Feeling kind of bad about a gift card that expired. I’m not going to cry about it but a $100 card that my sister got me for Christmas expired. I thought gift cards never expired, but then I also had no idea it had been five years that I’d been looking at that thing, which I had every intention of using. Most places never let their cards expire but this particular steak house happens to not be one of them. Damn. It’s not just the fact that I can’t use it but that $100 is a lot of money for my sister to have spent on something that I just never got around to using. I had used other gift cards she gave me, though, and at least one of those still has $25 on it, for Ruth’s Chris. Waahwaahwaah. It reminds me of a time my mother made a big deal of sending me something similar, a gift card or something that would get me see a movie at the theater for free. I never used it, and she kept asking me if I had until the thing expired. That was early 1990s, when I was a little more afraid of the world than I am now. But I don’t know if that characteristic is to blame for never using that ticket. Maybe it was something more passive aggressive, since my mother and I were kind of on the skids for a few years after college. I was angry about being pulled into a post-graduation road trip without anyone asking if I even wanted to go. It was subsequently assumed I was OK with going back down to Tampa, even though I had in mind to just stay at Oberlin for the summer. I had the goal of moving to New York but also considered Philadelphia, mostly because I knew somebody from college there. All told I spent about 6 months at the house in Tampa in what might have been the most uncomfortable and even miserable 6 months of my life. I loved my mother but I simply could not live with her. Years later my sister would arrive at a very similar conclusion. I do not think about period of my life much anymore, and thinking of it now is like stirring a dismal memory that deserves to be expunged. I felt like I was drowning. It might have been the first time I ever considered that people tend to become what they complain about the most. Mother complained to no end about how our Aunt would come by at the holidays and everyone would spend a few minutes listening to me play piano. The Aunt would listen for a few seconds then just start talking, like I was background music, and I would stop playing. That was usually the end of the concert, if you could even call it that. Years later mother exhibited this exact behavior, interrupting my practicing by blurting out questions, sometimes from another room where I could not possibly have even heard her through the sound of the piano. There would be a moment of silence or near-silence in my playing and from that I would be made aware that she had been talking away at me for an unknown length of time. Other times she would be sitting the room where I was playing and it seemed like she was playing a kind of target practice where she would wait for the most strenuous or difficult part of whatever piece of music I was playing to just start talking. The talking sometimes felt like it would never stop. During this 6-month period I would arrange to go out with the only friend I had left in town. If I mentioned this to mother she would seem to get confused and disagreeable, asking one stupendously obvious question after another, often repeating the questions about what movie we were going to, what time, but most obstinately of all she would ask “Why?” Does an adult man need to explain to his mother why he wants to go see a movie? So I got into a routine of not telling her I was doing this. My friend would just show up and I’d tell her I was going to a movie, or whatever. With the friend present she did not fire away her arsenal of questions. Instead she stared at the floor, saying nothing, pouting. There were also the video games. She could barely tear herself away from the chair where she played Nintendo games to a point where it was like nothing else mattered to her. There is more to all this but I am going to stop with this little trip down a Memory Lane that is overgrown and inhospitable. But i did regret never using that free movie ticket and, now, the $100 steak house gift card.