The Gift

Monday night. I've just sat down and ordered food when Ashley comes over and sits down beside me. Ashley is a 22 year old cutie (I almost said cutie-pie … sorry) who, whenever she sees me come into the place, hollers "Wayner!" Sometimes when I go to lunch at Applebee's my company’s GM goes with me, and when Ashley sees us she hollers "It's Wayner and Wayner's friend!" It tickles him so much that he's begun calling me Wayner. Look at what you started, Ashley.

Ashley sits beside me at the bar and orders a burger. Someone walks by and says "What are you doing, Ashley?" Replies Ashley, "I'm eating dinner with Wayner!"

I find it hard to talk to Ashley. I was never that young. In fact, I was born older than she is now. That may not be a fair thing to say, as I don't know much about her, but she seems to breeze through her days with the typical concerns of the very young soul: what bar to hit, where to party, where to party next, and you get the picture. I like Ashley and would like to know her better. But that's a conversation that will be hard to get a grip on. There's a gulf between us greater even than our difference in years, which is considerable. Sometimes she invites me to do something with her, and I wish I could. But her world is one I left lifetimes ago. I can't be a part of it, not even for a while. So we make small talk about her job, her plans to celebrate her friend's birthday, the quality of our respective meals (I should have ordered what she ordered). I leave early tonight, but I do enjoy her company. It was nice of her to join me for dinner.

Tuesday night. Tonight I screwed up. Or maybe I didn't. I'm really not sure, and that might be the worst of it. Probably no one but me is thinking about this, and that must say something about me.

It's Terry's birthday, and I decide to get her a gift. Of course, the first thing to decide is how much to spend—a little or a lot. She's not my wife, she's not my girl friend—and I fear that if I spend very much on a gift, it might make her feel weird, like I'm hitting on her, or suggesting something. I'm sure these gals get their share of that. To Terry, I'm just a bar customer. I only want to say "Happy Birthday" and give her something to unwrap, no big deal. I decide that a small, inexpensive gift would be most appropriate, would make her feel that my birthday wish was just that—a birthday wish—not a signal of an ulterior motive or unspoken expectations. So I buy her something, and I wrap it up, and I put it in one of those little decorated bags, and I take it to the restaurant. When she comes over to the bar, I wish her a happy birthday and I hand the bag to her.

She unwraps the present and thanks me for it. Almost immediately I start feeling that this is a mistake—I should have gone for the bigger bucks type of gift. Terry has done nothing to create this feeling, but I'm suddenly sure that she is disappointed that it was a small gift and furthermore I'm coming off looking like a cheapskate. I thought I was doing the right thing, but suddenly I realize it was the wrong thing. I realize that no gift at all would have been better than the small gift I gave her. So the scenario is—I try to do the right thing, it seems like I'm doing the right thing, I think I'm succeeding at doing the right thing, and suddenly, at the moment of doing it, I realize that it's not the right thing—in fact, it's the wrong thing. I go home kicking myself, and I kick myself the rest of the evening.

The next day at lunch I tell Joan about my social mistake. "You're being awful hard on yourself," Joan says. Maybe she's right, but I don't think so. It may not have been a major social blunder, but it was definitely some kind of failure. I don't really want to go back into Applebee's and see Terry—that's how bad I feel about it. I had a chance to make someone I like feel good and all I did was make them feel like, well, this is all you're worth. That's the way I see it. But maybe Joan is right—maybe it was no biggie, maybe it didn't matter. In quantum physics there is a concept called contrafactual definiteness. It means there is no way to prove that if preceding events had been different, the result would have been different. For example, say you leave work early and wreck your car on the way home. You could say, "If I hadn't left work early I wouldn't have wrecked my car." But contrafactual definiteness says you have no basis to say that—it's an unprovable assertion. If you had left work at your usual time you may still have had a wreck on the way home.

I'm going to apply contrafactual definiteness here. An expensive gift might have been inappropriate, might have made her uncomfortable. Like, "What is this guy thinking, getting me this kind of gift. What is he trying to say?" Maybe that would have been the wrong thing to do.

But who knows? Definitely not me.