Gourds and a One-eyed Santa

We drove to Berkeley today. Numenius has been trying to wean his father off Windows and onto Linux and for the week I was in Maine he had set him well on his way, but in geekery there’s always more to be done and so off we went to do it, well I did the driving part not the geekery.

But first we needed lunch, so we headed off to a fast-food Indian on Oxford and then decided we needed to go to Cody’s because that’s what you do when you go to Berkeley, you look at books. N’s Dad received a call on his cellphone in Cody’s from his wife, S, calling from Cape Cod, where she’s gone to give a recital, reminding him to make sure we took the GOURD home, a gourd she had presented to Numenius on Christmas Day (they’re Jewish, mind you) and which he couldn’t fit in his backpack on the train and his bike on account of its girth, so it was sitting on the dining room table waiting to be retrieved.

Sigh.

Some presents are useful, like socks and knickers. Some are fun, like the Herd Your Horses game my niece received last week, which featured mustangs named Dusty and Blaze and ranch horses of all breeds (did you know, for instance, that percherons only come in black and gray?). Others are gimmicks, silly and cheap and just for the sake of making sure someone’s got something in their stocking (these feature prominently in office holiday gift exchanges and their sales before Christmas in the United States amount to many times the GDP of most countries).

And then there’s the present that my friend T calls the crappy gift. Like the one-eyed Santa she received from someone at her office a couple of weeks ago no kidding cross my heart and hope to die, the office that used to be MY office, and if anyone ever gives me one I’ll hand it right back to them and smile and look blank and in fact closely resemble the one-eyed Santa. They called him Cyclops in Greece. I’m working on the LOOK, just in case. But crappy gifts can also be incredibly expensive: they’re just always OFF, by a little or a lot.

The gourd… let’s just say it’s a large spherical decorated object sorry objet originating in I believe Morocco to go with the other large arty-but-not-to-our-taste objects given by Numenius’ stepmother that don’t fit in our house either stylistically or physically owing to the fact that this is a 600-square-foot abode we share with two cats, a 7-inch dobsonian telescope, and a tandem bicycle. S has seen it. She’s been here. She knows what we have in the way of room.

We stopped off on the way home and deposited the giant gourd at N’s sister’s house, swapping it for yet another former large gift to us from S to give to T, with the solid assurance that if she considers this to be a crappy gift she can feel perfectly free to drop it in the back of someone’s pickup truck on the way to lunch sometime.

But we ain’t taking the cyclops Santa.