Mixtapes, Giving Our Best, a Stolen Telecaster, and a New Year’s Mix for Readers

When I was a kid and old enough to go to the mall by myself, my father would give me his Jordan Marsh credit card and some cash before Christmas and send me to the Burlington Mall to do his Christmas shopping for my mother. I felt grown up and trusted, brandishing a credit card. But after a while wandering the mall, I’d get melancholy passing the Santa and the queue of kids, and criss-crossing through all the adult shoppers. I never told my mother about these trips, but I’m sure she knew. I’d try to hide the bags somewhere, but now I know there’s really nowhere in a house a mother doesn’t go. 

I’d hoist the pile of gifts–a White Shoulders special gift set, some flannel non-skid slippers, a prettier than average watch, a fluffy robe, or some Jean Nate–up to the ladies at the counter. I said yes to whatever gift-wrapping was offered, and sometimes had to show the note my dad gave me that said I could use his credit card. When I started to look a little more like a teen, the cosmetics ladies would accuse me (or us, if I brought my brother or a friend) of stealing and loitering and try to shoo us away. I’d say I was shopping for my father and show them the card, though, and then I’d do a lot of unnecessary touching of things while they hovered.

I don’t remember my dad ever picking out gifts on his own. I was surprised the time he got me an unfinished pine dresser and stained it himself and even tied a bow around the whole thing the Christmas after I got my first apartment. I still have the dresser in the cellar. It holds vacuum filters and screws and things like that, which would suit him.

The biggest surprise gift from my father came a few years later. One Christmas, he got me a Fender Telecaster guitar that he’d researched and picked out himself. He wrote a card to go with it, which I still have in an old train case with other important things. On the card he wrote a little ditty in his angular handwriting of tilted slashes: “If you do a lot of strumming and fretting, an American Standard Telecaster is What You’re Getting.”

My father showed his love in funny and inconsistent ways. He was limited in what he could give, and there were reasons for that, and I understand those reasons much better now. His gift giving habits were just one of his many riddles. But, as you can see, he could really keep you guessing. I think he did give his all.

My telecaster was stolen 12 years ago when our house was broken into and robbed. I got the news late after school when I was packing up my stuff near the old church pew in the hallway where we’d all linger after school and in between classes. 

My husband had come home from work that afternoon to find the door to our house wide open and furniture tipped over. I was on the phone with him as he was going through the broken-into house for the first time. I asked him if the telecaster was gone, and he said it was, and I thought of my father, long dead by then. I told my husband I’d call him back.

The kid who happened to be standing there when I got the call was John-Paul, a student of mine who I was always bickering with because he told fibs about why he didn’t do his work or the reading for class, etc. But as my father used to say—and I wish I could remember the exact referent—“You can’t shit a shitter.” So this kid and I really got on each other’s nerves. But on that day, John-Paul walked me over to the hallway pew and we sat down. He’d overheard enough to know what had happened. He put his arm around my shoulder and said “I’ll just sit here with you.” I cried for another bit and then he walked me out to my car. After that, we went back to our normal bickering about class things. But it wasn’t the same.

In a classroom full of teachers once, Robert Pinsky said something I’ll never forget– one of many things. He said when we love people, we spend a whole life analyzing them. And it’s the same with poems, he said. If you love anything enough, he reasoned, eventually you’ll want to see how it’s put together. He told us a story about the time he walked into the living room, and on the TV screen was a dog’s cranium, open and being dissected and explained. His daughter, who was studying to be a veterinarian, was watching it, rewinding it, taking notes. That was how much she loved dogs. 

I had a student once write her senior thesis on the art and subtext of the mixtape. She used a mixtape that her new-ish boyfriend had given her. In the context of this budding relationship, she parsed the extent to which a given song’s lyrics were meant to be taken literally. Versus the songs that were just a gift to be shared, like you share a ripe apple, or shown off like you show off your best new weird pants. A good mix tape, she concluded, can have many layers of discourse. It can say I know you. I love you. It can say I thought you would love this song. Or, I love this song; this is who I am. 

How well can we know a person if we don't know or try to know their tastes, pleasures, aversions, and edges? Remember that scene in Hi-Fidelity when the dad comes into the record store looking for a crappy record for his daughter, and Jack Black’s surly record store clerk responds “Do you know your daughter at all? Go to the mall!”

You can glean plenty about the connection between people by the gifts and things that pass between them, especially over time. As recipients, there are gifts that we keep, or keep wondering about, long after the giver is gone. And it’s not about money; some of us give the best gifts when we're broke and in love.  

The Assignment

All this made me think of a favorite assignment. Here it is, in mini: 

Find a poem that your chosen classmate would love, and give it to them at the end of the semester.

On the first day of class, each student gets the name of a classmate (and keeps it secret). For the next 20 weeks, the giver attends a little extra to their person, trying to suss out taste, biases, inclinations, habits, aversions, and ways of interacting with different poems and poets, and with different stories and films. At semester’s end, the givers present their person with their carefully sought and chosen poem, along with a letter including their rationale.

As a teacher, this involved some front-loading and reminding, but it was worth it. One student called it “the literary stalking assignment.” At the end of his semester, this heckler/student was given Autobiographia Literaria by Frank O’Hara. And boy did he love it.

I wonder what I’d put on a mixtape of poems and songs and other favorite things for you–the collective of readers here. Doing that kind of one-size-fits curation would be antithetical to the things I said above about needing to know a person to give them a good gift, etc. There are all kinds of you– teachers, former students, friends, strangers, family– each with your own taste and likes and loves and irritators and inclinations. 

But if I were to do something like that, here is some of what I might put on such a thing:

Xoxo 

Baked Alaska at Oleana
Ways of Seeing (Berger)
Yo Yo Ma solo cello (For tinnitus)
Sula (Morrison)
Extra salt in the Tollhouse Cookie recipe & also make butter very very soft
The Wrens Happy 

There Are Birds Here (May)
Time (Louise Gluck)
In the Coma (Pinsky)
Townie (Dubus III)
Pen15 Season Two- Finale- envisioning joint babies, marriages, divorces, etc.
Happiness (Elliot Smith) (especially the Gondola Man outtro)
The Snowman (Stevens)
Sugar scrub (sugar, vegetable glycerin, almond oil, grapeseed oil, lavender eo)
Euphorbia (hardy, weird, beautiful perennial; not cut flowers, b/c stinky)
The Bees (Lorde)
Jig of Life (Kate Bush)
St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves (Russell)
Snapware
Poshmark
Red Hand Files (Nick Cave)
The Expert on God (L'Heureux)

Plus: All the poems I’ve included in the Substack essays