Best gift you've given

I think the year I found a clock that had been up in each in their last three houses over more than 20 years in the basement, only because it had stopped functioning. Was fortunate enough to be in a city that had a noted clock repair guy.

When I took it in, he said "Don't. Buy another one."

I knew what he was saying and usually, that's the correct move. I asked him to restore it.

When he asked for the surname, he got the message. The brand of the clock is also our family surname.

He had a good story to share for a while, and I think my parents enjoyed that one. My mother immediately found somewhere to put up again. The house streak is now at six.

 

I gave my son life.

 

Follow up. She LOVED it.

 

That absolutely kicks ass. Mom in pinstripes! Tell her I said have a blast.

 

As for me, the best present I have ever given (I think) was to my wife this past Christmas.

I got her a MacBook Air. She had been talking about them for months. She had stopped at Best Buy I don't know how many times to browse. She even went in a couple of weeks before Christmas and looked, calling me to say, "You'd be proud. I looked but didn't buy." At which point I was thinking to myself "I'd kick your living ass if you did," but controlled the smirk.

Anyway, throughout my career in the newspaper business, I never had that kind of money to toss around, and more often than not, her Christmas presents were something special I'd made -- not Bible school project ornaments or something; I'm a better than average carpenter. Now that I have seen the light, and the cash, I was bound and determined to actually BUY her something super nice that she wanted.

She had no idea I had gotten it up until the point of unwrapping the present Christmas morning. I'm pretty sure I was more tickled seeing her expression than she was getting the computer.

 

I was fortunate enough to be able to pay off the mortgage on my wife's house right after we got married.

It was nice for both of us to have a fresh start with no debt.

 

For Christmas several years ago, I gave my girlfriend a Maryland ACC championship souvenir football.

 

Paid off my wife's $5K Visa bill after we got married, which she had run up for truly worthy reasons (not buying bullshit stuff). I'm a pay-monthly, no-balance guy and I wanted us to start clean. Flushed the emergency fund, then worked my ass off freelancing to replenish it.

But my better gift-giving story is this: Dated a gal a few years before I met my now-wife. This gal loved Chilly Willy. Y'know, this li'l cartoon bastard:



Anyway, I go to a fancy art store in a major market to find an original framed animation cel from one of Chilly Willy's cartoons. Think it was $500 or so. So Christmas comes, we exchange gifts. She loves the art cel. I open the box she brought me. It's a glass decanter. I'm living a bachelor's life in a bachelor's apartment, I don't drink brandy and she gives me a no-thought, impersonal, something-to-throw-loose-change-into glass decanter.

Beginning of a swift end.

 

For me, probably time.
My mom was diagnosed with terminal breast cancer in the fall of 2001. My dad quit his well-paying contract gig with Microsoft the following summer to take care of her full-time. I came home every weekend both to spend time with them and to give relief to my dad. In the spring of 2003, I quit my job and moved back home to help take care of my mom in her final months, plus to be with my dad so he wouldn't be lonely in the aftermath.

When my older niece (my brother's first child) was born in 2000, I gave my brother a copy of the then-new Don Henley "Inside Job" CD, since it included the song "Taking You Home."
Speaking of that niece, she turns 16 in a couple of years. I'm hoping to give her my Honda (which I got from my dad last summer) as a Sweet 16 birthday gift.

 

Is this in your basic, sardonic "I fathered my kid," way? Or, is there more to this? I feel like maybe there is, and that I've missed it in previous posts?

 

I gave Buck a kidney

 

The best recent present I gave was to my 9-year-old goddaughter, who is studying math arrays -- never even heard of an array but apparently it's one of the new techniques in math. She showed me what it is but I'm still having a difficult time wondering why they're using this technique. How does it make learning better, or faster, or better suited for the real world?

Anyway, I'll correct her arrays every now and then. The word "array" has become a little inside joke now, one of our bonding things. So for one of the nights of Hanukah I made her an "A-Ray of Rays" -- pictures of famous Rays. She loved it. Still brings it to me every few nights so I can quiz her on the Rays. She brought it to school for Show and Tell.