t rush our thoughts, even when they come tumbling out a mile a minute. I cherish that. I know that our phone calls will be daily, and they will be long and good. Ryan has helped me understand my speech and my silence, and the necessity for both. We agree to speak freely to each other, to not edit ourselves. We agree to sometimes be uncomfortable in our talks, to be silly, to be unorthodox, to talk about big ideas and overplay small ones.
Someone told me once that pain was a gift. That thought really messed me up for a couple of days. Pain as a gift…that’s a hard one to access. Pain is the one thing each of us avoids as much as the next person. Pain is part of the human condition, part of the ultimate payment for eating the apple, part of living with other people, part of dealing with the curve balls life lobs at our heads with wild abandon. Pain is as unavoidable as death, and scares me more than death, if the truth be told. Even the word pain is short and clipped and feels rather abrupt coming off the tongue.
Pain, I suppose is a gift, if you take the tack that the absence of pain indicates the presence of pleasure, or at least the potential for it. Touch a hot stove, and you will feel pain. You will probably remember that pain the next time you even see a hot stove, much less get close enough to feel its heat, and that will maybe save you the unfortunate experience of another burn. Have your heart broken by a tall guy with blue eyes and political ambitions, and you will probably avoid dating political science majors for the bulk of your college career, and potentially the rest of your dating life.
Maybe I’ll accept pain as a maniacal teacher, or a kind of learning tool, but as a gift? I’m still not sold on that idea. To be honest, the idea of pain as a gift has kept me up more than one night, wondering what in the world that idea really means. Pain has taught me many lessons, heart lessons and head lessons. But I don’t know that it’s really a gift, as such. Or maybe it’s like the bedside lamp I mentioned earlier.
This lamp is a family antique. It’s not pretty, at all. In fact, I have long referred to it as “The Ugly Lamp”. My brother and I knocked it off a table once, and cracked the globe. My mother was mortified, and my dad was most displeased, as it came from his side of the family. Luckily, we were able to find a new globe for it, and have it painted to kind of match the horror of green and pansies that lived on the bottom half of the lamp. The Ugly Lamp belongs to me, now. It lives in my room, and oddly enough, does not absolutely clash with my wall color. I hate to admit it, but I have grown, over the years, to grudgingly love The Ugly Lamp. It’s one of those old lamps that was converted from being a gas lamp into being an electric lamp—I like that. It belonged to my great-great grandfather, who by all accounts, was a very nice man. I like that I have something that belonged to him. I like that it lights up my room, and used to light up his living room. I like that it’s heard stories I’ll never know, and now it’s part of my story. It’s a gift that had to grow on me. Maybe pain is like that—you have to sit with it, and let it mellow out, and get used to it, and even at some point, be grateful that it belongs to you.
