A short short...

The Gift of a Babe

“This is for you!” I turned in my chair to see Tom, my little 4-year old brother thrust out a package toward me. It looked like a misshapen cucumber with crumpled and bumpy green tissue paper and copious amounts of green ribbon crisscrossing its stubby length.

“What is it?” I asked.

“It’s your birthday present.” He pushed it into my hands and waited.

I knew he was excited because he was pushing down on my knee as he kicked his PJ-slippered feet out to “jump.” I thought quickly as I looked at the gift – last year for my fifteenth birthday he had wrapped my gift in a one of his small shirts and put a rubber band around it. Now he had learned the joys of ribbon and tape – every inch was covered with at least three pieces of Scotch tape. “You did a good job with this,” I told him.

“Hurry up! Open it.” He was impatient.

Last year, Tom had given me one of his pencils and a picture he had drawn of both of us outside our house, each with purple hair and three arms. I still had the picture serving as a bookmark somewhere. This present seemed much heavier than that.

“Ally, hurry up!” Tom whined.

“Ok, ok, here I go. I was just trying to guess what was in it.”

“What did you guess?” he asked.

“I think it’s an elephant!” I proclaimed. He giggled as I tried to slide the ribbons off the pickle package and then resorted to ripping through the layers of tissue paper. I first saw a black plastic wheel, then the metal body of a Matchbox toy car. I held it up. The car was painted in USA flag colors where the paint wasn’t scratched off yet. The hood was gone and the front wire axel was bent, so one of the wheels was lower than the rest. This car was Tom’s favorite toy and showed the signs of his adoration.

“Are you giving this to me?” I asked him, wanting to be sure that he understood what he was doing. I couldn’t believe he would give this toy up – I had seen him fight over it too often with Adam, our 8-year old brother.

“Yes, don’t you like it?” He looked worried, like I might reject his gift.

I rolled the car across my arm thoughtfully. Here was my little brother, wanting to give me his favorite toy for my birthday. I knew he’d want it back in a few days, and I figured I could conveniently leave it out where he could find, maybe on my dresser top. But the motive behind his actions is what hit me the hardest. He wanted to give me something, but it wasn’t like he had any money to spend on a present. I doubted that he knew how much a toy car would cost anyway. The fact that he wanted to give me his favorite toy as a present made me realize that he did it, not because everyone else had given me gifts that day, but that he did it because he loved me and wanted me to be as happy as he was with that car.

I grabbed Tom and hugged him, then tickled him by running the car up and down his back while he laughed. “Thank you, I like it a lot. Let’s go play with your other cars before it’s time for bed.” My little brother ran ahead of me into the playroom, and I followed, holding the broken car in front of me like a new treasure.