Father’s Day is Sunday.
Today, my family is having a get-together to belatedly celebrate May birthdays and upcoming summer birthdays. But the date happened to fall the same weekend as father’s Day.
Every year, I go through the same agonizing thought process of trying to decide what to get my dad. Every year, he asks for the same thing: .308 rounds. Easy peasy. Except I think it’s boring and not all thoughtful, despite my knowing he is a gun enthusiast. I’m the kind of person who starts whopping for Christmas months in advance.
(Point of fact, there is the first of this year’s hidden in my bedroom and the second on order.) So for me to not come up with a brilliant and personally picked gift is stressful. My parents taught my brother and me that all gifts are thoughtful and should be treated as such. Never return gifts and always be thankful to the gift-givers.
Even if the gift is not something one wants. My mother was against giving gift cards, so I have a very difficult time handing those out. Except with tweens. For the life of me, while my son just went through that age, I cannot conceptualize what it is tweens would like. To make matters worse (in my own head, of course), I set a budget and stick to it. So even if I do find that perfect thing I think a certain friend or family member would like, if it isn’t in my budget, I won’t get it.
As of yesterday afternoon, I had done some research on a couple of items for my dad on Father’s Day, and all of them were outside my budget. Back to square one and an imminent, all-day family gathering. While still figuring it out and knowing I will most likely run to the sporting goods department Friday evening for the ammo, I’ve taken a stroll down memory lane.
There was the several years in a row, as a child, I picked out cheap wallets he didn’t need, ties he would never wear and white tube socks Mom said he needed. Then I graduated to hardware. You know, “dad stuff ” that all dads need, like sets of screws and nails, a socket wrench set (of which he already had two) and a Skil-saw blade replacement I doubt fit any of the power tools he owned at the time. I’ve drawn him pictures and made cards for the occasion.
I even once called from Georgia to his favorite Tex-Mex restaurant and paid in advance for the next dinner he would eat there. Even if it’s ammo or a card or a box of Caribbean rice to go with the jerk chicken he likes to cook, in the end it doesn’t matter. The fact that I smile broadly and thank profusely my own child for bringing me a flowering weed from the yard or a pretty (gravel) rock from the road reminds me that these were the same reactions I received when I was a child from my father when presented with a handful of squished dew berries I’d picked from the pasture.
It doesn’t matter what the gift is, despite my getting in my own head about it.
But I’ll still gave a good browse to the store last evening before settling on .308 ammo he asked for in the first place.