appropriate presents.

My baby cousin graduated from college last week.  (No, she's not a child prodigy, nor is she actually the youngest of my cousins, and she's well past the age where I should still call her my baby cousin.  But when she was two and I was ten, we were like -best friends-.  I used to read her books, and drag her out of her crib to come sit on my lap, and I taught her how to walk down stairs without falling.  And she doesn't remember any of this, but I do.)

When she graduated from high school, I bought her a copy of Breakfast at Tiffany's.  (The book, not the movie, although I like them both.)  It had been my favorite book when I was that age, and I remember reading and re-reading it during the summer between high school and college.  In a quirk or coincidence that sounds rhetorical but is actually true, while I was giving her Breakfast at Tiffany's, most of the rest of the family was giving her jewelry from Tiffany's.  And I'm pretty sure she never read the book.

Speaking in very general terms, I believe that you're supposed to give gifts that the recipient would actually want, rather than what you'd want in their place.  But I can't afford gifts that she'd actually want, so I'm going to keep giving inappropriate ones.  I have a few books in mind--The Privilege of the Sword, mostly, and maybe one or two others.  Books about young women who find a way to make their own choices, books about people who find a way off of the path of least resistance.     When she was two years old, the biggest obstacle she faced was the set of stairs separating her from the rest of the house.  Now that she's twenty-two, I don't know as much about her life as I'd like, but I'm going to guess that (whether she knows it or not) the biggest obstacle she's about to face is the weight of expectation.  Everyone else in her life knows what they want from her, where they want her to be going, how they want her to behave.  She'll need to learn to navigate that.  I can't do much to help, but I do what I can, which apparently means I give her books she'll probably never read. 

Comments

[David Moles]

You gotta try, though. My photographer cousin (Moments: Pulitzer Prize Winning Photographs; Bound for Glory: America in Color 1939-43) may be opening a portrait studio in Grand Island, Nebraska, my going-on-20 but still not in college cousin (His Dark Materials; The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay) may be taking trips to the Carribbean as a youth missionary, but my vet-student cousin (The Ape and the Sushi Master; Fire in the Turtle House) has Jane Goodall for her hero and is interning with a sea turtle rescue center. If you're lucky, some of it sticks.

[Jackie M.]

You can post all you like. They're not getting the $10 back.

[David Moles]

You got that $10 because it was easier to pay you off than listen to you trying to justify changing the terms of the wager after the fact, and you know it.

[Jackie M.]

Thank you both for lunch!

[Jessie]

When I was a teenager I got presents from cousins and aunts and uncles that didn't interest me at all, mostly books and music. A lot of them were great when I pulled them out again five or ten years later.