Gift Season

THIS is the most difficult time of the year people. Gift Season in the Way household. Mother’s Day, my birthday, Father’s Day, my brother’s birthday, and then my mom’s birthday. All in the span of about 10 weeks. A Mexican standoff of soul baring and thinking about someone other than yourself. Brutal on the wallet, more brutal on the brain. Luckily, I don’t have to buy a gift for myself (doesn’t stop me from doing it though), but that little perk is canceled out by having to think of insightful gifts for my mom twice in ten weeks.

Do you realize that if you’re a mama’s boy like me and get your mom something on Valentine’s day, then that means you have to think of gifts for your mother as often as four times a year? Four times. I’ve had women in my life, women who I loved dearly, two of whom I was willing to quit comedy for, and they never got more than three presents from me in a year. Three presents is close to overdoing it. Four? What the heck is somebody supposed to do four different times?

Adding to the difficulty of this particular mission is the fact that my mom doesn’t need or really want anything. It was so easy when my brother and I were kids and the whole family was Dust Bowl poor. Team poverty, by the way, is one of many golden paths to learning to be funny. Cracking jokes together takes your mind off how hungry you are, how irreconcilably wack your tennis shoes are, the fact that you never get to have your own soda when the family goes out for fast food, or how you just spent a whole Saturday night at the mall but came back with no bags.

Those were the days, how does being broke manage to become romantically nostalgic with the passage of time? Window-shopping for hot dogs, rationing pop tarts, learning you could make almost any meat of any age taste good with enough season salt. And dating. Dating poor was the kind of adventure that would make Indiana Jones soil his khakis. Starting as a teen and carrying pretty much all the way through college you’d see a cute girl and want to ask her out, but a part you was always like “Really man, what’s the point? Not like you can afford to take her anywhere. Better hope she likes unshaded parking lots…” Couldn’t afford to chill in the house, because that meant keeping the air conditioner on. If you went on a date with me anytime between 1993-2004, odds are we were going for a nice looong walk, preferably to someplace that didn’t have an admission fee or require more than two dollars of metro fare to get to. We’d walk around the playground a couple dozen times, walk back home, and then I’d walk you to your car, where hopefully you’d be able to find yourself some potato wedges or something on the way home. For giggles a young lady could always count on watching me break into a cold sweat if she asked for anything more than a courtesy cup of water. Yet I’d still think she was stuck-up if I didn’t get a goodnight kiss at the end, “hey what is this “hug” foolishness? No you can keep all that baby, I will NOT be patronized…” Real mature Michael, show her what she’s missing. And for the record, don’t judge or pity my social squalor peoples; have it on good information Richard Pryor wasn’t buying women full glasses of water for women back when he was in Peoria, Illinois either.

Anyway, when the family doesn’t have much disposal income, gift giving is pretty easy, almost magical; it’s all a win. Provided one can scrape together a couple of bucks, the boy who gets his mama a new four-slice toaster is a bloody hero. Not just within the family, but the community at large. The preacher mentions you in the Sunday sermon, and all the city councilmen want to get their picture taken with the “toaster boy poster boy”.

That’s not the case anymore. My mom’s a professional woman with her own budding accounting practice. I’m a young starving comic so I’m still going through my frozen pizza and courtesy cup of water phase, but my parents, they eat lobster on weeknights now. Can’t hate. Life in America had better get more luxurious for a couple when they don’t have kids to feed or put through private school anymore; otherwise somebody in that house has picked up a nasty opium habit. But all that relative prosperity leaves my brother and I in a dilly of a pickle, because anything mama doesn’t have at this point, she probably felt wasn’t worth spending money on.

Gets extra tough gift shopping because my mom doesn’t really have much in the way of hobbies. Why? Because when you’re trying to raise a family and put kids through private school, all while hovering tantalizingly close to the poverty line, you don’t have time for hobbies. You don’t have time for anything that doesn’t clean the house, earn you accounting credits, put food on the table or help pay down that tuition. The closest thing my mom has to a hobby is gardening, and that to me still looks too much like chores. Sometimes I think about the sacrifices my mom’s made to get my brother and I to this point, it gives me nightmares thinking about how much I owe. If she asked me to put a bullet in an army doctor’s head, I’d have to pull that trigger and then help arrange the evidence so it looks like that woman from her job she hates did the killing. So needless to say I need to come correct at gift season?

The pressure’s mounting on this one, feels like a pop final exam “How clairvoyant are you about your family?” Have to think something good for this one. Got my dad a watch for Father’s Day, got my brother an electronic drum set for his birthday, didn’t realize I was inadvertently setting the bar crazy high for mom’s birthday.

Feel the need to come up with something jaw-dropping here, just short of a vacation package to Korea or Europe. Mother’s Day was sincere, but not my strongest showing. Got her an iTunes gift card and some CDs. In retrospect, am amazed and grateful she didn’t call me an unimaginative “hack” and show me the door. Could’ve gone that way too; one year when I was about twelve I messed up and gave her an iron, she flipped out like a football coach, didn’t talk to me for thirty-six hours (note to guys: do NOT, EVER get a woman anything related to chores as a present, unless you otherwise can’t find the nerve to tell her you want her OUT of your life, forever).

Really running short on ideas this time. This lady has been my mom now for thirty years. Means I’ve probably now thought of at least 80 different presents for her since first getting allowance money. Each time I try to top myself; at this rate by the time I’m 50, will probably be buying her trips to Mars with Kelsey Grammar as her tour guide. One year I thought I was clever, got her a bonsai tree, that sucker was dead in a month. Why? Because bonsai trees don’t help you earn your accounting credits. One Christmas I got her a home pedicure tub. It’s still in the box to this day. Basket of exotic chocolates, win. Box of Asian teas, win. DVD on amateur photography, FAIL. Gardening wagon filled with assortment of her favorite candies, big big win. This is the open mic of gift giving; if I buy her something she uses, I’ll know it waskiller. Keep your fingers crossed peoples, the clock is ticking. If things get much tighter, am just going to pretend like we’re poor again; somebody’s getting a new “new toaster” and a gift certificate to Marshall’s.