Show and Tell: Miniature Bat and Ball
Sometimes an accidental gift is the best kind.
Show and Tell is an occasional recurring feature of Inconspicuous Consumption, with most of the entries contributed by the site’s readers. Today’s installment is from reader Louis Griffel. You can see additional Show and Tell posts here.
By Louis Griffel
I’m a doctor, and also an avid baseball fan and collector. When I completed my internal medicine residency at Pennsylvania Hospital in 1993, the intensive care unit nurses gave me a gift. The gift wrapping included a red bow, and tied to the bow was this miniature bat-and-ball set — a little bonus present, because everyone in the unit knew I was a huge baseball fan.
I hung the bat and ball from the rear-view mirror of my car, a 1985 Toyota Camry. In the 31 years since then, the bat and ball have occupied the same spot in each of my subsequent cars — a 1995 Toyota Avalon, a 2003 Toyota Avalon, a 2010 Cadillac CTS, and currently a 2016 Cadillac XTS. Five cars in all.
Embarrassingly, I can’t remember what the main gift was. It might have been a picture frame or a book — I simply don’t recall. But it turns out that the bat-and-ball set was the real gift. I see it every time I get into my car, and it makes me think back to my days as a resident and the nurses who gave it to me.
If you have an interesting object that you’d like to submit for a possible future Show and Tell segment, send photos and a quick synopsis here.
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I really love this. Brought a nice smile to my face this morning. I enjoy thinking about the warm feeling this brings every time you get into your car.
It reminded me of a going away gift my coworkers gave me after an internship way back during college. I was staying at my mom's hours during the summer, living off of the groceries she bought. She would buy random things that were on sale, which one week included a whole bunch of root beer because it must have been very cheap. For what must have been a few weeks in a row, when I brought in my lunch to the office it included a bottle of root beer. I like root beer well enough but really it was just what was in the fridge when I was making my lunch and that's about all the thought I put into it.
Cut to the end of the summer and the company gave me a going away gift, which was a 6-pack variety of hard-to-find root beers because someone had noticed me bringing in root beer every day and made the reasonable assumption that I was a huge fan! Still makes me smile 20+ years later.
This is a platonic ideal. The inconspicuous detail became the main attraction, and now it’s a IC story. Love it!