One of the weirdest gifts I have ever received was Cooking for One.
I was in what I call The Wilderness Years, those years just after undergrad, before law school, when I lived alone, worked too much, ate too much, and grew so much. I was living in a rambling old Victorian cut up into four apartments, the other three of which were occupied by people I am now sure were on felony probation. I had no TV, but spent my time cooking, eating, reading, and writing. I was lonely, but part of me enjoyed the solitude. It was the time in which I learned to be alone, to be my own company, a skill that serves me well today. It was tough, but I could feel it making me tougher. I could have gone home every weekend to visit my parents, but I wanted to have this experience.
I didn't think much about how others saw my situation, until one Christmas when my weird aunt gave me a cookbook - Cooking for One. What the hell kind of gift is Cooking for One? Why not give me Eighty Ways to End It All? COOKING FOR ONE?? Why not call it You're Pathetic, but You Gotta Eat. Or maybe the point was 'cook for one, fat-ass, because it appears you are eating for three.'
Probably she just thought hey, she's one, she needs to cook, and it can be hard to cut down recipes to just one portion. I am, after all, famously bad at math. But I kind of don't think so, because the gift didn't end at Cooking for One. There were also the cheesecake pans. Pans. Plural. So I've not only got Cooking for One, subtitled forever in my mind as Just Kill Yourself. Now I have two spring form cheesecake pans along with it. It's so confusing and surreal. Who puts those two things together? I still don't get it.
Though Cooking for One and the cheesecake pans top the list, there have been other strange gifts over the years. Once, my whole family received a thumbnail sized portrait of my uncle's family - not one for each of us, but one tiny picture for the four of us to share. Another year, my brother and I received manicure sets. I was nine; he was four; neither of us cared that much about our nails. I've received earrings before my ears were pierced; bedroom shoes made to look like Santa and Mrs. Claus; a silver cup with a 'B' etched in it (not my initial); a tiny spoon with a map of Malta in the bowl, and a mug with a wheat field scene that proclaimed me to be A Wonderful Uncle.
When I think about these gifts today, though, they say much more about giver than they do about me. The manicure sets say "I have no idea what kids like," while the Santa slippers say "I don't really care what Onederwoman likes." The 'B' cup was a wedding gift from an elderly woman I've known since childhood, and it says she wanted to give me something nice, but didn't have the money to buy something new - the yellowed tape on the box gave it away. I love that cup, even if everything drunk from it does taste like pennies. The Uncle mug tells me my high school secret pal, an exchange student from China, likes a wheat field scene. And the spoon from Malta has a special place in my heart, because my brother brought it for me as a gift when he returned home from his first deployment with the U.S. Marine Corps.
When I was younger, less secure in myself, what people gave to me in both a figurative and literal sense gave me a feeling about their thoughts on me - like Cooking for One. As years pass, however, what people put out into the world seems to have less to do with me and more to do with how they perceive life, whether they are concerned enough about others to carefully select what they offer up, or if any old pair of Santa slippers will do.
But I still can't explain those damn cheesecake pans.
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