The Best Gift I Ever Gave
by Mallika Rao
Presented by by Capital One®.
During the holidays, we’re often asked what we wish for ourselves. This holiday season, Capital One is instead asking people to share their wish for others. Read on for a touching story that demonstrates the true meaning of giving.
There are no guarantees in gift giving. I learned this the hard way, when I gave my dad a new sugar bowl.
The original, shaped like an overturned onion bulb — round body, pinched base — meant something. My dad had bought it in the seventies, with my mom. Three decades later, the lid was gone and so was she, taken by cancer a month after my 23rd birthday.
In the haze that followed, I’d made more decisions than the one to protect our sugar from bugs: to love people while they’re still here; to conquer vanity, because who knows whether you’ll die with all your hair; and most concretely, to organize the house, so my dear dad could live his life.
The latter task was harder than it sounds. Loss gives meaning to every part of a home — even my mom’s mess of beauty products suddenly seemed precious. My anxieties centralized on a target: replacing the lidless sugar bowl. It seemed to me that I needed the same bowl as the one my parents bought. If I could find an exact double, could everything we’d lost reassemble somehow?
The implications of succeeding thrilled me.
An inspired combination of Google search terms later, I found myself staring at it. Few sights have made me feel that anything can be achieved by faith alone so much as the bowl of my childhood memories rendered perfectly on the screen of our Macbook. When my dad came home a few days later, it was to my little miracle on the counter. Same onion shape, only better.
Of course, nothing could be the same. My dad looked panicked. Where, he wanted to know, was our old, lidless sugar bowl?
I produced the original from the cupboard where I’d stowed it for posterity’s sake. This was not how I’d imagined my triumphant reveal. I felt foolish. I’d tried to fill a crater-sized hole with a sugar bowl. Should I return it? My dad considered this for a moment, then smiled. He put the new lid on the old bowl. Suddenly it was a perfect gift.
To celebrate that spirit of giving, Capital One is looking to hear about your wishes for others. Share your wish for someone else — a family member, a friend, a neighbor, or community — with #WishForOthers on Twitter, Instagram, or the Capital One Facebook page from Nov. 24 through Dec. 23 for a chance to make it come true.No purchase necessary.
Check out this video and then visit WishForOthers.com for more information, official rules, and to see the wishes that other people have submitted so far.
Photo: Procsilas Moscas
Sponsored posts are purely editorial content that we are pleased to have presented by a participating sponsor, in this case Capital One. The views in this article are solely those of the author, not our sponsor.