The Truth About Gift-Giving

When people say “Don’t get me anything,” it’s best to pay no attention.  They’ll  say “I have everything I need,” but that doesn’t rule out wish fulfillment.  And it helps if we’re mind readers about what they’d really like, if only they’d say so.

I’m going to a birthday party for a man who’s 85 years old today.  Getting a gift for him takes more than a little  thought.  After we’ve lived a certain number of years, most of us feel we own enough things.  In fact, we’ve started giving things away. 

It’s much easier to shop for younger people.  They really do need things and then they want so many things, there’s a world of gadgets they feel they can’t live without.

My birthday friend says “Don’t get me anything.  I don’t need a thing.”  But I think when someone says that, he’d still like to be surprised with a little something.  So I’m paying no attention  and giving him a gift anyway.  Sounds simple enough – but it’s not, because he really does have everything he wants and duplicates of everything he needs.

Over these past few birthdays I’ve about used up every creative notion about gifts for him.  Someone suggested “a gift of time” and last year I spent an afternoon with him over coffee and sweets I baked myself.  But this year’s a big number with a big party and I don’t want to arrive empty-handed.

I finally settled on the one thing that he uses every day – music.  He plays music at the top volume of his Bose extra-special CD player that his daughter insisted he buy.  So I got him a CD.   Oh – and one of those cushioned “kitchen slice” rugs to put in front of the stove.  He didn’t say he needs one, but I think he does. 

Thanks to his grandson,  who got him a DVD player and installed it, I’ve got a head start on gift ideas for Christmas.  

Ó Anita Garner 2009

Too big for the block?

Here’s what I see on a morning walk:   Cars parked on the street bumper to bumper, with barely an inch between them.  Vehicles with their wheels up on the sidewalk where baby strollers and wheelchairs and assisted-walkers fear to roll.

Vehicles clog the small village where I live, parked along every winding lane, every mountain road, many of them parked askew so that this morning as I walk carefully among them, a driver approaches, weaving through the space that’s left, becoming a skilled participant in the getting-to-work marathon.  As more walkers and runners and kids with backpacks  join in on their way to school, it becomes a dodgem game.

How did one small town get so full of shiny metal? 

Well, here’s a cottage that’s been expanded with its garage “repurposed” and its driveway fenced off.  Four vehicles park out front.  Here’s new construction – a giant house going up where a cottage once lived.  It’s being built fence to fence with no yard, no garage and no driveway.  More vehicles join the lineup. 

As I wander, I wonder something else.  If this house is too big for the block, is it also too big for the times?  

I do remember how it got like this.  I participated.  The thinking was, I’ve worked hard and my home (and sometimes what I drive) are part of my very identity.  If I can pay for it, I’m entitled to it.

It’s going to take a whole lot of re-thinking to change that part of our American dream.  We’ll need to figure out a new personal definition of success, ways to find gratification in making better choices.  And we’re just now beginning to ask the tough questions:  Is this home/car necessary?  Is it right for the preservation of the larger community? 

The biggest personal hurdle is getting past what is our right and moving on to our responsibility.  The toughest question is,  just because we can, should we?

Ó Anita Garner 2009

Will power is so overrated.

When  I need to change something, I don’t go looking for some (as yet undiscovered)  storehouse of will power. That’s just wheel-spinning, time-wasting.  Most days I can’t even spell will power.  Instead, I ask myself, how badly do you want this?  I  have  to want to want to before I begin.

After years of trying to harness will power, I find I don’t stick to positive change just because  I should.   Pitiful – considering there’s so much room here for improvement.

I think about change and think about it, talk about it and talk about it, and still I know that until there is desire, no amount of will power will help.  I only accomplish change when the deep-down want creeps in and sticks around for a while.

I once quit smoking for a boyfriend.  That didn’t last.  Went to the gym to impress someone there with my firm body. Hah.  My toned muscles lasted about a minute after he left the class.  (Obviously this behavior was when I was very young and impressionable.) 

