Got souvenirs?
This topic has been bugging me for some time. As you may know, I went on a road trip at the beginning of the summer with the intention to visit some places I had visited long ago and some places I had yet to visit but had always wanted to see. I never planned to take lots of pictures and create an amazing travelogue, something to equal tourism pamphlets. It was a personal trip. I only started taking pictures to send them home to prove I was where I was at each major stop, such as the Badlands of South Dakota, Devil's Tower in Wyoming, and Yellowstone and Glacier National Parks.
This topic has been bugging me for some time. As you may know, I went on a road trip at the beginning of the summer with the intention to visit some places I had visited long ago and some places I had yet to visit but had always wanted to see. I never planned to take lots of pictures and create an amazing travelogue, something to equal tourism pamphlets. It was a personal trip. I only started taking pictures to send them home to prove I was where I was at each major stop, such as the Badlands of South Dakota, Devil's Tower in Wyoming, and Yellowstone and Glacier National Parks.
It began with my grandparents who traveled around the world from the early days of commercial aviation to well into their retirement. They collected souvenirs from everywhere they visited - long before the shift to limiting how much you could bring onto an airplane. They stuffed souvenirs into every nook and cranny of their home. They gave many souvenirs to my mother (their daughter) and some to me. I was fascinated by all the things from far-away lands. That probably was what got me interested in traveling like them.
My mother tried to follow the family pattern by going on her own trips to places around the world. And she collected souvenirs - some of which I thought worthless. She put them around her home. She bought a curio cabinet just to display some of them. Looking back, I might suggest she was trying to keep up with her parents. The difference was that her parents brought back things which were unique, items you could only get if you went to those far-away places. By the time my mother did her international traveling, those same items could be found in stores in any suburban mall and weren't so unique.
My mother tried to follow the family pattern by going on her own trips to places around the world. And she collected souvenirs - some of which I thought worthless. She put them around her home. She bought a curio cabinet just to display some of them. Looking back, I might suggest she was trying to keep up with her parents. The difference was that her parents brought back things which were unique, items you could only get if you went to those far-away places. By the time my mother did her international traveling, those same items could be found in stores in any suburban mall and weren't so unique.
And that brings us to the Hurricane that swept through the Texas coast and destroyed my parents' retirement condo just off the beach. I spent a lot of time salvaging the souvenirs from that place. Who cares about clothing on hangers or dishes and cups? What about the sacks of bank records, or every kind of receipt imaginable? No, it was that curio cabinet's wares that I took. Also, my mother's coin collection she thought would be valuable one day (her father had collected rare coins, too, but her brother inherited that). I carefully packed the souvenirs into boxes - only the souvenirs I personally thought were "cool".
The point I dare make is that we don't need souvenirs. Sure, they bring a thrill in the moment, and perhaps a few moments later on. But we already have those memories; we can just bring them up to the surface. Maybe seeing a thing can help, maybe it doesn't matter. What does matter is that souvenirs pile up, get boxed up, get passed along, and unless destroyed by a hurricane, tend to last forever - and that's a mighty-long time. Even so, I still bought another t-shirt and mug on my latest trip back to that condo on the beach - sold and repurposed as a rental unit - just to have some closure to the place where my parents last lived.
(C) Copyright 2010-2023 by Stephen M. Swartz. All Rights Reserved. No part of this blog, whether text or image, may be used without me giving you written permission, except for brief excerpts that are accompanied by a link to this entire blog.
Violators shall be written into novels as characters who are killed off. Serious violators shall be identified and dealt with according to the laws of the United States of America.
