Weird Gifts

Here’s an added thing I should say about my weekend trip to New York: the most important thing I did there was to see my youngest child, who moved to that nirvana-for-the-young  after finishing  up at a college not 20 minutes from here. His birthday just rolled around again and for the 5th straight year I didn’t get to see him on it. I did send him an immersion blender.I sent him this because one of his big sisters gave me one and I just adore it. (Imagine! No more having to pour homemade tomato soup into a Cuisinart to make it look like food instead of throwup! No more having to ladle various kinds of goop into a blender! You just sink it into whatever you’ve got on the stove and its tiny steel fangs take it from there. (I picture them like the teeth of the bad gremlin Stripe.:-))  Michael does sometime cook for his pals, I know. That’s why I got him all those crystal glasses last December. I saw them at a consignment shop for a song, this set of stemware for 12, a dozen wines and a dozen waters, with the Mikasa sticker still on the bottom of a few. I bathed each one like a newborn baby, swaddled each in the softest cotton and laid them in what turned out to be four large gift boxes -  and never once stopped to think that of course he couldn’t lug 100 pounds of crystal stemware back to Brooklyn on the bus.“It’s Okay, I’ll just keep them here til you come back” I said, and then blushed fiercely for having spoken aloud my dearest hope: that he  will come back to us, maybe, someday.In the meantime they have sat in my dining room, where every night for some 60 seconds they break into tiny song. It took me forever to realize the source of this music which, when the house is hushed so we can hear it at all, turns out to begin just as the Boston-to-Lowell train that passes some 200 yards away. The glasses don’t even know him yet. is it possible that they’re calling to him just the same?  Watch this 30 second video and see what YOU think:[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yaHym4-WNG4]