Gifts That Stay Gifts

One of the little ironies of this time of year is the amount of time we spend dealing with gifts. Planning, discovering, suggesting, hunting, buying, hiding, wrapping, delivering, receiving, unwrapping, and then finding a place for ... gifts. And come January, they suddenly aren't gifts anymore: they're now just some more of our stuff.

As gift-crazed as we currently arc, it always strikes me when in "The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle" Watson finally shows up on Holmes's doorstep a couple days after Christmas to wish him compliments of the season. Dr. Watson immediately warms his hands by the fire and it is quickly apparent that there is nothing in them. Sherlock Holmes doesn't give him anything either, so it would appear that the two had an established tradition of not getting each other anything. Since they were first brought together for economic reasons ... lean times causing them both to need a room-mate, that isn't altogether surprising.

But just because Watson showed up at 221B Baker Street empty-handed on that frosty December day, don't think that both men weren't there bearing gifts. Dr. Watson would never let us forget that little fact.  

"It is with a heavy heart," the doctor wrote in "The Final Problem," "that I take up my pen to write these the last words in which I shall ever record the singular gifts by which my friend Mr. Sherlock Holmes was distinguished."

Watson writes several times of his friend's "singular gifts," and he definitely doesn't mean the kind with ribbons on them. And Holmes has many, most of which are fairly obvious. Oddly enough neither of the two things he is specifically cited in the Canon for being gifted at are detective skills: In The Sign of the Four McMurdo praises his boxing ability and Watson writes of his skill at improvisa-tion on the violin.  

Two very different gifts, both of which required a bit of effort on Holmes's part. Not all gifts are given without cause ... some are even earned, especially in the case of Sherlock Holmes. I've long contended that Watson actually does Holmes a disservice when referring to his "gifts." The skills Holmes exhibits in the Canon didn't miraculously appear from the blue.

He studied. He experimented. He trained. If we are going to call Sherlock Holmes's abilities "gifts," we must remember that he gave a good share of them to himself.  

True, there is a certain genetic side of things. In "The Greek Interpreter," Holmes and Watson actually discuss the matter: "The point under discussion was, how far any singular gift in an individual was due to his ancestry and how far to his own earty training."  

Holmes seems to be taking the genetic side of the argument, and he serves up his brother Mycroft as evidence. Ironically, Mycroft is as good an argument against heredity as for. He got the same basic genes, and he can do the observation/deduction trick. But Mycroft is no Sherlock, and that difference seems due to training.  

But Sherlock Holmes wasn't the only gifted resident of 221B Baker Street.  

"You have a grand gift of silence, Watson," Holmes remarked in "Twisted Up." It seems a silly gift, unless one looks at the bigger picture. And to do that, one must pair that remark with another by Holmes in "Illustrious Client:"  

"Perhaps you may meet her before we are through, and you can use your own gift of words."  

Words were Watson's gift. That much should be obvious from the sixty stories he produced. And from Holmes's second remark, we can see that Watson's way with words included both those spoken and those on paper. Just as the freedoms in our Bill of Rights guarantee us the freedom not to do whatever they offer, so too does Watson's gift with words include the gift of knowing when nor to use words: the gift of silence.  

Whether Watson's great gift was due to ancestry or training, we can't speculate. Watson's brother never shows up in the stories, and what all we do learn of him is that he had a drinking problem.  Bat whether gifts such as Holmes and Watson possessed are learned, genetic, or just plain Heaven-sent, the point best illustrated by the two friends is that everyone has some sort of gift. Sherlock Holmes was the sort we traditionally con- sider "gifted." His talents were a bit more flamboyant, a bit more dramatic. He was an obvious genius, and a ground-breaking entrepreneur in a career all his own that made him a good income. But John Watson, the "ordinary guy" of the pair, was no slouch. His writings have become literary classics, without which all of Holmes's showmanship would have been forgotten years ago.  

So no matter what your hands hold when you stop to give your friends the compliments of the season this year, remember the gifts you carry that you'll still be carrying when the season is done.  

(Printed in Plugs & Dottles, January 1997)