Later that same year, during the Christmas season, while I had my good friend Matt living as a roommate in a rental house in Los Gatos, I was scrambling to wrap a present and went searching the house for wrapping paper. I found a roll, got ready to wrap one of the gifts, and was disappointed to see that there was just enough paper on the tube to wrap it once, and only once. Even more bizarre was the discovery that, instead of leaving it loose or putting a rubber band around to hold the remnant in place, my roommate had used a piece of tape to secure it. That seemed crazy to me, as it made it even more difficult to get the paper off the tube. Yet there was enough paper to just wrap the gift, so I completed the task at hand and went about my business.
A few days later, it was Christmas, and we exchanged a couple of token gifts, likely a Gary Larson daily calendar in both directions, which was pretty much a standard routine, along with a CD or who knows what. Then he started to relay that he had another gift for me, but for the life of him, he could not find it. He'd searched high and low but to no avail. He didn't know where it was, but somewhere in the house was the movie poster for "Wings of Desire".
I was thrilled at the prospect of the poster, as it was something I really wanted to have, but equally disappointed to hear of its disappearance. As he continued to explain what little he could about its sudden absence, he said, "I had it all wrapped in a tube and everything". And right then, the little bulb above my head got a sudden jolt of electricity. My eyes widened, jaw dropped, and instead of saying a word, I raised a single index finger as if to say "hold that thought" while I ran out to the garbage cans on the outside of the house, which had not yet gone out for their weekly pickup the following day.
After I'd used the last remnant of wrapping paper from the roll I found, the one that was just long enough to cover the tube itself, which was taped into place, I folded the tube in half and threw it into the trash. Because, you know, it was just an empty tube. Or was it?
I found and removed the folded cardboard tube from deep inside the trash can, took it into the house, unfolded it, and gently removed the creased "Wings of Desire" poster from within. I'd mistaken a wrapped gift, one in a tube, to be the final bit of available wrapping paper in the house. Fortunately for me, the damage to the poster was not too extensive, and once it was put into a frame, the crinkles were barely detectable without looking for them. I still have it, framed and stored in the attic at the current moment. I am now considering bringing it to work to serve as a daily reminder of the message conveyed in the film. I came across the image of the poster the other day while drafting the aforementioned post, and it's hard to look at it without remembering how close I came to never receiving the gift I would have unknowingly thrown away.