Not all found objects are discovered, though. Some come to us from people we meet along the way. Take the airline gate agent who, when I mentioned I was going wine-tasting in 16)Tuscany but had yet to create an itinerary, began scribbling his recommendations—driving the Via Chiantigiana to Greve in Chianti, Radda in Chianti, Castellina in Chianti—on the back of my flight receipt (which I still have).
Or consider Ian Clark, the smart and smartly dressed tour guide who stood in the aisle of a bus and recited from memory Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18, “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” I was a teenager on my first trip to Europe, and my parents had booked us on a group tour to the birthplace of Shakespeare, Stratford-upon-Avon. A hopeful writer, I listened to Mr. Clark with rapt attention. When at one point he asked if anyone in our group knew the term, named after an English clergyman, for the transposition of letters or sounds of words in a sentence, I waited for a grown-up to answer. None did. “Spoonerism,” I replied (for William A. Spooner).
I can’t say who that pleased more, me or Mr. Clark. I think, perhaps, it was him. As the tour drew to a close, he emerged from a shop holding a little red hardcover book with gold lettering on the front:“The Shakespeare Birthday Book.” Each day of the year has a corresponding quotation from a work by Shakespeare. He 17)inscribed the book to me and, on a pale blue Post-it note, wrote five playful spoonerisms that he had shared during the tour, such as “Riding around on a well oiled bicycle” (as a spoonerism it would sound like “Riding around on a well boiled icicle”) and “Lighting fires in college”(or “Fighting liars in college”).
Since then, any time I’ve bought what I thought would be a beautiful souvenir, be it a wool skirt in Florence or a jacket in Madrid, I’ve been 18)left cold. Nearly all of it has been donated or given away.
What remains is a modest bin of ticket 19)stubs, hotel stationery and youth hostel pamphlets; postcards (a favorite from 20)Verona shows a crimson-lipped Juliet on the verge of stabbing herself atop a fallen Romeo); magazines (I take one from the country I’m in to easily recall the date and fashions); and 21)bric-a-brac (a Droste cocoa powder tin from Amsterdam, a plastic La Vieille Ferme wine bottle from Air France). Then there are the photos—including one of my laundry pinned to a clothes line below the open window of a room I was renting in 22)Liguria when I was in college.