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Tuesday, October 28, 2014

Prized Souvenirs, Found for Free



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Items the author found or was given on trips to Europe.

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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