A birthday gift.

The purpose of a gift is to bring joy to the recipient. That was certainly Sheila’s intention when she lovingly prepared her grapenut pudding, chilled it in to perfection in Corningware®, and gave it to her husband to bring to the office my birthday. She knew how much I liked it, and how much pleasure it would give me. What better gift than that made with one’s own clever hands?  Of course, she could not have anticipated the meager storage space in the company refrigerator and how much trouble I would have to go through to clear a shelf large enough for the huge casserole dish, tall can of whipped cream and stiff paper bag. Sheila could not have foreseen the difficulty of transporting the weighty glass dish home via a crowded bus on a hot afternoon, nor imagined that the potholes along 8^th Street would cause the loose glass top of the casserole dish to rattle incessantly during the entire journey. Nor would she have expected the bag to begin to rip at the seams, making it necessary for me, already weak from fatigue, to hold the dish in my arms while I waited in the blazing heat for a second bus. No, Sheila could only fantasize that moment when I would savor the spectacular flavor of her concoction and share it with others, after which I would  congratulate myself on having such an outstandingly thoughtful friend who was also a inspired creator of grapenut pudding. Imagining this joy, she could not have considered that enormous dish had to be washed and laboriously lifted into the strainer. She could not have predicted that I would feel it necessary to wrap it in newspaper to prevent a recurrence of the noisome rattling, then search for another bag of equal or greater strength, then carry the heavy dish to the bus stop, and later to the office for fifteen blocks along Ponce de Leon Boulevard from the Miracle Mile, all the while endlessly shifting the cumbersome casserole from hand to hand, while the jute straps of the shopping bag’s handles cut deeply into my palms. No, none of this would have entered the cheerful little thoughts of Sheila as she stirred and mixed and sang a little Irish tune while she happily prepared a birthday gift which she knew in her heart would bring nothing but joy to the lucky recipient.