Dreams, Moments, Travels
Caroline’s birthday card was a 10×15 print on 20×15 paper with an elaborate text printed on the inside. So I told you what was on the door, that doesn’t mean you get to read the words of passionate love that oozed from my hand onto the canvas. Let’s just say it did everything I hoped it would – that’s right, my wife cried on my shoulder she was so touched by my sweet words of undying love. Sadly, she didn’t cry even once while opening the next 39 gifts. I’ll just have to work harder on 41.
No time for a witty explanation of the sign on the door, this is too small to read in this photo, so here was the text Caroline read as she approached our front door on her birthday:
40: There must be something special about the number 40. 40 years old – quite the accomplishment. 40 could be considered middle-age. But for you, 40 will forever be a wonderful number. In 40 seconds you have to open the door. You must be thinking of 40 reasons why not to open the door. NO – There are not 40 people in there about to scream Happy Birthday to you. But, 40 figures prominently on this 12th day of December. Take a deep breath – 40 if you need to. Grab the door handle. Close your eyes – No cheating. Open the door. Take two steps forward. And open your 40-year-old eyes to the man who loves you more than ever.
Time to take it up a notch, my bright ideas that is. 40 gifts weren’t enough; they needed 40 wrapping papers, but what then? Lump them together on the floor as a birthday mountain? Create a layout in blocks or steps as a kind of Enochian magic square representing the 40 gifts of wisdom and understanding? Har, got you on this pun; you see, Caroline’s maiden name is Engelhardt, or angel heart, and Enochian is the angelic language, so this layout would have a deeper meaning to my wife with the angel heart. No, her gifts did not end up as a set of angelic keys, I had greater plans. Why not hang them from the ceiling at eye height? Told you, this was uncontrolled stupidity. Time to buy 3 miles of fishing line, break out the ladder, tie up the packages, cut the proper lengths of line, and in less than 3 hours hang 34 gifts – thank god 6 gifts were outside on a shelf, that really saved me.
How many times did people ask me, where are you hiding so many gifts? There was a point I was afraid I wouldn’t remember them all. I had stuff in the trunk of the car, hidden behind blankets in the cabinet, in brown boxes in the top of our walk-in closet, in a storage closet outside, the pantry. I numbered the gifts, not just so Caroline would have an order in which to open them but for me to be sure on the 12th that all the gifts were accounted for. Even after numbering them, I felt this was reeling out of control and so I made a list of where each gift was. I think you are looking at about 15 of them here.
So accumulating 40 gifts wasn’t hard enough, what could I do to make this even more difficult? I know, I should pack each of the 40 gifts in a unique wrapping paper. Man, I’m a real idiot, what did I do to deserve myself? Where do these dumb ideas come from? Buying the first 5 wrapping papers was easy enough, but wait a minute, pull out the fingers and start counting, at this rate I will end up spending hundreds of dollars on packaging and wrapping paper. Oh well, once committed to stupidity don’t go asking us guys to back off a perfectly cool waste of time and money – we are in for the long haul by that time. If I had a recommendation to anyone else taking inspiration from my wonderful idea, do this for someone before they turn 20, er, 10.
I present you, the Charkha. This gift was pivotal amongst the 40 gifts for Caroline. Matter of fact, this was the first thing ordered. Originally it appeared it would have to come from India as no one on E-bay had a Charkha and the other online sites were sold out or just informational. No problem getting one from India as our friend Rinku would be leaving soon to her little village with one bullock cart in the state of Guj in India to get ENGAGED to the new love of her life – Yagnesh. Oh, if only I would tell you the stories about her swooning love for this guy, OMG. Anyway, I digress, I found this wonderful lady, Eileen Hallman of Charkha.biz in North Carolina, who sells them along with a DVD on how to use it – perfect. So now I wouldn’t have to wait for Rinku to wait in line a month for the bullock cart to return her to civilization to take more modern transportation back to America with Caroline’s Charkha in tow, it was here in a week instead. Oh, did I tell you? Rinku is getting ENGAGED! Weeeee!!!!