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One Wine Glass

    On parent night at summer camp both my kids won raffle prizes. Five won a Frisbee and a family day pass for the swimming pool. Eight heard his name called, and could barely hoist his spoils–a gift basket including a gift certificate for a steak dinner, a bottle of red wine, and a Caribbean Escape scented candle. Dammit if they didn’t forget the size 8-10 boys smoking jacket. They did throw in several books of matches, a handful of mints and one enormous wine glass for good measure.

    I wonder what the giver of this gift had in mind when he or she packed the single gargantuan goblet into the arrangement. Two pours into this glass would drain an entire bottle of wine. For the wine-affected, not only could you get your entire nose in the bowl, you could also swirl a wine triple-salchow and not spill a drop.

    Maybe this vessel intends for lovers to share. The Sybaris of stemware! This glass likely emerged during the 1990s wedding trick-photography era. Picture the bride and groom smiling beatifically, hands intertwined around a single crystal toasting flute. The glass holds not champagne, but instead a miniature version of the couple in their wedding finery, executing their professionally-choreographed first dance; The Macarena.

    wineglasscouplephoto

    As I sipped and flip-turned in my above-ground pool’s worth of Malbec, I recalled another lone wine glass from my past.

    My first wine glass purchase came from Orange Tree Imports; Madison’s mecca in the 1980s for Sandra Boynton coffee mugs, stickers-by-the-yard and candy-by-the-diabetes. The boutique also sold gourmet kitchen items and fancy lady dining ephemera. I remember my shock and pride; that I—an eight-year-old Hebrew student and extremely inflexible ballet dancer–could afford a real glass wine glass made entirely of GENUINE GLASS!

    The sales lady collected my $4.00 and wrapped the solitary wine glass in tissue.

    “Just one wine glass? Are you sure?”

    “Yeah. It’s for my mom.”

    Still pre-pubescent and pre-symbolic, I didn’t understand the question. My parents divorced, my mom lived alone, she drank wine. Obviously a single wine glass made for a practical and opulent birthday gift. Besides, if I was rich enough to buy two wine glasses, I’d have forgone the gift entirely, blowing my budget on glass kitten figurines to keep in the zipper compartment of my KangaROOS.

    I remember the complex look on my mom’s face when she unwrapped the glass. Her bittersweet smile did not evolve into the jumping/clapping Clearing House Sweepstakes winner reaction I hoped for, but neither did it fall to the depths of the Mother’s Day when I re-gifted back to her the Alice In Wonderland plaque off my wall wrapped in a doll blanket.

    My mom found love again, and lost it, and found it anew. She moved from the home I grew up in to a condo. Nearly 30 years later the wine glass remains in rotation…a practical and opulent gift after all.

    0 thoughts on “One Wine Glass”

    1. If that wine glass has a deep end, I’m coming over.

      When I was 9 I walked to the drug store and bought my divorced, non-custodial mother a bottle of red nail polish. The sales clerk tried to talk me out of the colour, but it was so vibrant, how could it help but make her love me and come home?

      I paid for it, and as I left I heard the clerk say to her friend, “That colour is for whores.”

      I didn’t know what a whore was, but I knew it wasn’t good.

      I’m glad tyour gift went over better. You gave your mom permission to be alone, and be okay with it. Being symbolic and metaphorical works best, I believe, when we’re unaware we’re doing it. That’s pretty powerful for an eight year-old. But we know how smart they really are, don’t we?

    2. I can just imagine how she must have felt – a confusion of feeling, to be sure.

      We were given a wine glass set as a wedding gift – one was broken soon afterwards. In 35 years, we have never used those glasses (crystal, really) – the fluted wine glasses sit on a shelf and are never touched. Because one is broken, and there is heartache associated with that broken glass.

      So we drink wine out of HUGE tumblers. Heh. Better that way anyway.

    3. I love that the photo came from a website called “Photo Shop Essentials.” Forget stuff like cropping and correcting exposure issues. Superimposing wedding portraits on wine glasses is a basic skill set.

    4. I, of course, LOVED the Orange Tree Import memories. I gave my parents their one and only anniversary gift from Orange Tree – a trivet. Which also is still used to this day.

      Damn fine store.
      and p.s. I LOVED those figurines. And stickers. Hours were spent pouring over which one I would get after ballet the next week.

    5. I have fantasies of buying the Big Betty wine glass (it can hold an ENTIRE bottle of wine; thanks, Amazon, for something so useful!!) as a hostess gift for someone. She would have to be a very particular kind of hostess. And an extremely good friend. 😉

    6. This is such a sweet story, and by far the BEST wine glass store ever. Now I’m probably going to think about this every time I drink wine, which is often. 😉

    7. The most amazing part of this story is that the wine glass still exists. In my home a wine glass life can be measured in moments, not decades. Good job. 😉

      Cheers,

      Case

    8. Now that you’re a mom yourself, you can appreciate that the empathy you had as an 8 year old was the real gift to your mom. (I mean, after the Alison in Wonderland/Doll blanket incident.)

    9. I bought my mother a wine set once, but I included two glasses out of the sheer, desperate hope that she’d start dating again. I think your sweet mom can handle the single glass, since she’s getting herself out there! My mom has been single since 1992… the two glasses were just wishful thinking on my part.

      Although… she has stated before that, if she DOES start dating, she’s not going to tell us. So maybe the second glass IS getting used? Hm….

    10. I felt like I was standing there, watching you give your mother the gift. So lovely, Ann, so beautifully written. Bittersweet. (Did you catch that? Everyone else said “sweet”, but I did a callback to “bittersweet”. Yes, I agree, I am clever! 🙂

    11. I want to focus only on how adorable this story is.

      But I’m sorry. Instead, my cheeks are flushing with the memory that my wedding video contains not one but TWO clips of our bridesmaids and groomsmen doing the Macarena.

      Curse you, 1996 nuptials. We didn’t stand a chance.

      The ONE request my betrothed and I made to the DJ was NO MACARENA.
      When he approached us that evening saying he was being begged, we relented.

      Little did we know the video guy (clearly a fan of line-dancing) would accidentally splice our shame in twice.

      Yeah.

      I wish I’d sent him a blanket-wrapped Alice in Wonderland plaque as payment.

    12. I love this kind of writing. The kind where I become the 8-year-old in the store, where I’m in her head, knowing and deciding the best gift is a wine glass for one.

      You did that for me just now, Ann.

      My favorite thing, what feels the most like a treat to me, is when a genius humor writer can take me to the other side of their brain, and opens herself up to her readers: and we learn more about the seed of their being.

      Thank you, it feels like trust.

      Thank you.

    13. I am so glad that you bought your mother a special present, so glad that you write in a way that makes me SEE you as a pre-pubescent girl who did so many of the same things I did (but different store, diifferent city), and so glad that the glass remains in rotation. Cheers to that, please, with the single gargantuan goblet from Eight’s camp prize. How bizarre and wonderful.