Greetings, Sincerely

by PIERCE G. FREDERICKS

PIERCE G. FREDERICKS, a Williams College graduate, is a free-lance magazine and television writer living in New York City.

MY WIFE is an only child, but the same cannot be said for either of her parents. Because of this profusion of aunts and uncles, the song about “It’s somebody’s birthday today” was never righter than around our house. I wish I could join in the spirit of the second line, which, as I remember it, goes “Somebody’s happy and gay.”

I’ve never known whether all the Uncle Leonards and Aunt Trudes were happy and gay, because most of them live in California and the rest in England. The Californians even have a subspecies called Uncle this and Aunt that who are really just close friends. Of the California branch of the family, that is.

In my wife’s family — which I guess you could describe as composed of loosely knit strong bonds — all these people have to be sent birthday presents of what I can only call the damnedest kind. The thinking seems to be this: you should want—or maybe, should want — to send a gift to a relative; therefore, the gift must be something indicating that you really did want to send it and went to a lot of trouble over it. The sentiment is not only more important than the gift but must always be in excess of its dollar value. Thus, a $5 item must be accompanied by twice as many indications of thoughtfulness as one costing $2.50.

To a man who used to send a runner to Saks with $10 instead of $5 when wishing to indicate t wice as much affection, this doesn’t come easy. It may not be quite fair, but J sometimes feel that while the Lord may be partial to a cheerful giver, my wife’s relatives prefer a suffering one.

Now the 8th of next month is Aunt Anna’s birthday. (There is, unfortunately, absolutely nothing hypothetical about this example.) We will be reminded of the event by my wife’s mother telephoning to say she knows how sorry we’d be to overlook it. She will further say that since the gift will have to travel to California, we’d better have the necessary sincere welling up of affection sooner rather than later. These calls have a way of coming early in the morning and we present an attractive domestic scene: my wife sitting morosely on the bed in slip and one stocking while I busy myself with my shoelaces.

While dawdling with the laces, however, I will be going over the situation in my head. It is well known that Aunt Anna is batty about a fairly expensive brand of Turkish cigarettes, but, because it is well known, we are not permitted to satisfy the craving. The really thoughtful gift, you see, satisfies only cravings which the recipient never knew she had before. Cigarettes would clearly mean that we’d just thoughtlessly slung an old ten-dollar bill down in an old inconveniently located cigarette store. Besides, Aunt Anna may have been pretending this craving in order to ease other people’s gift problems. Examples of such counterthoughtfulness are common in my wife’s family, and there are times when old-fashioned Balkan politics seem frank and open by comparison.

These pitfalls in mind, I turn to my wife.

“All right,” I say, “what did we send her last year?”

“I don’t remember,” my wife says.

“Let’s send her a picture of the baby.”

“We can’t do that! We did that last year.”

Repetition of gifts, of course, is second in gracelessness only to catering to known desires, but if you have a trained mind these things can be worked out. In this case, it can be argued that the baby is a year older, children change rapidly at that age, hence another picture is not the same present.

The basic gift settled, we are free to concentrate on the real problem: how to surround the photograph with sufficient indications of the appropriate sentiments. First, trouble equaling thoughtfulness, it is mounted in a sort of candy box of colored papers. Since my wife is what my mother calls “ very artistic” (a phrase Mother uses to describe anyone who doesn’t need an interior decorator to help select linoleum) this is largely her department. I simply mutter “Green paper — pink paper — what difference does ii make?” in a helpful way.

Once the picture is well buried in what looks like a plan to redecorate Rumpelmayer’s Restaurant, we come to “writing a little note to go with it.” This has to be quite elaborate because Aunt Anna knows that my wife is the artistic one, and if the gift was merely decorated and not lavishly inscribed, she would conclude that only one member of the family had put her back into it.

For me to write even “Happy Birthday, Aunt Anna” legibly is hard, but my wife feels nothing carries quite the conviction of something that rhymes. The only verse of mine which ever attracted much attention was one beginning “There was an old man from Yongdok” — you had to slur the second line to make it scan — but my wife is convinced that only a distaste for her relatives keeps me from doing more in this direction.

Last year, I started by producing: —

My wif’didn’t think that was quite long enough. Besides, she pointed out, Aunt Anna might believe that th’ picture really was a snapshot and not a professional job and feel hurt. After some time with a rhyming dictionary, I offered her a new version.

“That’s good,”I told her. “It gets in the birthday present to him we forgot the thank-you note for.”

“I don’t think she’ll know what ‘natal’ means,” my wife said.

I asked, I guess sharply, if sh’d rather I changed the n to an f.

“Anyway,” she said, “it doesn’t sound sincere — as if you really meant it.”

“Do you really mean it?”

“That’s not the point—I’m not the writer in it the family.”

I dare say it was the prospect of facing my real feelings about Aunt Anna which caused me to change the subject. I was inspired to ask my wife if she knew when the 8th was and she said, of course, day after tomorrow.

“It suddenly occurs to me,” I replied, “that you’re wrong.”

She consulted the evening paper and she was. The 8th was tomorrow.

“Now you have to rewrite it,” my wife wailed. “You’ve got to make it sound sincere and you absolutely have to get something in about why the present’s late. And it’s got to be something believable, too.”

As I say, Aunt Anna is having another birthday next month. I stand ready to pay best prices for any phrases rhyming with “baby’s picture.” Don’t bother to submit “rabies’ stricture.” I’ve already thought of that and there’s nothing I can do with it.