Then one day, years later, I really wanted to be a non-smoker, so I stopped.  It was harder without a cheering section, but I wanted to be a person who didn’t buy cigarettes, didn’t carry them around, didn’t bum them from other people.  And that worked.  I’m nicotine-free about twenty years and counting.

Now to the body image thing.  I am looking in the mirror and seeing a whole bunch of stuff that needs changing.  I’ve made changes before, but when the urge left, so did the positive results. This time I want change to last.  So I ask myself, are you really ready?  Do you really want to?  Some days, I don’t even want to want to. But I can feel it in the air – that day is getting closer – the day when I will do it. 

With a history of  both extremely NON-successful habit changes and a few major successful changes (quitting smoking) I know I won’t even try until there is a stirring of desire.  It’s desire and not will power that precedes action in my case. 

So here are my three steps.  Boy how I wish I could claim something more logical, more mature, more focused.  Nope.  That would be the definition of will power.  Instead, here’s what works for me.

Step One:  I have to want to want to.

Step Two:  Then I move to actually wanting  to.

Step Three:  Begin!

Or not.  The or not factor is always the variable.

Ó Anita Garner 2009

Confessions of a magazine & catalog addict

I’m a third generation magazine and catalog addict.  My grandmother loved them.  My mother loved them.  And a fourth generation is now well represented by my daughter.

When I was a child, even before I could read, Mother saved all her magazines and catalogs for me.  I was fascinated by how she treated them like treasures.  Not one was thrown away until it had been read and read and re-read.

I thumbed through her McCall’s, Redbook, Good Housekeeping, Ladies Home Journal, Time, Newsweek, Life and Look.  She had a separate shelf for the big fat catalogs of the time, including Sears and Montgomery Ward and J.C. Penney and Alden wishbooks.  Those we kept forever, even after new ones arrived.  The magazines were eventually passed along to other families.

In later years she added subscriptions to Consumer Reports and lots of trade publications. As I grew away from her home and no longer shared all of her tastes in printed matter, still my reverence for those publications never diminished. Today I buy some magazines at the newsstand, subscribe to others, and am the recipient of still more from friends who pass theirs along. I enjoy them all. 

Some people complain about catalogs but I’ve never considered a mailbox full of catalogs an annoyance.  I welcome the ones that arrive unsolicited and then sign up for others, and pass them along too.  Next to my big blue reading chair right now there’s an eclectic stack.  One by one they’ll go into a box in the trunk of my car to make the trip to my daughter’s house.  She shares them with people she works with and they go round and round from there and end up who knows where.

I like the thought of this widening circle of readers.  When these publications fray and fall apart, as they eventually must, then all of us will have participated in a form of social interaction that some say is primitive, but I find satisfying. 

Sure I can order online without ever seeing a catalog in print, but the items seem different and somehow more appealing when I hold the pictures of the products in my hand and turn the pages back and forth.

As for ideas in newspapers and magazines, maybe it’s an illusion but it seems to me that I even think about things differently when I’m holding onto them in print. 

All this talk about newspapers dying  and magazines getting thinner and catalogs available only online has me worried.  I hope there’s a way to keep them coming.  They’re lifelong friends and I’d miss them awfully if they went away.

Ó Anita Garner 2009

Waiting is too hard.

Jack wanted that bag of cookies. 

His mom said,

“Jack, I told you, we need to eat our breakfast first.”

 He wailed and I mean it was loud, using the full extent of his lung power,

“Noooooo I don’t wanna wait.  It’s too hard!”

 In that small cafe, it doesn’t take much wailing to fill the room.

Jack appeared to be four or five years old.  His mother looked at the few of us gathered in the cafe early one morning last week and shrugged apologetically. 

I stood at the counter, placing my coffee order.  A young man waiting near me said, 

“Poor little guy.”

I nodded and added,

“I agree with Jack. Waiting is too hard.”

The mother heard us and said,

“I shouldn’t have bought the cookies ’til we finished our eggs.” 

