The Gift of Giving

What and how to give? Our field expert wraps up the subject

By Deborah Salomon

The art of gifting is a gift — but one that can be learned. Or at least improved.

The whole Black Friday shopping extravaganza gives me the willies; this puzzles, since my list is short and usually complete long before Turkey Day. I do enjoy watching people shop, however, while questioning their motives. Are the gifts required? Are they governed by price? What catches the eye? Do children even know about toys that don’t come doubled shrink-wrapped in a box?

I gladly share my gift giving and receiving experiences, which apply not only to Christmas, but birthdays, anniversaries and other occasions. Some you won’t like.

When in doubt, be practical: I’ll never forget the Mothers Day when I begged the family, please no flowers, overpriced restaurant dinner or bathrobe. I really, really needed a good vacuum cleaner. With three small kids and a shaggy dog I would use it every day. They were appalled, which meant whatever they planned suited them, not necessarily me. To this day, when I tell the story, people express sympathy. Rubbish. I loved that vacuum cleaner.

Listen: I guarantee that sometime during the year your recipient will drop hints. “I burned another skillet — just can’t seem to find a good one.” I exchange small gifts with a high school friend in Atlanta. She travels in the dinner-party fast lane, tells me she loves to bring an unusual wine. Lo and behold, I found some adorable wine totes in the supermarket — even an insulated one — at about $7 apiece. Three bags made a lovely gift.

Never “surprise” your honey with something expensive but difficult to return: My daughter’s car was in dire straits so I gave her mine, figuring I’d keep the terminal one going, somehow. It died. I was stranded for weeks. Then one night my husband drove up in a new car, which sent me over the moon, except it was bottom-of-the-line sub-sub-compact, two-door, no radio or AC. So sweet, but for the same price, I could have found a better deal.

Dollars don’t count: We were invited to a 50th birthday party. I was instructed to purchase a gift that looked its substantial price. Instead, I suggested digging up some old photos (mainly sports teams), having them blown up (with funny captions) and laminated to fiberboard. My idea got shot down, in favor of a cashmere sweater. Well, didn’t somebody else do a similar collage that was the life of the party, at half the price.

Vow today to shop all year: Last summer I saw a wooden box, about 7-by-10 inches, with the letter M carved into the top, on a clearance shelf, for $6. I filled it with old-timey candies from Fresh Market and gave it to my “M” buddy. She was thrilled! Haven’t you walked through a store — any store — and spotted a beach towel, a scarf, a fancy flashlight, a college or professional team T-shirt, a canvas grocery tote, a golf head cover, a pottery coffee mug usually on sale, all right there, no Google or Amazon required? Then you can get up at 2 a.m., stand in line, stampede the doors and grab that obscenely huge TV, go home and enjoy it because your shopping’s done.

Make a dream come true: One gift-giving experience stands out. My father loved watching sports. From a desperately poor background, he didn’t just pinch pennies, he hugged them. In the mid-1950s, we were the last on the block to buy a TV. Twenty years later, my father resisted replacing it with color because, “Color hasn’t been perfected.” Football, boxing, baseball remained monochromatic. I knew the real reason. So on his 80th birthday I contacted a Zenith (“The best,” he believed) dealer and arranged to have a color model with remote control delivered and installed. I could hear the smile in his voice when he called. “Y’know, I think color’s been perfected,” he said, above the roar in the background.

Suffer the children: I pity them their surfeit of riches. I grew up in New York City, in the 1940s, as World War II ended and post-war prosperity reigned. Manhattan was a magical place, a secular cathedral to Christmas for people of all faiths. The animated department store windows along Fifth Avenue; the Rockettes at Radio City Music Hall followed by the Nativity Pageant with real donkeys; gorgeous shopping bags from Lord & Taylor, B. Altman, Best & Co.; real chestnuts roasting over real fires tended by vendors in raggedy gloves. Ice skating at Rockefeller Center followed by ridiculously expensive hot chocolate and almond bear claws at the café surrounding the rink. But my happiest memory was knowing that P.L. Travers had published a new Mary Poppins in time for Christmas. I could hardly wait. For the first few days I flipped pages, glancing at illustrations, to preview the joy. Then I read it at one sitting, again and again, until memorized.

