There are no generic gifts on my shopping list. I want any gift I buy to be perfect. It must be uniquely suited to the person who receives it. And when I find that perfect gift, I cherish the secret, and count the hours until I can finally give it away.
A good example would be a gift I found for my four-year-old nephews. My mother introduced them to old-fashioned cowboy music, and they adore it. They will happily spend hours singing and dancing to old cowboy songs. Their favorite song is called "The Strawberry Roan". Whenever we need to stop unruly behavior, we either sing "The Strawberry Roan", or grab a book and start reading. Either one will stop them in their tracks. So I couldn’t believe my luck when I found a little book called Riding The Strawberry Roan. It’s a gift that will suit them perfectly. They love reading and this book is about their favorite song.
Unfortunately, finding a perfect gift for anyone is never easy, but finding a perfect gift for my father was almost impossible. If there was something he wanted, he’d usually buy it for himself. In desperation, I joined forces with my sister. She’s the one who thought of tying dozens of balloons to the trees along his driveway. We’d do it in the middle of the night before his birthday so he never knew for sure who was responsible. We knew he liked those balloons because he always asked my mom to take a picture of him with them.
Once on his birthday we filled a basket with different brands of spring water. He asked my mom to take a picture of him with that too, so we knew it was a success. Usually though, we’d present his gift with an apology, and a complaint about how difficult it was to find a perfect gift for him. My father would shake his head, smile, and say "All you need to do is be here". He couldn’t seem to understand how important it was to find a perfect gift.
I lost my father a few years ago so I don’t need to search for a perfect gift for him anymore. But old habits die hard, and a part of me will never stop searching. So I had mixed feelings when I found a note he had written to me before his illness. He asked me to look in the library for a book by a man he had known. It was about a boy growing up in the thirties in Kansas in much the same way that he had grown up in Iowa. I turned on my computer and found it almost immediately.
That book would have been a wonderful gift. My father would have been delighted. He might even have asked my mom to take a picture of him with it. But it wouldn’t have been a perfect gift. After all those years I finally know what the perfect gift is. I figured it out as we celebrated my mother’s birthday without my father for the first time. When I handed her a gift with an apology, and a complaint about how difficult it is to find a perfect gift for her, my mother shook her head, smiled, and said "All you need to do is be here".