My parents got me my first penguin because I had read Mr. Popper’s Penguins and decided that, like that fictional Minnesotan family, I too could raise a penguin in an American suburb. They were too gentle to tell me outright that this idea was stupid, that a penguin in Ohio in the care of an unprepared elementary schooler would quickly die, and maybe because of that gentleness my half serious pipe dream became a real attempt at persuasion. I knew that it was fiction and meant for children, but in my child mind I secretly wondered if the rudimentary logic might work. Out loud, I asked with the tone of a child knowing their request is absurd but pushing anyway. In my memory, before my mom said no, she hesitated for a moment after I explained the walk-out freezer in the basement, the strategic avoidance of the sun, the regular shipments of fish. She probably meant this as a small gift from parent to child so that I might keep believing in the great possibilities of the world, but I didn’t understand her hesitation that way. It was into the hesitation that I dove.
I did not succeed in convincing my parents to adopt penguins. But I put up a long and serious campaign that my mom still likes bringing up today, and come Christmas, I found my first penguin underneath the tree: a four-inch-tall, Santa-hatted Jingle Beanies named Zero, according to the tag.
I gave up my dream of housing a penguin, but the penguins came nonetheless. First there was little Beanie Zero, then I received socks, ornaments, a snow globe, a nutcracker, hand towels, more socks, a letter set, kitchenware, a two-foot-tall wire light-up penguin with arms tucked inside a fuzzy muff, and even more socks. The thing about gifts is that they beget more gifts. When I visit home for the holidays, I wear my penguin socks dutifully to show appreciation for the gifts, and then my family observes how much I love socks covered in penguins, so I receive more socks covered in penguins. Soon, my partner’s family notices that I’m always wearing penguin socks, and so they start getting me penguin socks too. At some point I had to place a moratorium on penguin socks, even as gifts (family members, if you’re reading this, I’m down to my last couple pairs and will accept penguin socks once more).
I have always liked gifts. Loved gifts. Giving and receiving. I love the element of surprise especially and have a temperamental distaste to giving preselected items from a list. For me, gifts, at their best, are things given as part of a relationship rather than as part of a negotiated exchange. When scholars define a gift economy, I often find they focus on the possibilities of giving without promise of return, some celebrating gift economies for offering ways of living in reciprocal community. I love that idea of gifts. But I am thinking now, as I look at a gathering of my gifted penguin collection, about how gifts allow for giving that may have nothing to do with the wants or needs of a recipient. Gifts, sometimes, are all about the imaginings of someone else. How we can press our desires onto another. How we long for someone to like the same things we do, to become the being we imagine they should be.
I have never bought a penguin for myself, but the ones I have been given fill a plastic bin that uses up a not insignificant amount of closet space in the one-bedroom apartment I share with my partner. If it were up to me, all my socks would be plain white or black. But the gifts I receive mark me. They checker me from toes to calves in tuxedo-clad flightless birds. This is another thing that gifts can do: mark us. At their best, gifts might mark us with the remnants of the people who have cared for us. And to receive a gift then is at times not only to willingly take but to willingly be taken by the giver, to step into their imagined ways of being. To step into a pair of grey socks so that scarved and beanied penguins might ski down the slopes of your legs. I am willing to do this. I could live without the penguins, but I am willing to keep on living with them—happy even. In fact, I am wishing now that I had not gone through that penguin letter set. How nice it would be to write this on paper with penguins decorating the other side.
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