But at this little cafe/bakery, decked out to resemble a French bistro, when you place your order, you pay for everything at once, so Jack knew that cellophane bag of treats was waiting.  Who could blame him for focusing on the treat?  Focusing on the treat is about as universal an emotion as I can think of. 

All of a sudden it got quiet in there.  Jack had stopped yelling long enough to say to his mom, 

“I am serious!”

The man and I, waiting for our orders at the counter, both broke into laughter at that, which probably didn’t help. 

Jack’s mom looked at us and smiled and over his now-renewed protests, she  said,

“He’s having a bad day.”

The man said to me,

“I can relate.”

I  walked past Jack, carrying my coffee and newspaper, and patted him on the head. 

He hollered some more and then gave it up and ate his scrambled eggs and toast. 

As Jack and his mom left, he asked her,

“Can I have a hug?”

She picked him up, and with his long growing-boy legs dangling, she carried him out, as he clutched that bag of meringues tightly.  He gave me a smile as they left.

I’ve been thinking about Jack and his bad day ever since.   I envy him.  It would be nice if once in a while wailing out loud in public was considered acceptable behavior for adults.  But since it’s not, at least we still have cookies.

Ó Anita Garner 2009

Sometimes a small rebellion is enough.

You know that feeling you get when someone cancels a plan and all of a sudden you have this unexpected clump of free time?  It’s exciting.  It’s a gift.  You were looking forward to the thing, but once it’s cancelled through no fault of yours,  you’re now looking forward  to not going.

It’s  a slippery slope from there to canceling something you planned for no reason except you don’t feel like it anymore.  At first it felt like a not-nice thing to do, but I have my rules:  

1) I consider whether anyone else will be hurt by my actions.

2) I never cancel at the last minute “just because.”  

3) I only say I’m sick if I’m sick.  

I’m too afraid of bad Karma to mess with that one.      

The first few times I used the “just because” clause, I felt a tiny guilt pang, but that was replaced quickly by a giddy feeling. Most of the time it’s like playing hooky with no consequences.  When it  feels like somebody else is running my life (no one else is – I have only myself to blame for my schedule) all it takes to restore balance is to cancel one thing that’s coming up.   

Still there’s that nagging feeling that a person ought to stick with what she committed to.

Which brings me to Netflix.  One day I returned a Netflix rental  WITHOUT WATCHING IT and when I tore off that skinny sticky strip on the return envelope, plopped the unwatched DVD  inside and closed it up, I felt a surge of whatever that feel-good hormone is.  It was  a small extravagance, but a huge emotional victory.

Here’s the shoot-myself-in-the-foot part:   More than once I’ve returned a selection, only to re-order the same title again later.  Evidently even my small rebellions have a price. 

Ó Anita Garner 2009

The Saint of Search Engines

My files disappear into my computer with great regularity – even the ones I name myself using such explicit language that I’m certain they’ll pop up when I need them.  Wrong.  Whatever language I used is not the language that comes to mind when I search for them.

I have had this trouble going as far back as the Yellow Pages.  I have never been able to quickly decide what the Official Namer Of The Yellow Pages will call, for instance, car repair.  Oh – I say car – they say auto.  And so on and so on.  My only successful Yellow Pages search was pizza, after they created pages in the “P” section for it. Everything else in that book remains a mystery to this day.

Those were the early days – the days of innocent assumption, believing that my own logic was clear and superior and that I categorize the same way everyone else does.  Today I am stripped of that illusion.  Nothing points out differences in thinking more quickly than a searchable  database.  

Recently I was one of several people looking to find a specific CD holder for children’s music.  This favorite CD holder was shaped like a ladybug.  It went missing.  The young owner of the ladybug was inconsolable – more over the container than its contents.  We tried every store we could think of.  No children’s CD holders in friendly shapes.  We went online.  Meanwhile the child decided she might be even happier with a butterfly-shaped CD holder-replacement. 