I hope today’s children can tear themselves away from Kindle and similar electronic devices to savor — nay, worship — a book the way I worshipped Mary Poppins.

Please find one for the child on your list. Minimal gift wrapping. No shipping, handling, downloading or charging. Season-spanning. One size fits all.

Pure magic in a format that although not new, has definitely been perfected.  PS

Deborah Salomon is a staff writer for PineStraw and The Pilot. She may be reached at debsalomon@nc.rr.com.

Confessions of a Nostalgic Nose

You can talk to the hand. However, the nose remembers all

By Deborah Salomon

The most underrated sense, I believe, is smell.

Remember Al Pacino as a blind veteran dancing the tango in Scent of a Woman, rated among the best all-time film sequences? Unable to witness her beauty, he inhaled.

This opinion results from losing olfactory competence 20 years ago, after a bad cold. It happens, my otorhinolaryngologist said. Don’t argue with a 21-letter specialty. I can’t smell a pot burning on the stove. A bit gets through if I put an orange right under my nose. Fresh paint doesn’t bother me, nor would sitting behind a high school boys’ basketball bench. But I do miss meat loaf, split pea soup and . . . let’s see what else my nose recalls.

Cider mills: Apples permeate October in New England. Nowhere is the aroma stronger than at a cider mill, where whole apples are crushed into a spicy-sweet nectar. You (and the yellow jackets) can smell it half a mile away.

A maple sugarhouse: Early spring nights in Vermont mean boiling freshly collected sap until the water evaporates, leaving pure maple syrup. Forty gallons of sap boil down to a gallon of syrup. Farmers boil all night in sugarhouses — rough cabins that glow against the receding snow. The maple smell is so strong, so delicious you can practically pour it on pancakes.

Lily of the valley: When I was a child, Coty’s Muguet de Bois was a popular fragrance. My mother had a cardboard cylinder of body powder; I would put it near my nose and feel soothed, happy. The powder is still available online, as a vintage product, like Tangee lipstick. Wouldn’t do me any good now.

What happened to new-car smell? I see sprays that provide what new cars have lacked for decades. My last fragrant auto was a spiffy ’72 Olds Cutlass convertible with white leather upholstery. Subsequent Subarus and Toyotas arrived fragrance-free.

Garlic: Here’s the story. My mother-in-law despised garlic. The very word made her shudder. She was an excellent cook without it. Then I took over the big family meals, aware of but not bound by her prohibitions. I remember a holiday back in the day when a standing rib roast didn’t cost more than a root canal. Mom walked into the house, exclaiming, “What smells so good?” followed by “Everybody says your roast beef is better than mine,” from inserting garlic slivers deep into the meat, then rubbing the outside with a cut clove. I never confessed.

A newsstand, preferably on a Manhattan corner, near the subway entrance: Stacks of fat Sunday editions, abetted by comic books, Fleers Dubble Bubble gum and cigars, emitted a smell I can feel, but not describe.

As a teenager I drove often from Asheville to Durham. Approaching Valdese, the smell of bread from the Waldensian bakeries dominated the air. I can close my eyes and smell it now.

Not all odors are good or even acceptable . . . like the time a mouse crawled behind the wall of built-in-bookcases, and died. I never knew how he got in but I know how he got out and how much I paid the carpenter.

But some scents are sublime: the fuzzy head of a freshly bathed baby. Great coffee percolating (drip and single-serve appliances not the same). Rain, on a summer afternoon. A wood fire. Steak searing on a hot charcoal (not gas) grill. And the one that breaks my heart: my daughter Wendy, running through the airport arrivals concourse, arms outstretched for a hug, whispering in my ear, “Mmmm, you smell like mommy.”

The holidays loom, announced by roasting turkey with cornbread-sage stuffing, followed by balsam and spruce boughs. In my kitchen, where deep-frying never happens, the heavy, sticky smell of Hanukkah potato pancakes sizzling in oil soaks into clothes, hair, upholstery and everything else.

Look, a working nose isn’t vital, unless you’re a bloodhound, but smell does enhance other senses while imprinting the brain and stimulating memory. I am absolutely sure that this very minute you are making a mental list.

