One of my wonderful wife’s only faults is that she can be a real bear to shop for. Most of the time she insists that she doesn’t need anything or want anything. . . sweet in a way yet maddening words for the husband in search of something nice for her birthday. But for this birthday I decided that what she needed – even if she didn’t know it yet – was an iPhone. Mark and Polly are iPhone People, as are several of our friends, and it just seems like the kind of gadget that my wife would enjoy having and figuring out and using. (However, it would not be good for me. Just yesterday I discovered that with my cell phone’s camera I had accidentally taken 113 pictures of the inside of my pants pocket. That’s right, 113. The intricacies of the iPhone would be lost on a techo-klutz like me- and the thought of losing or damaging it – all but certain to occur with me – made me nauseous.)
But even with some new iPhones just on the market that are nicely priced, this was enough of an investment that I was hesitant to take the plunge without being pretty certain that she would welcome such a gift. So I enlisted the help of a couple of her closest friends to ask her as innocently as possible, in the course of normal everyday conversation, if she had ever thought about getting an iPhone. Unfortunately, I picked a couple of her busiest friends at particularly busy times in their lives, and they just didn’t get around to it. Finally, at the Marler wedding reception in Chicago, I managed to corral one of her out-of-town cousins to ask her about it . . . which Leslie did as sneakily as if she were a C.I.A. double agent. Unfortunately, the notion of getting an iPhone or Blackberry elicited a big raspberry from my wife . . . which was in turn conveyed to me . . . and I realized that I was going to need a Plan B and quick.
I decided that Plan B would be a GPS, especially after we had such fun using Kathy’s dad’s GPS as we tooted around Chicago. (I even pretended to be grumpy and pessimistic about it, to help throw her off the trail.) But Plan B got blasted out of the water on Thursday (two days before her birthday) when Kathy mentioned over lunch that we needed to stop at Boston Store and pick up the GPS unit which she had ordered a few days before and which had finally come in. Arrrrrrrrrgh! (Actually, other words crossed my mind, but I kept them to myself.) For a moment it looked like I was going to need Plan C. . . and I had no idea what that would be. A waffle iron? Replacement Bags for our vacuum cleaner? New flea collars for the dogs?
And then Kathy started talking about how nice it would be to have the GPS for our trip in August to visit Mount Rushmore, and that’s what jolted me back to Plan A. . . minus the element of surprise, which had screwed me up from the start. I gave Kathy my most earnest sales pitch, explaining that when one is on a long trip with an iPhone or Blackberry and have a question about a given destination or the weather or road construction or breaking news or how many performances of Elektra Gwyneth Jones sang at the Met (believe it or not, some of us actually wonder about such things) it would be so nice to have access to the internet right there in the car. And just like that, the walls of her resistance crumbled and she agreed that it would indeed be a great thing to have. Eureka! And just like that, we were off to the Verizon Store to sign her up.
By the way, I might have saved myself a lot of sleeplessness by just getting her an iPhone and hoping she would come to like it – except that it would have meant that she would have had to switch her phone from Verizon to AT&T – which would have about as complicated as adopting triplets from North Korea. That was the deal-breaker for me and is the biggest reason why I didn’t just buy the iPhone- fun as that would have been. And as it turns out, the Blackberry we bought her proved to be very reasonably priced and almost as sexy as an iPhone would have been. And I breathed an especially deep sigh of relief when Mark, our most respected technical advisor (and iPhone owner) played around with Kathy’s new Blackberry and gave it a fairly glowing review.
So now it’s just a matter of my wife getting to know this amazing little device and all that it can do. And in the meantime, I have 364 days to figure out her next birthday gift.
pictured above: Kathy with Mark as he plays with her new Blackberry.