I typed in every conceivable description of such an item that I could think of.  I changed the order of the words. I found out during this search that they are often called “CD wallets.”  I added that phrase to my searches and kept looking for one shaped like a butterfly. 

An ebay-friendly acquaintance was puzzled I was having such a problem.  He said everything relies on the way you seek.  Duh.  I already know that.  But evidently I don’t speak Search language.  He said it just comes naturally to him and he let loose a stream of descriptive words in a sequence I would never have thought would work.  Meantime my daughter had also asked a Search Engine Specialist who gave her the words that led to the one and only butterfly CD holder that any of us found. She bought it immediately and happiness is restored.

This experience points out again that my thought process in no way matches the way searches are conducted. It doesn’t even match my own thinking from the previous day. This is not a good outcome for a writer who opens the same files again and again.  I name them when I first create them.  Evidently a gremlin enters my brain’s Center Of Logical Response while I sleep and by the next day I am hunting endlessly.  When I accidently locate a correct folder, it’s now called something I find hard to believe.  Who named this file?  I am forced to reprise the old-school write-it-down method.  I open the file, make changes, then write the name of the file on a piece of paper and attach it to the hard copy of the manuscript in progress.

If I can’t even find my own files, with my own quite specific descriptions, is it a wonder I can’t figure out what to call something I’m trying to buy?  Google tries to help by suggesting that perhaps I might try another word. My friend Catherine tries to help.  She says  ask the saint of lost objects.  She’s not Catholic but she speaks to Saint Anthony frequently and she says he helps every time. 

I need a Saint of Search Engines – one who’ll whisper in my ear “Look here.” and point me to which words to type, which items on the pull-down menu to select.  And while he’s/she’s at it, explain who decided  which letters will comprise an entire text message? 

I don’t even try to think like a search engine anymore.  These days I ask everybody, “What would you call that, online, I mean?”  The correct answer is generally the opposite of what I thought.

So my wish has been granted in a way.   Friends who communicate clearly with search engines are my new Search Engine Saints.

Ó Anita Garner 2009

Making the case for girlfriends (If I could talk to my mother today)

I would have girlfriends today if for no other reason than that my mother didn’t, and I viewed her life as lacking in that one very important way.

Of course I think of my own mother this time of year, and I remember sadly the way she died.  ALS is a scary ending.  She was already widowed by then and was lost without him.  Those years before she left us are difficult in memory even after more than a decade.  During that long time of being bedridden, no girlfriends came to visit.

And not a single solitary girlfriend crossed my mother’s threshold in all the years I lived at home.  Her husband and her work were everything to her.  She talked about school chums, but I never met any. 

Maybe her own mother would be the closest she had to a girlfriend, if by that you mean telling each other nearly everything.  But there was more competition there than support and I wouldn’t want  a relationship like the one they had – not with a friend and not with a mother.

At the end of her life, her accomplishments were (I hope) what she had as comfort.  Professional colleagues phoned – singers and musicians and fellow evangelists.  But no girlfriend called.

It’s not because we’re going to die eventually that we need girlfriends.  It’s not just so we have them available for bedside vigils. It’s because of the ways they help us live.

Everything is easier with girlfriends and when the going gets rough, even if a girlfriend can’t make the trouble go away, her presence makes it better.  Boyfriends and husbands and other relatives can be a comfort, but perhaps because the language between girlfriends doesn’t require translation, understanding is immediate.

Not just for mothers, but for all women, I wish us more time to appreciate girlfriends – both old and new.  For anyone who’s lost a girlfriend – through moving or death or attrition of any kind, go find a replacement right away.

Ó Anita Garner 2009

 

Water bottles everywhere

Water water everywhere. We take it with us wherever we go.  First it was water bottles.  And sports drinks.  Then coffee cups.  Now all of these show up at any time. 

I’m a bit amused at all of us acting like we’ll perish from dehydration if we don’t have a water bottle to hold onto.  

