I hosted a happy hour recently for sailing friends, using cocktails as lure and lubricant for a group whose conversation inevitably devolves in one-upmanship of ridiculous but always entertaining sea stories. Laura inspected my walls as if she were planning a heist at the Louvre. “You have a lot of mementos,” she noted as she scrutinized a paddle from Tahiti and a planter in the shape of a head from Sicily. “They must trigger memories and evoke joy.”
I stifled a snort. “Evoke joy?” I can’t imagine those words entering my consciousness much less my vocabulary, but she did have a point. I keep reminders of my travels all around me, like a knickknack security blanket. “Which is your favorite?” She asked.
It was a simple question, but I was dumbstruck. I had never thought of ranking them. Can you have a favorite corner of a security blanket? After college, my souvenirs got an upgrade, reflective of a modest uptick in my income. I went from keychains and magnets to marginally more upscale keepsakes that told the story of a place where at some point, I had hoisted sail. There was a hand carved chessboard from Croatia, a swordfish dagger from Tonga, a silhouette painting from the Dominican Republic, and comedy/tragedy theater masks from Greece. These odds and ends weren’t necessarily expensive. In fact, some of them came from kitschy kiosks or silly souvenir huts on distant beaches. But at the time, they had meant enough to me to have hauled them home to proudly nail to my walls.
My mother called them “dustibles,” collectibles that become clutter if not reigned in. I mixed the cocktails and thought. Why do I have them? Do I need them? When will I run out of wall space?
When I was a kid, we lived in Egypt and our house was a poor man’s museum of tiny silver chariots drawn by furious looking horses with flared nostrils, and ubiquitous ashtrays emblazoned with the pyramids ready to catch an arcing ash from a lit but forgotten cigarette. With her own haul of curated curiosities, my mother had nothing on me.
I’m not a collector by nature. I would no more consider acquiring Lladro figurines then hanging on to old socks, but these bits and pieces from my travels hold a special, if not critical, place in my heart and history. I can look at my carnival mask from Puerto Rico and be instantly transported not only to a place, but a time.
Like smells, souvenirs can teleport us back to another age, another set of emotions, and a completely different bunch of youthful expectations about what the future held. These shells, colored plates, and wooden fish mobiles are evidence of a life lived. They document where I went and what I felt was important at the time. One glance at the head plantar and I’m back on a boat cruising off the coast of Sicily where legend says that a local girl fell in love with a visiting Moor. When she learned he already had a wife back home, she killed him and used his skull to plant herbs. Not a great conversation starter for a Tinder date, but a highlight in my haul of travel trinkets.
In my busy workaday life, I find it’s easy to forget what once made me laugh or what seemed like a big deal, but these tokens are affirmations that I went somewhere, did something, and maybe was reshaped a tiny bit by all that I figuratively collided with while traveling by boat. There’s comfort in these doodads and stories that not even photos can capture.
I added more tequila to the next batch of margaritas and thought, “Yeah, they do evoke joy, and I don’t even mind dusting them.”
This article was originally published in the May 2026 issue.
