Special Gift

                    When I was around four or five my grandmother came to the United States from Peru and brought with her many gifts for the family. I received clothes from her and a lot of chocolates and other candies from Peru as I was the youngest of her grandchildren. My grandma brought my father the wooden toy car he used to play with when he was a kid. When my father was a kid he grew up in a poor neighborhood and that was one of his favorite toys if not his only toy. Anyway she gave it to my father and he ended up giving it to me. He told me that while I have all of these modern day toys, the wooden car entertained him and his other brothers a lot.

           The toy was about half the size of a standard sheet of printing paper and really old with some of the areas of the wooden car chipped off.  It was basically four round pieces of wood connected to a block of wood that was a little curved to make it more realistic. Markings surrounded the block portion of the car that obviously looked like it was made by young kid with ink. Car doors and stick figures were drawn on the sides and it was also colored. Each of the wheels also had its own design and the two wheels on the left didn’t roll too well and it even appeared loose. Upon asking my father if he drew the designs he replied by saying that it he drew the wheels but couldn’t remember if he or one of his sisters and brothers, he didn’t remember.

          At the time the car was worthless to me. It looked like a piece of junk compared to my colorful remote controlled car and yet I still played with it. I now realize that this gift was an act of kindness from my father who is sometimes a serious person. I never admitted what I thought about the toy when I was young because I thought it would make my father feel bad but now I still have it and value it like gold. From this gift I learned that it is possible to be happy with or without money and that in life you shouldn’t take anything for granted. Trying to enjoy everything you have is the way to live happily or else go nowhere in life and live with anger and greed. In fact I sometimes feel bad when I receive something that appears to have cost a lot of money especially when it’s from a relative.

            The person who gives you the gift is more important sometimes than what the gift itself actually is. It could be an item that seems worthless through the eyes of another however to the receiver it is a gift given to them by their favorite person. That gift could also be an item that reminds them of happy times that they shared with another person. It doesn’t necessarily have to be an expensive gift for it to mean something to you. It’s the thought that counts.