So sure I can almost smell it. PS

Deborah Salomon is a staff writer for PineStraw and The Pilot. She may be reached at debsalomon@nc.rr.com.

Wrong Number

How I found my way to the deadbeat Scrooge list

By Deborah Salomon

I am the hunted. Help! Please help!

I stand prey to denizens of faceless (though not nameless or voiceless) robots who wait until mealtime, or the evening news, to offer me hearing aids, funeral insurance or, most recently, an extended warranty on a car I traded in three years ago.

What happened to electronic record-keeping?

These robots, obviously, aren’t MIT computer whizzes. They aren’t even smart enough to hack into the DMV.

I am warned of their spiel by a blip when I pick up the receiver followed by a pause while I am plugged into some voiceboard, whatever that is. 

Then the cheery-sounding gal or gent greets me with a generic name like Kate Jordan or Bill Perkins. The voice never has an accent — heaven forbid, that might turn off prospects in a different region. At least I can chat about the weather in Mumbai when I call Dell or Time Warner.

After introducing him/herself the robocaller proceeds to “Howareya’ doin’ today?” at which most prospects hang up. Instead, I answer, “Horrible. An alligator just bit off my foot,” to which the voice replies, “Well, good. Now if you’ll just give me a minute of your time I’ll show you how . . .”

When robocalling and other nuisance telemarketers first raised their ugly heads it was possible to call a central agency to unsubscribe the number they got from — go figure. The last such agency I tried had been disconnected, a recording announced.

I assume AARP provides information to businesses targeting retirees. But really, who would buy insurance for “final expenses” over the phone?

Cells were safe (especially private numbers) until providers started annoying their customers with in-house sales pitches. Caller ID isn’t much help. Sometimes just a city name will pop up, or that same phony moniker.

Similar solicitations now arrive by email where a Jane Doe — more likely a Mike Stevens — appears on the “from” line and something like “a voice from the past” as the subject. Many have attachments, begging you to “see how the gang looks now,” the gang being Sammy Scam, Vera Virus … and Charlie CRASH!

Even worse, a bogus message from your bank or credit card company suggesting a dire circumstance.

The most difficult requests to ignore come from veterans’ and police/ firefighters’ benevolent associations. At least you’re speaking to a real person, which makes saying no harder. Once scammed (by a lightbulbs scheme) always suspicious. So I reply, “Please mail me information about your organization, including its tax-exempt status. You accessed my phone number, so finding my address shouldn’t be difficult. Then I’ll consider a modest donation.”

Never got one single follow-up.

However, I regularly receive hand-addressed envelopes of greeting card or invitation dimensions that do, in fact, contain an invitation to a sales-pitch event.

Then, watch out what you browse online because the products will show up forever on your home page, an annoying reminder that you haven’t purchased them yet. This reveals your choices to whoever uses your computer. Uh-oh.

Door-to-door solicitations have all but disappeared. I’m almost glad to find students with overpriced chocolate bars ringing the bell. At least they’re not selling quinoa or kale.

Suppose I do donate. Practically overnight my mailbox overflows with requests from organizations that have purchased a list with my name on it. Imagine the wasted paper and postage. Must I be hounded by nature groups just because I subscribed to National Geographic, for my grandsons?

What to do? An anonymous donation means no tax receipt, which is better than the alternative. But I experience horrible angst during TV spots about abused animals and sick/starving children with insects crawling across their innocent little faces. I can’t stand it. I want to run to the bank, empty my checking account, cash in my IRA and CDs. Except past donations have triggered impassioned pleas to become a regular contributor, perhaps monthly.

The most disappointing attack occurs after canceling a magazine subscription. This happened with The New Yorker, after more than 50 years. Just too expensive. I even wrote them a letter, explaining why. Big mistake. The deluge of offers and reminders made me feel like I had abandoned a sick parent. But I stood my ground, which seems to have had some effect, since I’m still receiving articles online.

Let this serve as a public statement: I am that ghastly senior citizen living on a pension, Social Security and a good part-time job. My “final expenses” have been pre-paid. I don’t need a hearing aid. I am sympathetic, but wish the government (to whom I still pay considerable tax) would take better care of police and firefighters. I regularly donate to children’s causes and animal relief — I even buy chocolate bars, if the kids have bittersweet.

