Though I completed this chapter of my pop music autobiography (20 songs, 80 minutes, mp3 for download) in late September, a few weeks into my first semester at Georgetown, only now in the more apparent denouement of my existential crisis do I feel compelled to write its intentions, framed in the context of two gifts I received in November.
When Indi greeted me a happy birthday, she told me she hadn’t yet sent out my gift, the Lost Buildings DVD. A copy of it arrived shortly before my pilgrimage to Fallingwater a couple weeks later, and I watched it with Shiella, Roanne, and Jerry in Pittsburgh the night before our tour of the house. When I called Indi to tell her about the trip and thank her for the gift, she apologized that my gift was still on her dining room table as she’d hoped to wrap it with a card before sending. The copy I received in the mail the week before didn’t include a receipt; the return address on the padded manila envelope was the NPR store in Chicago. I wondered who might have thought to order a copy on my behalf, who in the world would know how this slim volume occupied the intersection of my interests in architecture, the work of Chris Ware, and This American Life, know such an object existed, and feel inclined to buy me a birthday gift. It was a short list.
After some talk among friends I might have an admirer, I called my parents and discovered it was from them, something they knew I’d like from consulting my wishlist. I asked if they knew how it ended up there, and in the midst of explaining why I wanted it, my mother asked, Why does it matter? I began to think that document of stuff I want is like an answer key to a test, a series of questions about my taste, interests, and aspirations. The maxim it’s the thought that counts found relevance — though it’s a gift I love and something I plainly wanted, the material possession of the gift did not, as I realized gifts are supposed to, signify an understanding of the receiver by the giver.
The Friday after that road trip, I took lunch with Christina. Waiting for our table at a sofa by the bar, she drank a cup of tea and I ordered coffee. A waiter set a tray with a French press and accoutrements on the low table before us. At a break in our conversation, I leaned forward to add cream and sugar, and in my periphery, I noticed she was leaning too.I want to know you take your coffee, she said.
As it’s Christmas morning somewhere in the world now, gifts seem an appropriate subject. I wrote once that though it’s my spoken ambition to calibrate my existence to the basic unit of a transcontinental flight, my worst-kept secret is that I’d like to land somewhere and know, quietly, sincerely, that I’ll be understood. And it could be my fault that it took so long to feel I was approaching what I wanted: although I gave away the answers, perhaps the questions were too obscure. Maybe nobody really got me because I didn’t give enough of myself.
After the Fallingwater trip, Roanne and I discussed the appearance of our mutual interest in architecture in the conversation that prompted the pilgrimage. I observed that I tend to conduct my relationships around a specific range of subjects and that conversations rarely extend into my other interests. We agreed that we owed it to ourselves to have whole relationships, to let networks mingle and see what happens, to make commonplace these moments we are at once comfortable and complete.
And I guess that was the existential crisis — the struggle to be comfortable and completely myself in an existence where so little of myself was applied, among people who really couldn’t be bothered to appreciate with half my zeal a building, public radio, graphic novels, road trips, and everything else. When I say it’s the thought that counts, I mean the thought is everything — a gift without it is scarcely a gift at all. Sentimental as it sounds, these may be the best we have to offer each other: the curiosity, perception, and memory of how we take our coffee, and the space where, without first asking forgiveness, we can be completely who we are.
To those who celebrate it, merry Christmas.