We collect things. Today’s collection comes from our travels. Buenos Aires was today’s find as my wife was cleaning out things. Where “cleaning out” means to give up on hanging on to things from Buenos Aires.
What kinds of things? A receipt from Gout Cafe (loved the place), a bag from Kentucky Cafe (pizza, cheesy pizza), a two peso note with an inscription (este billete …), a sealed bag of postcards, a map of the city, a flyer for an art show for engraved wood, wood block?, and much more.
Going through the pile of stuff we alternate between the joy of remembering, like the wonderful foods from Gout, to the “why do we have this?” Despite of needing to get rid of the stuff. A map of Buenos Aires? Really? Do we need that? In Portland, Oregon, thousands of miles away with very dim prospects of returning to that city.
We have similar collections from Bejing, Guanajuato, Bogota, Madrid, Milan, Grenada, Bali, London, Frankfurt, Oaxaca, Cancún, Turin, and other places I cannot bring to mind now.
The difficult is throwing away this ephemera is we pick up most of them and memories flood through us. A plastic bag, the thin flimsy kind you get to carry things home again, triggers a memory of a cheese pizza with a thick layer of cheese, so much we were astounded by it. And they offered pizzas with extra cheese. gawd it was delicious. Almost enough to return to the city. If the travel there did not take 15 hours of travel time (not including getting to the airport, waiting in advance at the airport, going through customs, a cab ride to the city, the total time is closer to 22 hours, maybe more) well OK, there are other wonderful things to see, do, eat (oh gawd yes! eating) in Buenos Aires.
This entire rabbit hole of memories of Buenos Aires is why we keep the ephemera. We need, we love the memories that it dredges up. And why we have so much other “stuff” from other places we have visited.
How can we throw away our memories?
— MichaelRpdx :: rkmm
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