Bee Travel
A Perpetual Gift
CHRISTINE HICKS- USTA Travel
I want a gift that keeps on giving. As I sat down to write this week's column, as so often happens, I look at an unforgiving piece of white paper. I perused the web a little, and was thwarted in my efforts at several junctures because my computer is old. It's four years old, but it's too old to accept information that sites want to give me. My screen isn't big enough and my memory isn't what it ought to be (in so many ways). As happy as I am with my computer, it soon won't give me what I want...because technology will have squeezed it to the brink of the junkyard.

I want a gift that keeps on giving.

No, not a newer computer, though I have pined for a laptop from time to time, a small one to travel with, one with a perpetual battery that would never crash. It would be virtually unbreakable, light, and have a big screen that's easy to read. The computer I have virtually ordered (and virtually cancelled - several times) is always outrageously costly, which is followed shortly thereafter by becoming wildly outmoded somewhere around the virtual shipping date.

No, I want a gift that keeps on giving.

As I organized my gift lists this year, it became increasingly clear that my priorities had shifted. My list was short, and the one I used to keep for myself (for "when people ask") was smaller, too. Indeed, the laptop didn't even make the list this year. What keeps coming back to me, time after time, is this notion that what I could really use is, well, more time. Regrettably, no one has any to sell. We don't seem to have any extra of this, even though it's free. We squander a good bit of it, and don't share enough of it.

Now, that's a gift that keeps on giving. Another gift that keeps on giving is memories. When I do peruse the internet for ideas, the virtual journey invariably brings back memories. Sometimes it's the place. Sometimes it's the circumstances. Sometimes it's a remote sensory connection I can't place, but find myself nonetheless in a reverie about a time, a place, a person, and how wonderful it was to be there, at that time, with that person.

That's a gift that will always give.

So, as you work on your holiday lists, crossing off "to do's" and "to gets", think about these things. The best gift of all is the gift of you. Give time to those around you, and make memories with them. Whether they're in your living room, or living out loud in downtown Prague or living out your dream trip, wherever that may be, the time you give, spent with friends, relatives, or friends you have yet to make, is the stuff of memories, and memories are the gift of a lifetime.

Give the gift that really does keep on giving. Spend time making memories.

(Christine Hicks-Usta has enjoyed more than 30 years of globetrotting as a member of the travel industry in various capacities. Direct questions to her at Bee Group Newspapers, P.O. Box 150, Buffalo, N.Y. 14231-0150.)