The Gift of The Grunge Guy

Posted on May 11, 2003 in Book of Days Festivals North Carolina

Note: This is twenty-fifth in a series based on exercises from A Writer’s Book of Days. It’s something of a rebellion against the Friday Five and similar tupperware content memes.

Today’s topic: Write about a time you gave someone a present..

Judy. First Christmas. I wanted to give her a gift that was both luxurious and inexpensive. So I went to Belk Leggett’s in my torn-out faded blue jeans. Those blue jeans were my trademark, my protest against polyesters and Izod sports-shirts in an age before grunge became a fashion. Thread-gagged mouths opened at the knees and along the seams– I discarded them when a hole opened in the crotch or the ass. When I wore them, I got offered handouts or questioned intensively before I was allowed to enter restaurants.

I wore them into Belk’s that winter evening with no snow fall, that evening when I skirted the crystal counters and beseeched a clerk to help me select a gift for my fiancé. Something special. Something that would sew up the holes that she had in her mind about me. The clerk overlooked my feigned impoverishment. She suggested the rich gift which was within my budget: a silk scarf. So soft, so iridescent. I turned each scarf like I was flipping the pages in a book filled with reproductions from a favorite museum or photos of a place I had visited such as Firenze. A most tasteful design caught my eye. A simple geometric done in tangerine, dark lime, and lemon — the colors of a California winter to warm the heart of this woman who would be opening it on a white New York Christmas.

I gave it to her just before we both left the state — this was North Carolina, the scene of many sorrows and some joys. I went to Portland, Oregon for Christmas with my West Coast family.

After the holiday, I picked her up at the airport, drove her home, and brought the luggage through her front door. En route, she told me how she loved the present. “What did your mother think?” I asked. “Oh she liked it,” and then Judy told me stories about her mother and the maiden aunt who shared the house.

I did all my duties as I have described when we got there. While she rifled around up stairs, I spied the open white box and the scarf on the kitchen table. The lie could stand no more. When she came down, she confessed. She hadn’t trusted me. What if I had packed a joke gift — “candy pants”, something in latex, or a rubber wonder of the kind they sold in adult book stores? Oh the embarassment! Her mother — who toyed with fundamentalism mainly to irritate people she didn’t like — would have seized upon this and nagged her until she promised to see me no more. “But I love you!,” she cried and I bought it. For the time being.

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Tomorrow’ topic/prompt: I can’t remember.