But that’s it. Hounding won’t help. So please, transfer my name, address, email and phone number to the miserable old deadbeat Scrooge list.

After that, “Have a nice day!”  PS

Deborah Salomon is a staff writer for PineStraw and The Pilot.
She may be reached at debsalomon@nc.rr.com.

School Daze

A learning experience we all share

By Deborah Salomon

I’m not one to skip down memory lane unless it leads somewhere — in September, obviously, to long hallways lined with classrooms and metal lockers.

Back to school: a marketing phrase that exposes layers of emotion. Amazing, at an age when many recollections have begun to blur, school retains IMAX clarity, a permanence drawn with a stick in wet concrete.

Why? Young minds are eager, receptive, soaking up experiences like eggplant soaks up oil. I remember my fourth-grade teacher and classmates better than college professors and sorority sisters. Within these halls I also identify the roots of lifelong fears and pleasures.

The elementary school I attended bore no resemblance to Norman Rockwell’s. We wore uniforms. Teachers didn’t accept apples, and nobody got detention. My mother, a high school math teacher, had high hopes for her only child. So she chose a private girls’ school deemed “progressive” by 1945 standards. I loved it. Classes were small, about 12; French conversation was taught in Grade 1 (great idea); and faculty moved students along as they saw fit. At the end of Grade 2, the headmistress — a formidable dowager with Edwardian bosom, lace collar and a gray nape bun — decided with some tutoring during summer vacation I could take on Grade 4.

The tutoring, implemented by my mother, boiled down to multiplication tables. I resisted, resentful at having to memorize numbers while other kids played outside. She employed tactics I’d rather not mention. During that summer I envisioned, come fall, the entire fourth grade devoted to multiplication when all I wanted to do was read. To this day, flash cards give me hives. To this day, also, I’m wobbly on 12-times. Furthermore (a dark secret), I couldn’t tell time because my parents owned the world’s first digital clock, with wheel-mounted numbers that clicked into place every minute. I was terrified, absolutely terrified. Things worked out, I guess. I only remembered the clock incident when my grandson, spoiled by Velcro, had trouble tying his shoelaces.

By junior high (now called middle school) I lived in a different city on a different planet. Nobody cared about multiplication. Everybody cared about whether you wore bobby sox rolled up or down. The arbiter was the girl with the most sweater sets and the coolest boyfriend.

High school . . . much better. I was a cheerleader when our basketball team won the state championship. Latin made sense. Algebra proved way easier than 12-times; plane geometry, a snap. My English teacher meted out inspiration but took no prisoners. I finally got the sox thing right and had a few cool boyfriends. Then, senior year, my friends’ older siblings, home for Thanksgiving, bombarded us with warnings about college: impossibly difficult, tons of work, heartless instructors, killer exams.

“Just you wait,” was the message.

Again, I was terrified not only by the academics, but because for the first time in my life I would have a roommate. With eight siblings, this was the first time in my roommate’s life that she had only one. She took advantage of the quiet by studying, writing letters and praying. I admired her dedication. We hardly spoke.

Roomie and I split at end of semester. Let’s see . . . what was her name?

The dire warnings about workload guaranteed panic. Worse, I got lost changing classroom buildings on Duke’s two campuses. I misplaced a textbook. Then, after midterms, it hit me: I can do this. Not easy, but possible. I’d come this far, right?

I was an active participant during my children’s school years — mostly as provider of rides, lunches, pocket money, the right jeans. Kids hung around our house for the big, friendly dog and homemade cookies. Pushover mom could be persuaded to drop everything, pile a gang into the station wagon and head for the movies.

September brought relief tempered by envy. Ah, the thrill of flipping through a new textbook, the woody smell of freshly sharpened pencils, the joy at finding the right cartoon-character backpack.

But, unlike some old-timers, I don’t yearn to return. School has changed. Fonzie’s a senior citizen hawking reverse mortgages on TV. Police patrol the grounds. Cursive is hieroglyphics, soda fountains are extinct. Hoodies and “jeggings” replace sweater sets and bobby sox, and every phone multiplies by 12.

