Creativity and a New Year’s resolution
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I’m an annual source of irritation to my wife and two daughters when they ask me what I want for Christmas, and I come up blank.
I’m not trying to be difficult. I simply can’t think of anything. My life is already full of unworn shirts and unread books and exotic gadgets I haven’t yet figured out how to use. They don’t understand that just contemplating these gifts in my closet or on my nightstand gives me pleasure. This concept is especially difficult for my wife, who puts on new clothes, assembles new gadgets and gulps new books immediately after receiving them.
But Christmas was different this year. Creativity took over.
My daughters’ joint gift to me won’t be stashed in a closet. At the moment, it is on a living room end table, where it will probably stay, a splendid and accurate model of the airplane I first soloed in. The U.S. Navy N2-S primary trainer, circa 1942, known with inordinate love as the Yellow Peril, had two wings, one propeller and two cockpits.
To young people who visit our home, it will look like an artifact of the Civil War -- or maybe the War of the Roses -- with no hint of its frisky nature as a superb plane to stunt, all the way to the inverted spins we had to recover from to get out of primary. It rests on a pedestal, which is where it belongs.
Sherry also got creative.
She gave me a sweater, a very special sweater with a history. It belonged to my brother who died 10 years ago. I coveted his tennis racquet , but his wife gave me one of his sweaters instead.
My brother and I found a place to be close his last few years, so wearing his sweater felt good to me -- so good that after 10 years it had developed large holes in both elbows and numerous small holes scattered about. But I wore it constantly and couldn’t give it up, which was painful to my wife, who has this thing about holes.
The sweater disappeared in November, and I strongly suspected she had removed it from our lives, a dastardly act she emphatically denied. That’s where matters stood until the sweater reappeared in a box under our Christmas tree. Brown leather patches cover the elbows, and there’s not a hole to be found.
I suspect having it fixed cost her more than a new Cashmere, but I wear it gratefully every day with my brown pants with the frayed cuffs. I see her eyeing them for next Christmas, which is OK with me.
Oddly enough, I also got into a creative mode with mixed success. I have overflowed storage space, both inside and outside the house, so I’ve been excising reams of files and photographs. Because I wrote frequently about my family, I found many shots done by professionals to illustrate those articles, so I started memory books for my two daughters with a batch of old pictures I newly captioned. Maybe I just passed along the job of throwing the pictures away, but the girls seemed pleased.
Creativity didn’t operate quite the way I expected when I directed it at Sherry.
Two years ago, I came up with an idea for her birthday that blew her away. She loves flowers and buys them frequently at the supermarket, so I found a florist willing to put together a $10 bouquet for me twice a month and gave this to Sherry as a lifetime supply of flowers. The bemused florist found all this charming, and went along with it. The only hitch was that I had to go get them every other Friday as part of my deal, but the florist wasn’t far away, and this added a personal touch.
I can’t remember for sure when the plan began to fall apart. I would guess that it worked smoothly for about six months.
Then things started to come up, and I’d forget and try to make up for my forgetfulness and get back in sync for a while. Then we’d go away and break the rhythm and I’d forget to start it up again and feel badly. And so it went, limping toward oblivion.
So I had another great idea last Christmas. Since this was the best gift I’d ever given her, it seemed logical that the second best gift would be to revive the flowers with a new dedication that would guarantee delivery on schedule, ad infinitum.
I put all this in a note in a card I gave her, along with her first bouquet of the new plan, when we were opening our gifts. She read the note several times, and it was hard to pick up her reactions until she told me it was a sweet and thoughtful note and a wonderful idea, as it had been the first time, but....
Then she saved me from myself. She said we should learn from the first experience that the discipline required becomes a kind of tyranny for me that we would just be setting up again -- only the guilt of failure would be greater.
So why not make it easier on both of us by just buying her flowers when I feel the urge? And that, of course, is where we are.
It occurred to me between the football games I’ve been watching all week that I should have figured this out for myself. This episode reflects rather exactly the reasons why I never make New Year’s resolutions. They simply set up a framework for failure. Like the flowers, the things we would resolve can be approached when the urge hits us, without the guilt of welshing on a promise.
If this demeans the importance of discipline, so be it. You just have to choose when to be disciplined.
Like right now, I’m highly disciplined to watch USC and Texas have at each other. And I’ll be wearing my brother’s sweater.
* JOSEPH N. BELL is a resident of Santa Ana Heights. His column appears Thursdays.
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