The Gift Not Given

Do you have something around the house that reminds you vividly of another person, possibly someone who’s not in your life anymore? I have this odd little thing:

It’s a stoneware sauce or gravy server (I guess), about 4½ inches in diameter. On the surface, it’s fairly useless…but in fact, it’s absolutely perfect for melting butter. And that’s how I use it, with some frequency.

Quite a few years ago, when I was in graduate school, one of the students who was  a cohort ahead of me announced he was getting married. He invited me and my husband to his wedding. Nordley, his name was.

Well, this was a shade flummoxing. I hardly knew the man; had never sat in a classroom with him, and I’d never even heard of the prospective fiancée, much less met her. I had exactly zero idea what to get for a wedding gift, but clearly a wedding gift was expected and required. They were not registered, as far as I could tell. And I didn’t have a clue to their taste.

I wandered in to an upscale gift shop where all the young lawyers’ wives obtained their stylishly upscale stoneware, stuff with names like Heath and Dansk and Arabia. Nothing seemed appropriate. Nothing. Went into a jewelry store that carried crystal and silver tchochkies, the sort of useless dustcatchers people gave me as wedding gifts. Not an inspiration in sight. Stumbled through the department stores. Niente. Finally I went back to the gift shop, resigned to having to buy something stupidly expensive for people I didn’t know and who I suspected issued  invitations to passing acquaintances for the sole purpose of furnishing a household with wedding gifts. Since this search took half the afternoon, I began to resent the whole thing.

There in the gift shop, my eye fell on this little bowl. Perfect: unusual enough to please academics and cheap enough to fit my mood. Grabbed it, had it gift-wrapped, and went on my way.

I think it cost about ten bucks, which in those days would buy a week’s worth of groceries. So, for what it was, it was kind of expensive. But it wouldn’t break the bank. And it was different.

A couple of weeks later, along came a new announcement: the wedding was off!

No explanation was given, or if it was, it wasn’t offered to those of us who barely knew Nordley and didn’t know the prospective wife at all. I took the thing off the shelf to return it to the store. But…

On second thought, I kind of liked it. And in those days I was averse to asking for money back. So I unwrapped it, stuck it in the kitchen cabinet, and there it resided.

It’s resided in a number of kitchen cabinets over the years. It seems to be unbreakable, and it comes in very handy whenever I want to melt butter or heat some small amount of something, whether in a microwave or on the stove. Occasionally I’ve used it to serve some fancy sauce to guests.

Every time I use that thing, I think about Nordley. He was the sort of guy we’d call a nerd today: kind of small and slender, balding, probably a little older than the rest of us. ABD, he was treading water in one of those exploitive jobs universities call “instructorships”: at the Great Desert University, these were low-paid full-time positions that you could hold until you finished the dissertation. As soon as you completed the degree, though, you were out of a job. Some people hung on in limbo like that for years, until the university established a deadline for completing the Ph.D.

Nordley  managed to escape, though. He got a job at a community college in Monterey, California.

If you have to teach freshman comp for the rest of your life, you could find lots worse places to do it. 🙂

Don’t know what became of him.  A while ago, after the Internet made it easy to stalk people, I looked him up and did find a mention. Now there’s no trace of him on the Web, anywhere. Presumably he’s retired or died. Or both.

Nordley lives on, though, in the gift that I never gave him.