I’m pretty sure that if we all worked out vigorously at the gym (who are we kidding about how often that happens?) we could drink enough water there to satisfy our thirst and make it home. 

We could probably get from home to work without liquid reinforcement. Maybe even to the grocery store. Or to pick up the kids.

A few years back, I noticed something odd in church on a Sunday in L.A. in a celebrity-strewn pew.  Several famous people who famously arrived at church in play clothes – one of the attractions of our particular congregation – brought their water bottles right inside.  At first they just held onto them, like a security blanket or some kind of talisman. 

Within a few weeks, more bottles appeared and people opened them and swilled. It was disconcerting. Picture this:

The pastor says,

“Let’s sing hymn number 47,”

and before we can turn to “How Great Thou Art,” bottle caps have to be put back on, bottles placed on the pews, while the pianist plays the introduction.

A guest singer steps up to the microphone and the congregation takes a swig. Heck we didn’t even get a chance to address whether or not we should be applauding the soloists (a big back-and-forth discussion in a congregation of performers) before the issue switched to whether liquid refreshments belong inside the sanctuary. 

Then, sure enough,  coffee cups showed up – the paper kind with the hot-holding band around.   It was a good half hour into worship before those cups were drained and put on the floor.  I saw members of the volunteer cleanup committee chasing them down the aisle later, since once emptied, they tended to roll toward the altar.

Oh yeah, I’ve got my water bottle in the car now. It’s one of the new ones that doesn’t leach harmful stuff.  I’m still congratulating myself for not buying the 24-bottle pack of disposable (except evidently not quickly biodegradable) kind.

My water bottle isn’t a necessity, so is it more of an accessory?  It may miss the mark, since a bottle attached to a hand is not as aesthetically pleasing as, say, a good pair of shoes. 

What does our water-carrying habit reveal about us?  That we’re the thirstiest people in the world?  That we are the fittest, most athletic people around?  Or that today we are super-embracing our need to be nurtured?  

I don’t have an answer. I’m just saying.

Ó Anita Garner 2009

Toddlers rewrite everything.

By Anita Garner

While I drive, the little girl in my life sings me some songs.  In the middle of lyrics about, say, the wheels on the bus going round and round, she tosses in a line or two from adult songs she’s heard.  Songs about heartache or other grown-up feelings.  It’s always a surprise to hear which phrases resonate with her.  A typical re-write goes like this:

“The wheels on the bus go ’round and ’round.

And my heart misses you forever and I want you to come back right now.”

When she’s not singing, she tells me stories.  She draws in a big breath, indicating something dramatic is about to occur, and begins,

“Awe duh sodden.”

It takes a couple of seconds to figure out the words, but her emphasis helps.

Ohhh.  “All of a sudden…”

What follows are a whole bunch of sentences, spilling out in a rush, about three pigs or Belle from Beauty & The Beast, or Cinderella or Spiderman.  She starts off fairly true to the version she’s heard, then changes direction and lays down a new plot point.  Something like,

“And Cinderella stayed in the little house and the wuff couldn’t blow it down.”

Just as she’s hooked me with this twist, she announces,

“The end.”

I teach her songs from my own musical library.  She likes a song to fit into a category.  If you don’t clarify, she’ll ask what kind of song is this?  On the way to school, I say,

“Let’s sing a morning song.”

She’s fine with that.

I start with a tune from Annie Get Your Gun (not too subtly trying to teach  some Broadway tunes)

“Got no diamonds, got no pearls.

Still I think I’m a lucky girl.

I’ve got the sun in the morning and the moon at night

And with the sun in the morning and the moon in the evening, I’m all right.”

She can only take this much before the urge to re-write hits her.  She says she will now sing that song for me. Away she goes,  with an approximation of the melody and a new version of the lyrics,

“I don’t have any jewels.  I’m not happy.”

Terse.   To the point.

Irving Berlin it’s not, but it’s not bad either.  With the pre-schooler rewriting, a Broadway show would be over in about 15 minutes.

Ó Anita Garner 2009