As a callow youth, I was on a quest, searching for a unique personal identity. That quest, many decades later, produced two pieces of memorabilia. The first was a meerschaum pipe, acquired while wandering through Istanbul’s crowded outdoor markets. Imagining myself as a kind of late-teenage literary artiste, I splurged on the gorgeous pipe. I was sure its unique full-bent style would mark me as a pensively philosophical wordsmith.

At the time of the pipe purchase I was absorbed in the writings of Matsuo Basho, the seventeenth century Japanese Haiku poet. Basho was an old man writing a travelogue about his final journey through central Japan; I was on a hitchhiking journey around southern Europe. So it was a natural literary fit. Basho’s writing style was to put down a few descriptive paragraphs of his journey, follow them with a poem in the classic Haiku style, and then transition back to descriptive prose. Each poem would somehow reflect the emotional or artistic meanings of the portion of the journey he just described.  

One of those poems stood out for me. It came as the aging poet was on horseback, being led by his manservant across an open meadow:

Turn the head of your horse

Sideways across the field

So I can hear the cry of a cuckoo

I was so taken by the poem that I carefully carved it onto the bowl of the elegant meerschaum pipe. Eventually I lost track of said pipe—either it was stolen or I misplaced it, probably because I had quit smoking. So now it is memorabilia in memory only. As Ringo Starr once said about memorabilia: who knew you had to keep it.

There is another memorable symbol from that youthful era, which is still in my possession. In my early twenties I worked as a Peace Corps volunteer in a jungle area of northern Colombia. Some enlightened bibliophile in the Peace Corps office had supplied us volunteers with a box of carefully selected paperback books, knowing we would experience some long evenings away from the usual First World comforts and distractions. Several of the volumes were from Vintage Press, a New York book publisher. As a result I became familiar with the works of Jane Jacobs, William Faulkner, Joan Didion, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and others. All the paperbacks bore the enigmatic fiery sun logo of Vintage Press. 

The jungle town I worked in had a history of gold mining, and a large portion of the population were black Africans, brought over originally as slaves to work the gold mines. One of their descendants had become a street jeweler, and I approached him, Vintage book in hand, and asked  if he could make a small gold replica of the logo for me. He did an excellent job, and I doubled the few pesos he charged me for it. 

That medallion hangs on a loose string around my neck as I write this. I’m not exactly sure what its meaning is for me: reverence for nature as symbolized by the sun, respect for good literature, or the power of artistic craftsmanship. Memorabilia are mere objects when you acquire them. It is the passage of time and memory that layers them with significance, reminding us of particular moments, states of mind, or adventures. I do worry occasionally about losing the medallion, like I lost my meerschaum, but that is the nature of a memorabile: it must be out there, a visible mental trigger to earlier days and passions. Otherwise it is just a possession.

Our basement storeroom is chockablock full of boxes containing random items from our children’s childhood and highschool years. Whenever they visit I offer up a box or two for them to take home, but they refuse. So we keep them, knowing at some point a grade school award, a favorite doll or one of the dozens of other items in the boxes will suddenly have meaning. 

I suppose for elders like me, there is the risk of dwelling too much on the past. On the other hand, reflecting on memorabilia helps us define how we got to who we are.