Arnie Weissmann
I live in a New York City apartment, neither tiny nor sumptuous by NYC standards. Storage is the space under beds rather than in an attic or garage.
I'm a collector, and I like to bring something back from my travels: A pack of Construction Worker cigarettes from North Korea; a jar of crap from Romania (translation: "carp"); a set of espresso cups from Kurdistan emblazoned with the words "Tomatoes. Refresh your feeling!"
You know, the typical stuff.
Finally, my wife gently laid down the law: One in, one out. Before I buy something, I should think about what I already have that I like less and am willing to remove from the apartment to make space for the new acquisition.
But too many things are irresistible. Not only souvenirs but art, which, I sadly discover upon my return, is sometimes more to my taste than my wife's.
Rather than replace existing inventory, I started bringing new acquisitions to my office in Secaucus, N.J. Occasionally, it's put on display there, but surface and wall space being finite, it's often stuck under my desk, out of sight, waiting for the day when, perhaps, my family moves out of Manhattan and ends up in a house big enough for me to have a home office and (in my mind) unlimited surface and walls.
But before that day could arrive, an apocalyptic announcement appeared in my inbox: Northstar Travel Group, Travel Weekly's parent company, is planning to move its headquarters when its lease expires later this summer. Following a trend in commercial real estate, in the new office no one will have proprietary space. Offices and cubicles will be available on a first-come, first-served basis, so the space where you work might differ from day to day. (This model is called "hoteling.")
To be fair, I travel so much that, pre-pandemic, I was perhaps in the office an average of one day a week. Maybe less. There is no logical reason that Northstar should lease space that sits vacant more than 300 days a year.
Or rather, lease space for my souvenirs 300-plus days a year.
So I spent most of last week boxing up my office. Not only souvenirs but miscellaneous trip-related brochures and paper from six file drawers and the contents of three large bookcases filled with guidebooks, travel essays, directories, phrase books, books on writing and language, antiquarian travel books, business books, books written by travel professionals and a few novels that I read during lunch hours.
Did I just hear you think, "Hoarder!"?
I don't think I am, and my experience last week filling 26 boxes with my exiled possessions, destined for a storage unit, reinforced their true value, and the value of souvenirs in general, even those that sit under a desk for a decade or more.
In fact, especially those that sit under a desk. The ones aboveground become somewhat invisible over time. Taken for granted, to some extent. But unearthing forgotten souvenirs was much more than a trip down memory lane; I felt it touched on the essence and value of travel itself.
When I told my wife that I thought souvenirs might be an interesting topic for a column, she said, "You're a collector. I'm not a collector. It will only appeal to other collectors."
Perhaps. But above all, I think of myself as a collector of experiences. And in cleaning out my office, I came to better understand the connection between the experience economy and the material world. It's a bit yin yang, or even inside/outside.
The travel experience is ultimately internal. In the best of circumstances, it shapes your viewpoints and gives you a better understanding of the world. What I discovered last week is that sorting through the external -- the physical remnants of past trips -- can reawaken past experiences, even more meaningfully than reviewing photos.
Seeing a forgotten purchase sparked a memory not only of the thing itself but the circumstances surrounding where I got the thing. I was surprised at how many times I had not given a thought in years to a particular time and place I'd traveled to. Souvenirs can resurrect something that lies dormant internally. I found that an experience could be relived thousands of miles away and decades after it happened. It was more like time travel than a time capsule.
I've come to believe that photography sometimes distorts the past rather than enlightens it. Too often, the image you capture replaces the actual memory; one begins to call to mind an image in a photo rather than the fullness of what was actually seen. Even before the era of Instagram and posed, curated images, a picture could be a deceptively incomplete representation of experience.
But the right souvenir, like a smell or sound, can revitalize feelings and lessons learned in a place that, with the passage of time, no longer exists.