His and Hers III
His and Hers is a question or discussion topic relating to marriage that I post every Tuesday or Wednesday. On Friday, my wife and I each write our thoughts on the topic. I invite other bloggers to do the same with their spouses as an exercise in celebrating marriage.
What is the most meaningful gift you've ever received from your spouse?
Curt's response
Two years ago, my wife was preparing to graduate with a Master's degree from her university. During most of her schooling, we had to scrimp and cut corners since we live in an area that has a high cost of living, we had only one income, and all of our savings went to pay tuition bills. She had been working at a school for special needs children to fulfill a hands-on experience requirement for graduation, and they offered her a job for the summer that paid fairly well. Since I had been working a job I didn't enjoy in order to pay for her schooling and help her fulfill her dreams, I thought I was due for a reward and suggested that we use part of her earnings to buy a new iMac.
Mrs. Happy thought that was a lousy idea and let me know it. She doesn't like computers, she had worked to earn this degree, and she would be working to earn this money, so if anyone deserved a reward, it was her. Upon reflection, I decided she was right. I had made sacrifices to support her, but I had always considered it a privilege to be able to make such sacrifices—not to mention that a sacrifice with a reward is no sacrifice at all. We would use a portion of her earnings to celebrate in a way that would reward her for all her hard work.
My birthday falls in a summer month, and that year it fell on a week day on which Mrs. Happy didn't have to work. When I arrived home from work that day I found my wife toiling in the kitchen making chicken pot pie, my favorite dish in the world, when she makes it. She greeted me with a smile, a hug, and a kiss, then led me to the living room. She gave me a birthday gift that turned out to be a Spirograph, one of my favorite toys. Then she told me to sit tight while she got something from upstairs. A few moments later, she called down to me, saying she needed my help with something. As I climbed the stairs, I could hear one of my favorite songs playing. When I turned the corner into the main room, I saw a pristine iMac sitting on my desk, framed with a big blue ribbon and bow, blasting BNL's One Week via iTunes. I believe it's the only present I've ever received that made me openly weep with joy. It wasn't because I wanted the computer so much, but rather it was because my wife had gone to a lot of trouble and expense to get me a gift that she neither understood nor cared about, and all because she loved me.
Mrs. Happy's response
It's really difficult for me to rank Curt's presents, since there have been so many thoughtful, creative, wonderful gifts from him throughout the years. Since he cheated on the movies/music/books list, I'm tempted to just list a whole bunch of my favorites, but I'll narrow it down to one (well, actually two, but I have to mention one to make sense of the other).
Ever since I can remember, I could always look at the front or back of a motor vehicle and see a face—the head/tail lights as the eyes, the license plate (or sometimes a spare tire) as the nose, and the grate or bumper as the mouth. So each car has its own distinct personality or expression to me, and I've pointed this out to Curt on numerous occasions while we're out driving. This car looks mad, that car looks smug, etc. Another one of my little artsy quirks is that I often leave a face made out of food for the waiters to discover after we leave a restaurant table, preferably with the tip if we didn't pay with a credit card.
One Christmas, Curt bought me this little book called Faces, containing photograph after photograph of different everyday objects and juxtapositions of objects that appeared to contain faces. I loved it and showed it to just about everybody I knew; my only problem with it is that I hadn't made the book myself.
Recently, I started making faces for waiters again, and Curt started taking pictures of them, ostensibly to help me acquire material for my own possible photograph book. But this past Christmas, he presented a home-made version of Faces, especially for me, containing photographs of my friends, family members, pets, stuffed animals/dolls, restaurant food faces, and various objects resembling faces. This gift touched me on many different levels. First of all, he put so much time and effort gathering all these photographs from my family and friends (in secret, no less) and designing the layout of the book itself. Also, every person, animal, object, etc., in the book has a very special meaning to me, and having them all together in one little booklet overwhelmed me with joy. Furthermore, the whole idea made me feel truly adored, because it shows that he actually appreciates my creative, often child-like vision of the world. Not only that, but he shares it. I am just so blessed to be married to a man who loves and appreciates me for all that am and want to be!
