Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth

And just why shouldn’t you look a gift horse in the mouth? Is it because horses have much stronger teeth that you would expect and tend to bite? Perhaps it’s the stench that eating dirty hay would create in their mouth and I doubt they rinse with Listermint daily. Or maybe it’s just really good advice not to look into the mouths of creatures that can take you out in a minute (this from a woman who once spent time underneath an 1,800 pound horse, but that’s a story for another time and it’s not in a Catherine the Great way either.) Also, did your mall have a store called “The Gift Horse” when you were growing up in the ’80s and liked to go to the mall and pretend you were in the movie “Valley Girl”? I got a pair of unicorn earrings and Michael Jackson poster there, both of which I am sure you can buy at Urban Outfitters right now (along with ugly shoes, ugly fake glasses, ugly sweaters, ugly pants and other ugly hipster sundries.) So why all of the gift talk? Well, Ogden Nash’s daughter and her husband want to tell you all about how great getting a gift is, in case you didn’t know already. I have a feeling they wrote this book, along with their others (“Who is at the door?”, “Where did Tuffy hide?”) from their well-heeled, very modern Upper East Side apartment all done up in white and green geometric patterns in between being fabulous at parties thrown by dowagers, drinking martinis and thanking their live-in maid for making streudel for tea with Mrs. Astor.  But, I digress in my seething jealous imagining of their Town and Country life…

Our heroine peers out from the greener side of the grass.

Probably your great-grandmother’s pearls, monogrammed stationery, a cashmere sweater and a stallion.

Because when you're this wealthy, the cops bring YOU gifts.

All I can think of is the David Sedaris essay I read this morning in which he tried to avoid using the word “blow” around the truck driver who picked him up and kept offering, um, pleasures untold in his tow truck. And how this is clearly porn for rule-followers.

“Oh, wow. Really, you shouldn’t have. No, really, you really should not have given a six-year-old girl a POLICE WHISTLE.” A doll, a nice baby doll with blinking eyes, now that’s a nice gift for a little girl, don’t you know?

(I love the floor, btw!) Oh, Bill, from up the block, you couldn’t even get it together to wrap the gift. You shoved it in a paper bag and got your mom to tie a ribbon around it. Well, at least he’s promising it to be something FUN!!!!! Which is good, since it is her birthday and she is sick in bed.

“OH! A gun! Of course!” I’m not sure what kind of upbringing Ogden Nash gave his kids, but where I was raised, you didn’t give firearms to kids for their sixth birthday. Of course, I was raised by Jews which means we no longer hunt, but read French Existentialist novels instead to scrape out a living. But still, I never knew that upper class white people gave each other weaponry for birthdays. Don’t they know you shouldn’t give away your secrets like this? Who knows what’s in that Pucci purse that white-haired lady at the club is carrying. What do you get for your seventh birthday? Hand grenade? Bowie knife, uzi? (All monogrammed, of course with fetching carrying cases.)

I think I’ll stick with my Michael Jackson poster, thank you very much.