genomeboy.com

‘Tis the season for a re-gifting pandemic:

Recently, Nancy’s 11-year-old daughter, Chun, aided and abetted by Nancy’s partner, Chrissie Schlesinger, presented Nancy with a birthday present that seemed oddly familiar. They had spotted a carving that Nancy had just been given by one of her students in their Lower Manhattan loft, and they added it to their own pile of gifts for her. This incident would seem to suggest the primacy of the behavioral model in re-gifting. Close investigation, however, points to the possibility of a strong genetic factor as well, probably on the maternal side.

The Frieds’ father, the late Dr. Paul Fried, was a prosperous Philadelphia physician. He and his wife, Grace, had a four-story town house and a country house, and employed a maid. Yet one day when driving back to the city with her three young daughters, Mrs. Fried spotted some boxes on the side of the Pennsylvania Turnpike.

“She pulled over,” Nancy remembers, “and we’re tearing these boxes open. They were filled with stockings. We took them back to the house and spent days sorting thousands of stockings in every shade. What was funny is my mother grew up in a wealthy home, it wasn’t like she was somebody who was deprived, and the fact is we all could have been killed.”