The
opera was over, and the loiterers on the steps of the Palais Garnier
peeled off into the night. Something glinted on the dark sidewalk. I
bent down. It was the face of Marianne, symbol of the French Republic,
on a copper 2-cent euro coin. I slipped it into the pocket of my trench
coat, just as I had tucked stones from the Irish Sea into my jeans in
Northern Ireland the previous year, and dropped a fragrant wine cork
from a bar in La Boqueria into my bag in Barcelona a few years before
that.
There
are orphaned things in the world — coins, books, fallen leaves — that
when you chance upon them feel like winks from the universe. They are at
once the most ubiquitous and intimate souvenirs. I’ve returned from
Europe with superb bags and scarves, yet my prized mementos are the
things I didn’t buy. They’re the things I found. Or maybe they found me.
Sprigs
of lavender, maps, matchbooks: They’re ordinary. Yet acquiring them in
faraway places seems to infuse them with mystery. Suddenly that 2-cent
coin was some cosmic affirmation that I was on the right path. Even if I
wasn’t, plucking a coin from a sidewalk in heels necessitates slowing
down — which is precisely what one must do to savor a spring night in
Paris that’s fleeting even as it unfolds. As I walked the Rue Auber to
the Rue Scribe, I thought of the countless “lucky” pennies picked up and
casually handed to me by loved ones during strolls back in New York. I
thought of how, for centuries, people enacted similar rituals, and how
they would continue to do so after I’m gone.
Three
smooth stones from Northern Ireland, now huddled like wise men on my
desk, prompt similar contemplation. Who knows how old they are, what
currents carried them to the shore of Cushendun where I fished them from
a sandy pool of water on a summer afternoon at the lip of a cave —
bright white reminders that nature endures.
We
typically think of objects as “useful or aesthetic,” “necessities or
vain indulgences,” as Sherry Turkle of the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology puts it in “Evocative Objects: Things We Think With.” Yet
through essays by humanists, artists and scientists she shows how
objects are of central importance to thought and emotion. An object, she
writes, is “a companion in life experience.”
Sometimes
it takes years for such companions to materialize. In April I found a
mystery novel hidden-in-plain-sight in the Medieval-inspired gardens of
the Musée de Cluny. The sky was white and there was a damp chill in the
air, the kind that feels like it’s seeping into your spine. Having
failed to find some Parisian address, I retreated to the Cluny where I
began reading a series of posters about the landscaping. It was at the
last one that I spotted a paperback abandoned in a corner: “L’affaire
est close” by Patricia Wentworth, about one of the earliest female
sleuths. That tickled me.
But what really turned the afternoon around was a sticker on the cover that said Bookcrossing.com. For the uninitiated, Bookcrossing encourages people to read and hide books in the world for others to find. I was buoyant.
I had been wanting to discover a novel in the wild for years, and at
long last there it was, 3,600 miles from home. “L’affaire est close” is a
keepsake of that trip and of the generosity of an anonymous stranger.
It’s also a reminder that not getting what you want can sometimes lead
to something even better.
Unlike
clothes or jewelry, the value of such souvenirs cannot be understood
unless their owner shares their provenance and significance. A book or
coin from your travels is a secret object; only you know its meaning.
There’s something nice about that. It can be kept on a shelf or coffee
table; a trinket or objet d’art to anyone who doesn’t know better. This
is as true today as it was hundreds of years ago when people filled
curiosity cabinets with tokens from their adventures.
Not
all found objects are discovered, though. Some come to us from people
we meet along the way. Take the airline gate agent who, when I mentioned
I was going wine-tasting in Tuscany but had yet to create an itinerary,
began scribbling his recommendations — driving the Via Chiantigiana to
Greve in Chianti, Radda in Chianti, Castellina in Chianti — on the back
of my flight receipt (which I still have).
Or
consider Ian Clark, the smart and smartly dressed tour guide who stood
in the aisle of a bus and recited from memory Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18,
“Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” I was a teenager on my first
trip to Europe, and my parents had booked us on a group tour to the
birthplace of Shakespeare, Stratford-upon-Avon. A hopeful writer, I
listened to Mr. Clark with rapt attention. When at one point he asked if
anyone in our group knew the term, named after an English clergyman,
for the transposition of letters or sounds of words in a sentence, I
waited for a grown-up to answer. None did. “Spoonerism,” I replied (for
William A. Spooner).
I
can’t say who that pleased more, me or Mr. Clark. I think, perhaps, it
was him. As the tour drew to a close, he emerged from a shop holding a
little red hardcover book with gold lettering on the front: “The
Shakespeare Birthday Book.” Each day of the year has a corresponding
quotation from a work by Shakespeare. He inscribed the book to me (in
calligraphy, no less) and, on a pale blue Post-it note, wrote five
playful spoonerisms that he had shared during the tour, such as “Riding
around on a well oiled bicycle” (as a spoonerism it would sound like
“Riding around on a well boiled icicle”) and “Lighting fires in college”
(or “Fighting liars in college”).
Since
then, any time I’ve bought what I thought would be a beautiful
souvenir, be it a wool skirt in Florence or a jacket in Madrid, I’ve
been left cold. Nearly all of it has been donated or given away.
What
remains is a modest bin (just one; I’m not auditioning for an episode
of “Hoarders”) of ticket stubs, hotel stationery and youth hostel
pamphlets; postcards (a favorite from Verona shows a crimson-lipped
Juliet on the verge of stabbing herself atop a fallen Romeo); magazines
(I take one from the country I’m in to easily recall the date and
fashions); and bric-a-brac (a Droste cocoa powder tin from Amsterdam, a
plastic La Vieille Ferme wine bottle from Air France). Then there are
the photos — including one of my laundry pinned to a clothes line below
the open window of a room I was renting in Liguria when I was in
college. I was afraid of many things back then, including renting rooms
from strange men in Liguria. Some photos we keep as nods to who we used
to be.
One
of my only successful souvenir purchases is but a few months old: a
pair of gray Bensimon sneakers from a temporary shop on the bank of
Canal St.-Martin. When I pull the laces tight, I think of my long walks
in Paris. Through the thin rubber soles I feel the cracks and unevenness
of New York City’s sidewalks, evocative of cobblestones.
On
occasion I glance at one of these memorable items and wonder: What if
there was a fire? What if the little red Shakespeare book, still in
pristine condition, was destroyed? Or the coin that winked from a dark
sidewalk along the Palais Garnier? This is, after all, an age of
emergency go-bags and super storms. Yet the conclusion is always the
same: It would be a shame. But having already lived with the book and
other tokens for many years, I’m beginning to think it might not matter.
“Souvenir”
comes from the French word for “remember.” Everything it represents,
marks or makes you wonder exists as long as you live and remember. In
this way the ultimate souvenir is not a coin. Or a book. Or even a thing
as ancient and everlasting as a stone. It’s you.
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