This Gift Only Costs an Occasional Buck
Call me Buck.
Actually, I didn’t say it quite that assertively.
“Would you consider calling me . . . Buck?” I asked.
My wife scoffed.
“You don’t look anything like a Buck,” she said. “Anyone who sees you knows right away that you’re not a Buck.”
“Right. But would you call me Buck?”
“Well . . . I’ll call you Buck--if every morning, you tell me I’m beautiful. As soon as I wake up.”
OK, then. The deal was set.
“So, just Buck and beautiful, right?” I said. “Otherwise, no anniversary gifts this year, right? Just a nice dinner, right?”
Right.
After 17 years of marriage, we’ve been down this twisty road before.
In the first few years of a marriage, anniversaries are big occasions, and big occasions come with big honkin’ gifts. Trips to Maui. Strings of pearls. A piano.
But then you start to make deals. I mean, who has the time or money to schlep around town looking for the perfect gift? And think of the stress: You have plenty of it without meeting a suddenly urgent deadline for a tribute to true love, payable in cashmere.
So who needs gifts, anyway?
This year, let’s just have a nice dinner, you and your partner agree. Let’s not get each other gifts. Or maybe just little gifts, right?
Right.
A few years ago, Jane and I celebrated one of those just-little-gifts anniversaries in the same deluded manner as so many other couples.
Jane, the Partner Who Broke Her Word, gave me a lovely, handsomely framed print by an artist we both admire.
As for me--the Partner Who Kept His Word--I gave Jane a tin of Bag Balm, a thick grease that dairy farmers use to soothe Elsie’s chapped udders. Runners also use it to ease chafing.
Jane was stunned.
“It’s the nicest ointment anyone has ever given me,” she said.
Nobody knows how to handle these situations.
The “marriage fact sheet” proposed by Assemblywoman Hannah-Beth Jackson won’t touch anniversary awkwardness.
Under a bill proposed by Jackson, the sheet would be handed out along with marriage licenses. But it would deal with such gritty material as community property, domestic abuse and spousal support. On the issue of Unauthorized Gifts, it would maintain a discreet silence.
That’s fine, I suppose. The state has no business disillusioning honeymooners. Besides, I think Jane and I now have the maturity to make a vow and stick to it.
All she has to do, I reminded her, is to call me Buck from time to time.
“But not just when I tell you you’re beautiful,” I said. “That’s too mechanical. And you have to say it in front of other people, too--not just when we’re alone.”
“How about Bucko?” she asked, “like in ‘Well, me Bucko!’ Or Bucky? Remember Bucky Beaver? ‘Brush-a, brush-a, brush-a--brush-a with Ipana?’ ”
“No,” I said. “Not Bucko and not Bucky. Just Buck.”
She was OK with that, but gave me some conditions of her own.
“When you tell me I’m beautiful, you have to say it like you really mean it.”
“Sure. But can I be a little more poetic, and say something like, “ ‘You’re as pretty as--’ ”
“NO!”
Jane cut me off. After 17 years, I guess she’s enjoyed about all the poetry she can stand.
“Just say: ‘You’re beautiful,’ ” she said.
“OK. Just call me Buck.”
So that’s the deal. I’m Buck and she’s beautiful, ‘til death do us part.
I’ll probably get her some big honkin’ gift anyway, and she’ll be miffed.
She’s really beautiful when she’s miffed.
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Steve “Buck” Chawkins can be reached at 653-7561 or at steve.chawkins@latimes.com.
