Bragging rights

In a change of pace, I’m high fiving myself this morning. Normally I don’t do such things in an attempt to keep my ego in check. It’s not that an ego is a bad thing; it is what drives you and make you want to do your best. It becomes a problem when it starts imposing itself on or interfering with others. So I try to keep myself on a steady keel, proud of the things I’ve accomplished so far in life but maintaining a “So, what have you done lately?” perspective on things. Braggadocio and/or trash talking just aren’t my style.

In a few days will be my second wedding anniversary, though we’ve known each other for almost twenty years and had lived in sin for nearly five years in a de-facto marriage by the time we got around to formalizing it. It’s hard to believe that it’s been two years already; the time has really blown by. We just helped some very good friends of ours celebrate their tenth wedding anniversary this past weekend. For me it’s hard to believe it’s been a decade since I was a part of their wedding; it feels like it was just a few months ago!

I’m a bit of a traditionalist by nature. So as our second wedding anniversary approached, I began checking into what gifts are customarily given for the second anniversary. As it turns out, cotton and china are the traditional gifts. Some of the ideas that I found online for cotton included tablecloths, monogrammed towels, placemats, none of which sounded like creative ideas for a present. Actually, some of the ideas were just horrible. They say it’s the thought that counts, but I wanted to avoid falling into the same gift-giving pit my father often found himself in. My dad had an innate knack for finding the perfect inappropriate gift; his personal favorite was the dreaded toaster oven. I didn’t want to find myself in that mine field as the prospect of sleeping on the couch is not an appealing one.

With cotton striking out I began looking at my options for china as an anniversary gift. When my wife and I were making wedding plans a couple of years ago, we had picked out a china pattern for our wedding. We were both older than the norm for being first-time nuptial exchangers, with both fathers already having passed away, and handling almost all the wedding planning and expenses on our own. It’s not as though our surviving parents would not have helped us with expenses if we had asked, but there comes a point in your life where you just don’t go to your parents asking for money. Even though we had found a china pattern that we both really, really liked, the money was not there to purchase it. One of my wife’s co-workers, though, gave us a “starter plate” as a wedding gift; it may not sound like much, but the price of just that one plate would make most folks scoff at the idea of paying the cost just for a single plate.

Which brings me to yesterday. With just a few days to go before the anniversary I used my lunch hour to hunt for a set of china that I had found online. Normally I avoid going to the mall, but my quest for a set of china took me there. The first store I went to had the set I was looking for, but it was only a three setting set. I’m no expert in place settings but I knew three would not be enough. They had another set with a pattern that I liked, but they didn’t have at least the five settings I was looking for. The saleslady was very helpful and said they could order it, but it would be five to seven days before they received it. The ramifications of being late with an anniversary present were very clear to me; a night on the couch loomed in my future and suddenly that toaster oven was looking like an acceptable fall-back option.

The saleslady suggested checking out another store in the mall for the china pattern they didn’t have, which turned out to be a good call. I found the china section very easily in the second store, and the pattern I had spotted at the first store was also available here and at the same price. With no salesperson immediately available to help me, I began looking at other sets that were on display. A blue willow wood set caught my eye, as my grandparents had a very similar set when I was growing up and often ate dinner at their house on that set. But it was a fifty-piece set of china with a pastel colored floral pattern, a light blue border trim, and platinum edging that caught my eye. It was Noritake’s Rothchild pattern and no matter how many other china sets I looked at, I kept coming back to them. There was something about them that I really liked but couldn’t put my finger on it, but I was soon to find out why. Few decisions in my life were as clear as this one was.

I loaded the box into my van and headed back to work. Given the size of the box, it would have been difficult to sneak into the house much less wrap it up without raising suspicions. So the better angels of my nature decided that I would give my wife her gift a few days early, me not being clever enough to find a way to bring a sizable box of china into the house without being detected but smart enough to know better than to leave it in my van.

My wife beat me home from work, as usual, last evening. She had been in a panic because she thought she lost her cell phone at work. Turns out it had fallen out of her belt clip in our daughter’s bed that morning when she was dressing the child. With her spirits suddenly raised, it was clear the time was right to present her with the china set. I asked her to follow me out to my van, where, after apologizing for not coming up with a more creative way to give the present to her, I opened the side door to reveal the box of china. From her reaction I knew I had chosen wisely. We took the box inside to check out its contents, make sure nothing was broken, and to get an up close look at the pattern. It was then that my wife also noticed something familiar in the pattern, and she went down the hall to retrieve the single “starter plate” we had received two years before. Returning to the living room she held the starter plate up to me; it was the exact same pattern as the set I had just given her. I had unknowingly selected the wedding china we so very much wanted two years earlier. What are the odds of that? Perhaps it was meant to be; had the first store I had gone to had the number of settings in the pattern I liked there I would’ve gotten that set. But they didn’t. And now I’ve given my wife an eight setting set of the wedding china we wanted as an anniversary present, and I couldn’t be any more pleased as to how things worked out--not to mention our daughter wants to use the new china for a tea party.