Whenever we leave a relationship, we take something with us. Sometimes it’s just what we have on our backs, our exit from the game of love so swift that there’s no time to even thank the host for inviting you to play.
At other times you get to choose your parting gifts. You come into the Newlywed Game with one set of prized possessions and you leave with an entirely different set. Depending on the situation, you may have brought little with you to trade, like the contestants on Let’s Make a Deal who trade a sign or a fake hammer for what Jay has in the box. It’s hard to go wrong in these situations, as you pretty much have nowhere to go but up.
In my own case, I have received some wonderful parting gifts, especially the time I played Let’s Make a Deal in Florida. You remember that episode. I was selected as a contestant on a very strange show that ran for five seasons.
I came with very little. A Windstar van, a couple of boxes, some pirate clothes and a dog. I took so little, in fact, that everything pretty much fit in the Windstar; everything except four boxes that I wish Jay was still holding.
I don’t think anyone has ever heard how this game ended. Oh sure, you know how I finally lost and left the show. That’s well documented.
Rather, it’s the parting gifts that have a story behind them. As I said, I went to Florida with a Windstar half-filled with stuff and came back to Washington with enough stuff to fill a four bedroom house. Yes, a lot of parting gifts.
Let’s start with how I ended up with them as in retrospect, it is an odd story. To show you where my mind was at the time, I went along with the “Eeenie, Meanie, Miney, Mo” option for parting gifts.
In preparation for filing for divorce, we had to divide our possessions. This is a major battleground for most people. It wasn’t for us. In a process that was as clinically clean as the “unfortunate series of interactions” (as I call this so-called marriage now), we went through the entire house choosing up sides. I’d pick something, then she’d pick something. In case of a tie, a flip of the coin settled the issue.
So the game started. Bed hers. Futon mine. Hanging pirate guy hers. Cannon from “Hook” mine. On and on this went. In this rapid exchange of “I wants” some things became hers that were indeed mine and some things that were hers ended up in my pile. This even happened with the Christmas ornaments, which I lament because she still has my French Quarter ornament and I ended up with a pair of red glittery mouse ears, as if I would ever hang Disney ornaments on my tree.
The entire process from start to finish lasted a half hour. You read right. Thirty minutes to unravel all the possessions acquired over the space of five years.
In a strange twist of parting gifts, I even ended up with her car, now dubbed The Black Widow. Talk about parting gifts. I went for the box on the floor and ended up the car behind the curtain.
To be fair, my own car had gone to a good cause, me figuring that this game we played would never end so I didn’t need the Windstar any longer. So the Saturn was kind of the consolation prize in that regard.
While this story seems astounding enough, it pales in comparison to the fact I had already played Let’s Make a Deal when I left Washington. There was only so much room in the Windstar and only so much money to pack and ship things to Florida.
It’s funny how your choices change when you have to limit your options. Suddenly, things that seemed so important seem so unimportant. For example, coming back to Seattle, I had a lovely steamer trunk that I had moved everywhere in my life, from White Center to West Seattle to Port Orchard to Orlando to Melbourne to Vero Beach. It stayed in Vero Beach.
Shipping parting gifts by the pound also affects your choices. At a buck a pound, you have to be very deliberate about the gifts you haul cross country. The steamer trunk would have cost $75 (a buck a pound roughly) so it didn’t pass muster. I had only paid $60 for it originally.
I really miss that steamer trunk now. I could have easily left behind the lamps. They weren’t really my favorites to begin with. I’m sure not why I traded the trunk for the lamps, but such are the parting gifts we receive in life.
As I look around my abode, I think about where all this stuff came from. As I said, I went to Florida with nothing and paid about $5,000 to bring all the stuff back that I acquired there (including the Black Widow). That’s a lot of dough, especially for stuff that wasn’t necessarily mine to begin with.
I guess that’s the way it is with parting gifts. Sometimes you end up with the brand new livingroom set behind Door #2. Other times you end up getting Zonked, ending up with a llama instead. And yes, that was really a Zonk once on Let’s Make a Deal.*
I guess we all end up with a parting gift or two along the way. Fortunately, I didn’t get Zonked. Unless you count ending up in Florida in the first place. Then I got totally Zonked.
In the Emerald City, glad I unloaded that horse head I was initially dealt,
– Robb
* In case you’re wondering, you really do win the Zonk on Let’s Make a Deal. You are then offered a $100 consolation prize to trade it back in. A little trivia for ya to make reading this worthwhile.