Moving Cup

When I was a child, our family had the tradition of the reading night. Instead of watching TV, one night a week we would pick out a book and everybody would read aloud one chapter and then pass it on to the next person.

Last Christmas, my mother decided to re-launch our common reading sessions. She picked the autobiography of a second-class celebrity, which she had gotten as a gift.
Not my cup of tea, but I didn’t complain. Over the years, I had learned that sometimes it’s better to say “Yes, Mum,” than risk an argument. While I was reading it aloud, I actually noticed that there were some paragraphs, which were quite funny, in a cynical way.

But then, I came to realize what my silent disagreement with my mother’s choice had caused: for my birthday, she gave me her copy of that book! “I remember you liked it at our reading night, so, now you can finish it – you hardly ever come to our place, so we can’t finish it together.” “Yes, mum, thank you.” I was not going to pick a fight with her on my birthday.

Three days later, a friend of mine saw the copy of the book lying on my desk: “Oh, I see you also got one. I wouldn’t have thought you'd read something like that.”
“It was a birthday gift.”
“I got one copy, too,” he told me, “but I keep it wrapped, so that I can give it to somebody else some day.”
I wonder if my mother had had the same plan...