This September, however, my interest is rekindled. Back-to-school means law school. After graduating with honors from an accelerated pre-law college program, my grandson will commence studying for his chosen career.

The very idea terrifies me. Not him. He has times-12 down pat and reads an analog clock. He can tie his shoelaces, drive a car, keep a steady girlfriend and make a grilled cheese sandwich. Laptop loaded, apps in place, roommate selected, apartment rented — he’s good to go.

Far, I hope.  PS

Deborah Salomon is a staff writer for PineStraw and The Pilot. She may be reached at debsalomon@nc.rr.com.

Travels With My Plant

Wherever I’ve lived, a geranium in a pot welcomes me home

By Deborah Salomon

One geranium, pink or red, in a clay pot.

Wherever I have lived, for more than fifty years, this has stood near the front door — a symbol, but of what? Geraniums in pots or window boxes remind me of photos and paintings of the French countryside I long to visit. The look is simple, elemental, classic, right.

When giving directions, I’d say, “The house with the geranium on the stoop.” This worked since neighbors chose pre-planted urns or hanging baskets.

My geranium owns a backstory.

The first I positioned by the door of an ugly house on an even uglier street where for fifteen summers I kept my eyes on the pot when walking up the front steps, to soften the blow. Those geraniums were always red, never salmon. My mother preferred concrete urns overflowing with salmon-colored geraniums; my dislike for the color was complicated, mirroring our relationship.

Several moves later found me in an adorable cottage, in a small but perfect Vermont city overlooking mountains and lake. The front stoop barely had room for the pot, but we managed.

Geraniums are annuals; they don’t overwinter indoors. In September I would bid farewell to the bloomed-out plant, dump the soil, wash the pot and, come spring, start anew.

I can’t remember why I brought this one inside, sometime in the early 1990s. My cottage was built against a hill, which allowed an above-ground basement. A previous owner had made the basement into a studio apartment with kitchen area and bathroom — convenient when the kids and their friends visited, otherwise unused.

The apartment door opened onto a wooded backyard. Beside the door was a covered area where I kept lawn furniture and planters. Except something about this clay pot with its spent stem made me set it on a basement windowsill.

I closed the café curtains — and forgot.

Those years are still a blur. My daughter, Wendy, died in 1991, changing everything; sunlight looked different, food had no taste, I couldn’t bear music, especially the folk songs she played on her guitar. I craved invisibility. Except I had an exhausting (and visible) job as features/food reporter at a good newspaper. Work must continue.

Winters are long in Vermont — long, cold and dark. Snow covers the ground from Thanksgiving until late March. That first winter without her was especially cold and snowy, which reminded me how much Wendy loved fresh powder. An accomplished ski racer, at 14 she trained with the Canadian National Junior Ski Team at their summer camp, in Argentina.

By April the sun was higher, stronger, illuminating winter dirt. I lugged the mop and vacuum to the basement, pulled aside the café curtains to open the window and let in fresh air.

There, on the sill, shrouded with dust, stood the forgotten clay pot. Miracle of miracles, from the withered stem erupted a green shoot, with two tiny leaves. From bone-dry soil a germ of life, sensing spring, had burst forth.

Neglected, against all odds . . . survival.

“It happens, sometimes,” a gardener friend told me.

My feelings were intense. I wanted to document the experience. The short column — barely 400 words — was the first in a weekly series on life’s vagaries that ran for more than a decade.

I have endured other losses and moved three times since that spring. In the Sandhills, with sun, heat and rain aplenty, geraniums grow into bushes. This year, mine — purchased at the farmers’ market — is a stunning purplish-pink, quite an Impressionist image with Lucky, my velvet-black cat, lying beside it.

This desire for a solo geranium in a basic clay pot remains strong. Was the tiny green shoot a sign that life survives circumstance? That a single flower can mitigate ugliness? I’m not a believer in mysteries or miracles. But I do know this: When I drive up and see that bloom, no matter locale or climate, house or apartment, I’m home. PS

Deborah Salomon is a staff writer for PineStraw and The Pilot. She may be reached at debsalomon@nc.rr.com.