Head Trips
Our most treasured souvenirs are steeped in home, and the flight from it.
Puppet outside a gift shop, Oaxaca. 16:9clue via Flickr.
Every morning my toddler wants to go upstairs to our guest room, to stare up at shelves of books interspersed with a few cherished items: a piece of petrified wood I brought back from a reporting trip to Myanmar, a worn mannequin hand I purchased deep in a Mexico City flea market, a 1950s cocktail mixer printed with recipes for classic Cuban cocktails, filled with ballpoint pens from hotels where I stayed in California, Vermont, and Portugal.
My son makes toys out of these objects. He shakes the mannequin hand and laughs. He removes the pens and puts them on the floor, where we make a grid out of them, and then he puts them back
