Something happens to me when I travel. I become a magpie.
At home, I’m fine. At home, I am, if anything, a little severe about stuff — I don’t need it, I don’t want more of it, the drawers are full enough. But put me on the far side of an ocean, wandering a foreign flea market or a medieval souk or even the cluster of souvenir booths that surround every popular tourist site, and some ancient acquisitive circuit switches on. Suddenly, every shiny useless thing starts calling to me in the same low voice: That. Bring that home.
I’m sure the Germans have one of those compound nouns to describe this behavior. Something like touristiktrinketschleiben, probably. But I cannot walk past a souvenir stand or pass a flea-market table without stopping — and not just stopping, but picking things up, turning them over, holding a tarnished Blue Mosque souvenir spoon to the light with the exact expression of a man who might actually buy a tarnished Blue Mosque souvenir spoon. Which is a fatal thing to do, because it wakes the guy up. He’s been dozing behind the table, thumbing his phone, and my performance of interest is so persuasive that he rouses himself, waves a hand at the whole sad pile, and says the words that have separated me from my money on four continents: Eeez guld.
It’s not gold. It’s never gold. I know that. But all too often, I buy it anyway, or I buy the next thing, because the problem is never the object. The problem is me.
In Tbilisi, there’s a bridge that spans the Kura River called the Dry Bridge, and along the footpath, there’s a daily open-air national garage sale where the whole of the Soviet century seems to have been carried out of somebody’s apartment and laid on a blanket. Old postcards. Fountain pens. Soviet kitsch, medals, pins, and little Lenins. Rusted jewelry older than any country currently issuing passports. And, of course, the usual stratum of pure crap, the souvenirs, which I cannot walk past without picking up and turning over and — see above — rousing the keeper of the table off his phone.
There are also, alarmingly, Zippo-style lighters emblazoned with the likeness of Stalin, with STALIN etched in large red letters. For about a half a second, I thought about buying one — Hey! Fun! — until I remembered the nearly 100 million poor souls that Joseph Stalin dispatched in his capacity as one of the 20th century’s greatest villains, which I think we can all agree is a contest with some serious competition. So, no to the STALIN lighter. I don’t mind buying crap, but I won’t participate in the Che Guevara-ification of Marshal Stalin.
And anyway, after years of struggling with this affliction, I made a pact with myself: I have caged the magpie. He is allowed exactly two things, and no more.
The first is a souvenir pen — one of those terrible, cheap ones they sell everywhere, the kind that says I HEART TBILISI down the barrel and that will run out of ink before I get home. The second is a patch. A little embroidered patch of the flag of whatever country I’m in. It’s the kind you’re supposed to sew onto your backpack, which I would absolutely do if it were 1984 and I were a college kid on his summer Eurail trip with a backpack. What I am is a man in his 60s with a Rimowa. So the patch goes to the local dry cleaners back home, along with my old safari jacket, and the woman there with the sewing machine sews it on for me. I don’t wear that jacket often, but when I do, I get a lot of compliments on it. Or, at least, I get a lot of remarks that I take to be complimentary.
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The pen is different. I just drop it in the jar by the phone with all the other pens, the dead ones, and the hotel ones, and the bank ones, and I forget it completely. And then some morning months later — when it’s cold, or wet, or your mood has gone bleak and hopeless for no reason you can name — I’ll need to write something down, and I’ll reach into the jar without looking, and my hand will come out holding I HEART TBILISI. And for a second, a good long second, I’ll be back in the Caucasus in the summer, wandering a market in the sun, defenseless and happy and a very long way from home.
That’s what I bought. Not a pen. That.
Rob Long is a television writer and producer, including as a screenwriter and executive producer on Cheers, and the co-founder of Ricochet.com.