SOUVENIR. Even the word is beautiful. It has that gentle, whispery sound
of memory brushing by. A wonderfully inclusive label, it can apply to
anything, because anything can be a souvenir, any object whose real
value lies in its association with a past journey — or, I suppose, a
person. A souvenir of a city. A souvenir of a love affair. Something
that may have started as an inconvenience (how will I find room in my
suitcase?) but on arrival home makes its way onto the mantel as a
keepsake of delight. If it is a souvenir, it can transcend kitsch, at
least for your lifetime. You are the keeper of its value.
But how does one make the case for souvenirs with so much Anti-Stuff
propaganda in the air? We are living in an age in which it is considered
morally superior to be a minimalist — not that I’ve ever met a real
live one, mind you. We are supposed to stop accumulating things, and
start shedding. This presents a serious problem for travelers and their
souvenirs. And let’s face it: We are all travelers on this journey
called Life.
When I open my crammed linen closet, thinking that this time I will
purge, I am faced with souvenirs. The light winter blanket I keep at the
foot of my bed when the autumn leaves begin to color came from a tent
in India. The brilliantly embroidered cotton spread that covers my
sheets in summer came from a tiny shop in Casablanca. I get under the
covers, and dream of where I’ve been.
End of purge. The same thing happens as I dust my souvenirs: a teacup
from Japan, a bit of coral from Florida. I am cast adrift on currents of
remembrance.
So I am going to take a radical stance against the Anti-Stuffers: Stuff
it. Some of us — dare I say it, most of us — love our stuff. After
struggling for years with my untoward attachments to my things, after
resisting exotic bazaars and stands selling trinkets, I am declaring
that I love my stuff.
And why shouldn’t I? Shopping, after all, is an essential travel
experience — a profoundly interesting way to understand a culture. (And
that’s as far as I’m going with rationalizations.) I look for great
souvenirs no matter where I am, including the most rural, out of the
way, desolate, no-shopping zones in any guidebook. You cannot take me on
a hiking trip without my finding a souvenir somewhere near the trail or
the parking lot, or at the bus or train depot. Driftwood from a
Northern California beach or a geode from a Colorado rock shop will do
the trick.
And I am a fast shopper, even an impatient shopper. In the blink of an
eye an object will twinkle out at me. I can count, among my perfect
finds, tea towels from an island off Canada, crude, fragrant bars of
lavender soap from Marseilles, a stiff boot brush from a tiny hamlet in
Italy, a tin cup from a street booth in India. And every single time I
reach for that towel or that cup, I can hear and smell and see its natal
surroundings.
Not that you actually have to go to Turkey, or India, or Kenya any
longer to actually have hookahs on the bookshelf or weavings on your bed
or kilims gracing your floors. Remember those days? Not so long ago, an
ancient, faded bit of cloth mounted in a shadow box fixed to the wall
was the sign of an intrepid traveler who had wandered into the souks of
Afghanistan. No longer. Such is the appeal of travel that our retailers
have captured its essence and brought it home for us. You can now go
around the corner to your local Pottery Barn and your home will look
like that of a globe-trotter. Actually, why leave home? Get online and
shop your wanderlust.
My older son, who now loves to travel, developed a strong affection for
souvenirs of world monuments when he was a child. By the time he was in
junior high school his night table featured a neat display of miniature
monuments: the Eiffel Tower, the Arc de Triomphe, a Leaning Tower of
Pisa, a Big Ben. None of which he had yet seen. My son’s souvenirs — he
was easy to shop for when I went on business trips — were anticipatory,
promises of travel, much like the handsome brass vajra, a small ritual
weapon that oddly resembles a baby rattle, said to represent firmness of
spirit, that sits on my desk. In reality, it was purchased at a
consignment shop in Westchester, but in truth it is a souvenir of
intention, of the hope that I might some day make a trip to Nepal.
Contrary to the Anti-Stuffers, I am convinced that we need a certain
number of souvenirs in our lives, a healthy dose of remembering that we
found respite, an escape from the daily grind, on far shores. Such stuff
is good for the soul. It moves in and out of our lives on great,
eternal tidal swells. If you get rid of your souvenirs, soon more will
wash right back into your home, because stuff, like body weight, has a
set point, ingeniously and particularly calibrated for each and every
one of us, so that no matter what you get rid of, you will soon be
packing in more, or you will be unhappy.
The Buddhists will tell us that attachment causes suffering. This
particular phrase has so perniciously entered my consciousness that it
alone causes suffering. I have thought long and hard about it. Even as I
was fondling beautiful teacups in Kyoto — surely a place conducive to
sensitizing one to the perils of attachment — feeling the heft of fired
clay in my hand, running a finger along a vein of lustrous glaze,
weighing up which vessel I would buy, and trying to calculate conversion
rates, I thought about how another new attachment to a thing would
bring on new suffering. And I threw caution to the cash machine, yet
again.
Perhaps I just don’t get the Buddhist way of souvenirs. For I think of attachment as the stuff of life.
Which brings us around to what I have come to think of as the Problem of
the Snail. Rooted somewhere in every traveler’s psyche is an atavistic
affection for a small, slimy creature that carries only what it needs on
its back. Some of us might consider this an appealing metaphor for
never having to leave home; it is permanently attached to you, as it
were. However, I believe that the classic interpretation, the lesson for
people of a certain mind-set today, is that you should own only what
you can carry. Corollary: Travel with only what you can carry on. Fat
chance.
We are not snails. We are never going to become snails. We travel
cheerfully through the world, awed — and goaded — by the variety of
human treasure. And we accumulate things that are destined to become
charming, quirky guests in our homes, guests who just sit there, quietly
collecting the patina of age. Age makes them better things. Indeed,
rather than listening to the snails, we would do well to realize that we
have things to learn from our stuff. Things about radiance, redolence
and individuality. Our souvenirs remind us of lives well-lived.
Sometimes I think about leaving behind this world on that last, ultimate
journey where there are no boarding gates, no secret codes for who goes
first, no scheduled departures even. When I think of no longer being
here, I do not think that my children will sit around and remember the
way I made muffins using every ingredient that happened to be left in
the refrigerator, nor do I assume they will remember the way I turned
down the corner of their blankets for them at bedtime.
No. I think about my souvenirs and how my children — even though they
will take their own journeys in this world, and bring home their own
souvenirs — will inherit them. I think about how they had better keep my
stuff, because it was once precious to me, and it graced the homes in
which they grew up. Because my souvenirs contain the traces of a life I
carved through this world. My children will look at the wood heron from
Massachusetts and remember how it was always silhouetted against a
window, looking longingly into the marsh. They will page through those
gorgeous volumes of Dickens novels from that quaint London bookshop and
know that there is always a good story handy, waiting for them to turn
to it, no matter what the interior weather. They will wipe clean a piece
of pottery from Japan and thank it for holding yet another cup of tea.
