I often joke that my mom got me a lot of 'slow cooking' gifts. I would open it on Christmas, find no use for it whatsoever, and store it away. Then, I would wake up one morning and find myself in sudden need of the exact item I'd been incubating in some drawer since the week after Christmas. The gift would then become a cherished and/or critical item until I broke it, lost it, or used it to the point of disintegration.
The best example is my Patriots sling backpack. I got it one year for Christmas and immediately decided it had no use. I already owned a regular backpack and had several extra gym/duffel bags in my apartment. What a stupid gift!
So the sling backpack sat, unused, in my apartment while my mom's cancer grew worse and worse. A few weeks after she died, I signed up for Hubway, the local bike share, and realized I already had the perfect backpack to use while cycling.
Her last gift to me was a t-shirt. She handed it to me just a week before she passed. On the front of the shirt is a ridiculous cartoon of a sumo wrestler sporting a top knot and wearing a purple uniform (well, 'uniform') (1). When I received it, I thought it was an exception to the usual 'slow cooking' rule because I understood its value right away - it was a funny shirt and might make people laugh.
I've worn this shirt regularly since and always get positive remarks. As an added bonus, since I mostly own dark-colored t-shirts, this sumo shirt is my coolest option for a sunny day. No incubation period needed for this gift!
I noticed one day that the size was 'LL'. That was interesting. The shirt fit me, almost, but my size was usually somewhere between 'M' and 'L'. I guess the logical explanation is that shirt sizes in Japan differ from those in the USA. This is the type of insight that is nice to have, in theory, but difficult to put into practice.
Six months after my mom passed, my cousins from Japan visited. I wondered in the days leading up to the visit if my Japanese speaking skills had rusted away in the preceding half-year. I wondered because you see, reader, I only spoke Japanese with my mom. And without her around, I wouldn't have the only source I'd ever relied on to answer my incessant on-the-spot questions about the right vocabulary to use in those everyday situations - like ordering coffee - that I never seemed to actually encounter.
At one point during the visit, we stopped at my mom's favorite coffee shop. I was having a hard time recalling the Japanese needed to describe the drink sizes to my cousins. As I was searching in the corners of my memory attic for the right words, I suddenly realized I knew the perfect way to describe the options.
"Let me put it this way," I said in my dusty, resurgent mother tongue. "The options are Japan-sized or America-sized."
Footnotes / pointless realizations
1. I guess I wear the same uniform during phone interviews!
Don't go wandering around town looking for this shirt - it came directly from Japan (though I would try Uniqlo if you really wanted to look for it).
I should also note that the t-shirt WAS white. Now, it resembles the sky about an hour before a spring rain - it's getting darker, slowly, but perhaps more importantly, it's obviously going to keep getting dark. I can't own white clothing.
