Mother's Day gifting and celebration

The story of how I actually gave a good gift (I think), and was almost late to a wedding because of it.

Last week, I figured I'd try to get my wife something nice for Mother's Day this year. As it happens, I'm usually a terrible gift-giver. I attribute this to an empathy deficiency, and even more to a terrible memory. Besides, the kind of thing I love for a gift is completely different than what my wife (or any other reasonably normal person) would like. (I was so proud of the gifts I got her one year -- I would have loved to have the more-masculine equivalents of the whole lot. Then she pointed out, "But, Sweety, you did all your shopping at the campus bookstore." It didn't even occur to me that this was a bad thing -- I would have loved it if someone had done all their shopping for me at a bookstore.)

Well, this year, she'd mentioned a few weeks ago that she was experiencing an earring shortage. I think there was also some necklace trouble, with one or two having broken.

So I went down to a local jeweler's, where they do a lot of custom work. They'd done some work on a group gift to someone else for me, and always been pleasant. This time, I picked out necklace and earring set and picked the color crystal I wanted in there. Daughter and I went to pick it up on Friday, then stashed it in the house, to await Sunday morning.

But as we were trying to get ready to leave for the wedding Saturday morning, my wife realized that with the last necklace that had broken (this is the problem with putting cheap jewelry on active people), she didn't have any that went with the dress she was wearing. So we changed the plans quickly, and when she asked for pliers to fix her necklace, instead I gave her the new set.

She seemed delighted by the set, and immediately put on the earrings and necklace. But the earrings were of the sort that don't come with any kind of catch on the back -- they just have a long, thin, kind of hooky piece of metal to go through the ear. And whenever my wife would push her hair back, the earring on that side ran the risk of being knocked out of her ear.

Or so we discovered after we left the restaurant we ate lunch at on the way to the wedding, and my wife realized in the car that she didn't have the earrings. Back we went, where we found one outside the restaurant and the other beneath the car seat. Whew. And we weren't quite late for the wedding, in spite of the detour.

Instead of eating out on Sunday afternoon (or, heaven forbid, me cooking -- Mother's Day is supposed to be good for the mother!), we ate at a steakhouse at South of the Border on I-95. In spite of all the trips up and down that interstate, neither of us had ever stopped there before. The meal at the steakhouse was very impressive (good salad, good bread, awesome sweet tea, so-so fish, great steak), and we figure we'll have to run back down there again sometime when it's not late and raining to look over the rest of the place.

Mother's Day itself was kind of low-key for us, since the biggest gift had been given, the meal had been eaten, and I work like a dog for most of a Sunday. I did wash some dishes, though, which is pretty momentous (I know, it shouldn't be all that strange, but this is a blog, where we're supposed to be honest, so there it is.)