Gifts, Identity, & Bonds

Sometimes I like to wander around offering this or that little item, usually food, to friends and acquaintances. A friend described this behavior as gift-giving affection, or sometimes known as charity--occasionally thought of as a virtue. Gift giving, particularly with food, is a fairly common form of affectionate expression and a rather potent one, especially between intimates (see this NYT article). Two things come to mind: first, food has a particular place in our psychology; and second, gift-giving is an obvious external behavior that is significantly expressive of one's unseen identity. I plan on shortly giving a house-warming gift to some friends of mine, but because of events that I do not entirely understand, I will provide them in absentia. I am struck with some discontinuities about giving without presence.

In many ways, giving something is about acknowledgement. When I, say, gave some comic books to Miss Anna Tibstra at the Garlic Festival a few weeks ago, it was in part a means of saying, "Hey Anna, you are in important to me, so important that I got you these comic books." In another way it is about self-acknowledgement; "Hey Anna, look at these cool comic books that I have! Do you want them as a gift because right now I have them." The latter suggests some of the depth a gift can have pertaining to the person. This past year, Anna purchased a few successive comic books, read them, and was then so excited about them that she leant them to me despite her intention of giving one, then the second, and finally the third because she so wanted to talk about them with me. These gifts highlight a bond between Anna and I, as if we both were to say, "We like comic books together and enjoy these characters, stories, and artwork; but we can do that together! How great is that!"

Giving food, though, has a different sort of character. Suppose I work for three hours, earn about twenty-four dollars, buy a comic book, and give it to Anna. How is this different from spending three hours preparing bread for Anna or when I made the crust (and much of the pizza) for Linnea, Lydia, Kristin, and Beka when I was in Minneapolis? (Coincidentally, the house-warming gift is food.) Well, I think of what Marx has to say about labor alienation, which I cannot quote or likely describe particularly well, but here it goes: Using my wages from work to purchase a gift is about practising a skill and receiving payment rather than the goods of that labor and is therefore disconnected from me (the gift-giver); whereas when I use my skills to produce a good to be given as a gift, that good is very much nearer to me than an identical gift purchased with wages. I once purchased a book of Shakespeare's sonnets for my first girlfriend, Whitney; I also happened to write a few--significantly worse--poems for her--though I like to think they weren't altogether sappy. In one act, the gift is expressive (the purchased gift), while the other act manifests.

I favor baking and other cooking. Perhaps I could tie it to the historical reality of food production and preparation, or its nutritional utility, or communal nature, but no matter the pseudo-universal reality of such ideas, making food and giving it as a gift is personally powerful. Food, even amongst strangers and between relational rifts, has powerful symbolic and rejuvenating qualities. In A Home at the End of the World, following a traumatic event (of which the film is full) early on, the mother of one character is up late in the kitchen making pie crust. Colin Farrell's character asks why, and she says something like, "It is good to one simple, useful thing." Food has a simplicity to it, a culturally atomic reality bound up inside. It may be that such notions are not as universal as I like to think, but they show up everywhere in our media. Morning news shows are littered with hosts testing their skills with professional chefs, other shows focus on a host inviting the audience into his/her kitchen, and what about the intimacy of a homemade meal over candlelight for two?

Another film, Stranger than Fiction, uses food's qualities deftly to highlight and explain the sentiments and divisions amongst the protagonist (Will Ferrell, I have no bias toward the last name) and the love interest (Maggie Gyllenhaal). After an exhausting day of old tax forms and receipts, Harold comes downstairs to Ana's bakery where she offers him fresh cookies, which he fails to except because of occupational obligations, a blunder he understands after he has offered to pay for them. later, she prepares dinner for Lthe two of them and the scene acts as a salve to the previous wound between them. (I might add that I adore Stranger than Fiction and my friends sometimes tease me for similarities they perceive between Maggie Gyllenhaal's character and myself.)

Without presence, though, any attempt at intimacy, at building bonds between people (whether broken or newly forming) is stilted, awkward, and frustrated. The dinner made for a loved one left in the oven to warm is heartfelt, but sad, disconnected from the affectionate intention; or the ever-present dinner out when someone doesn't show up or disappears between the salad and the main course; or an even the psychological weight of an empty or moldy fridge; each of these suggests decay or distance, the failure of connection rather than the richness of new bonds founded, old bonds maintained. Often, it can at best suggest the yearning for bridging what has been riven, about healing what is wounded. Bonds require multiple parties, but the gift in absence is one party, reaching out with something that--one hopes--cannot be easily wasted.