A Grandmother's Gift

"Each of you should give what you have decided in your heart to give, not reluctantly or under compulsion, for God loves a cheerful giver." (The Bible, 2 Corinthians 9:7)

Of the incidents from my early childhood that I still vividly recall one relates to my maternal grandmother. This happened when I was little—around half a century or so ago—and so I'm not sure if my account is entirely error-free but maybe it went something like this:

My maternal grandparents were returning from America, where they had spent some time with their son (my mother’s brother), who lived there. It was rarely that we got to meet these grandparents of ours because we lived in a distant city, and in any case we weren’t very close to them emotionally. It so happened, though, that we were vacationing in the city where their flight was to land and so were able to be present when they arrived from their holiday abroad.

I can’t say I was enthusiastic about meeting my grandparents, especially because I knew that my mother didn’t get along well with her mother. I had learnt from my mother that my grandmother treated her shabbily when she was a child, and my mother felt bad about this even decades later, long after she had married my father and shifted out of her parents’ home. Now, I know it is said that one shouldn’t speak ill of the dead, but my grandmother really was quite a cold-hearted person, and so I suppose my mother’s grouse against her wasn’t completely baseless. The fact that my grandmother wasn’t overly warm towards us children only confirmed what my mother felt about her.

Arriving from the airport, my grandmother began unpacking her suitcases. Now, in those days, when overseas travel was a rarity and when things made in America were hard to get yet much valued, people looked forward to the gifts that their America-returned relatives might bring for them. I suppose I was eagerly awaiting a special gift as my grandmother began opening her bags. But guess what she took out and gave me as my gift (with much flourish perhaps): a bit of paper with a religious icon printed on it and inserted into a cover that was fitted with a nylon strap. A plasticky religious badge!

Yes, this was the gift I got from my America-returned grandmother that day! And, it was also perhaps the only present I ever got from her as a child. It looked like the name tag that office employees dangle around their necks these days, the sort of thing that a religious organization might give away for free to visitors. I don’t suppose my grandmother had spent even a cent on it—for one thing, it was likely a freebie that she had picked up from somewhere, and for another, she wasn’t, as far as I know, at all enthusiastic about any religion other than her own, and so it was unlikely that she would spend money on anything that represented another faith, which was the case with this badge.

But the story does not end here. Handing me her gift, my grandmother said to me, “We had got a nice present for you, which we had placed at the very top in the suitcase, but we were bringing so many things that we exceeded the permissible limit, and so, the airlines authorities made us remove some of the stuff we were carrying to lighten our luggage. Since your gift was right on top, we had to remove it and leave it behind.”

"Wow, Granny, that must have been some really big and fancy present that you had so sweetly thought of giving me but which you oh so reluctantly had to part with on the insistence of those pesky airlines' folks! And, oh, how very thoughtful of you to have placed the special gift you had got for me right on top in the suitcase so that I would be the very first person to get their gift from you! Granny dear, you really are so very kind, and you love me oh so very much!": Perhaps this is what my grandmother wanted me to think at that moment.

The guileless child that I then was, maybe I did believe my grandmother’s tale, though of course now I know better. It seems to me likely that my grandmother just did not care for me enough to spend any money on a gift for me. At the same time, though, she might have felt duty-bound to give me at least something as a present (after all, she was returning from America, of all places, and what would people say if she gave me nothing!)—and the religious badge she might have picked up for free at a hotel or museum came in handy for this purpose. Whatever else one might say about her, my grandmother was rather clever, wasn’t she?

Although I long harboured unpleasant memories of my grandmother, I think I can say I have forgiven her and can now see how very human she was, even in the way she treated her little grandchild that day, on her return from America, with the gift she gave me and the fanciful tale she conjured that accompanied it. In fact, I can now even sit back and have a good laugh over the entire episode! After all, the whole thing was, in a certain sense, really quite funny, don’t you think!