Shopping for Memories as a Parade of Destinations Comes and Goes

I love tchotchkes, gewgaws and bibelots as long as they come from someplace I’ve visited. My apartment is full of things collected in my travels that make me happy at home.

A drawing of a camel hangs over my mantel; I paid just $5 for it several years ago in Istanbul, but it cost 10 times that to frame it when I got home. By the front door there’s a wooden carving of a Balinese funeral procession, painted in red, green and gold. A Kashmiri rug I purchased in New Delhi lies on my living room floor. A miniature watercolor from County Clare, Ireland, given to me by my sister, Martha, to commemorate our bike trip there in 1996, is propped on a bookshelf by my desk. And I keep the soft leather slippers, called babouches, that I bargained for in Morocco (and got for $14) right by my bed.

Still, I am not a material girl or a shopping-mad female, even on faraway roads lined with marvelous, unfamiliar things to buy. In Oaxaca, Mexico, where I purchased a ceramic figurine of a woman paddling a boat loaded with flowers, or in Copenhagen, where I found a pink and white checked bag that always draws compliments, I shop only until I find one special item that seems to me to sum up the trip.

I seek out practical souvenirs, as does Carol Rivendell, co-owner of Wild Women Adventures, a Northern California tour company. “I like things I get to live with,” she says, “things I use, touch and see every day.” You might not call the ceramic dog that my friend Margaret Fleetwood got in Odessa on a Black Sea cruise practical, but in a sense it is, because, as she says, “He sits on a bookshelf I pass myriad times a day and amuses me.”

Size is an important issue in souvenir shopping; lugging around extra bags of loot is the last thing I want to do. So I like to bring home bars of soap, which smell of foreign places when I suds them up in the tub. My friend Penny Kaganoff favors jewelry, like the glass and gold necklace she bought on the island of Murano, near Venice. My widely traveled sister buys little things that can be used as Christmas tree ornaments, some made for that purpose, others adapted to it.

“This year I brought back Korean slippers, a lady in a fur coat from Russia’s Sakhalin Island, a wreath from Berlin’s Charlottenburg Palace and a wooden fish from Japan,” she says. “It’s a nice way to remember trips and friends overseas. But I think I’ll need two trees next year to hold all these little treasures.”

I rarely spend more than $50 for souvenirs on a trip, because I’d rather use my money for concert tickets or white-water rafting. I suppose I learned my parsimonious ways from my father, who keeps what I consider the world’s best souvenir in a box on his dresser. It’s a small, smooth, mottled Petoskey rock found more than 30 years ago at a beach on Lake Michigan, where my family spent several summer vacations when I was just a towheaded tyke. Still, when I hold it in my hand, I fancy I remember the feel of round beach stones under wet kid-sized tennis shoes. So I collect rocks when I hike in the Sonoran Desert and shells on the beach in French Polynesia, which I keep above my kitchen sink in a martini glass from Tiffany’s on Fifth Avenue in New York.

The Petoskey rock explains why I love little, kitschy things from far away. Trips are as ephemeral as chocolates unless you can find a way to get them back. Pictures don’t do it for me; they aren’t usable on a day-to-day basis. I show them for a month or two after I get back and then put them away.

A true souvenir, like the blue print cotton quilt I bought in Jaipur, India, five years ago, greets me in the morning, comforts me when I’m sick, and makes me think of the day I bought it. From my hotel in the suburbs of Jaipur, I caught a pedicab, driven by a man who took me first to the Hawa Mahal. He waited while I toured the intricately built 18th century royal apartment complex, took me to a good vegetarian restaurant nearby, asked whether I liked Muslims, and perked up when I said I was in the market for a Jaipur cotton spread.

It was getting dark, and I knew that Indian pedicab drivers are often in cahoots with shopkeepers, taking tourists to showrooms to get percentages on their purchases. Still, I let him take me to a place near an American chain hotel, where I found the blue, king-sized Indian cotton spread of my dreams, and bargained it down to about $30. On my bed in California, it remains one of my touchstones. Every time I look at it, I try to figure out what made the Jaipur pedicab driver ask me whether I like Muslims.

Above her fireplace, Annette Zientek, owner of the Internet women’s travel catalog Christinecolumbus.com, has a “tree of life,” made of hide, used in Balinese shadow puppet shows, depicting nirvana on one side and chaos on the other. It reminds her almost every day of the young craftsman who came to her hotel in the arts and crafts center of Ubud, produced it from a valise and demonstrated how he paints with one hair of a squirrel tail. When things get tense and crazy, she reminds herself that, like the souvenir on her mantel, life has a calmer, happier side.

I collected the same souvenir on two visits to Helsinki: a small, delicate glass pitcher designed by Finnish artist and architect Alvar Aalto. It reminded me of the blue spring Scandinavian sky and somehow helped me think clearly. But back at home, I broke them both, a misfortune that will be righted only when I return to Finland.

A wise man whose name I can’t recall said that memories are scattered everywhere around the world and that we must travel to seek them out. The truth in that thought, bound up in souvenirs like my Moroccan slippers, keeps me traveling and shopping for memories.