Two of the momentos I brought home from my trip to Berlin in 93 have already been mentioned, but I’m gonna say them anyway.
- a “genuine” chunk of the wall, complete with stenciled image of the Brandenburg Gate.
- Nesting dolls painted with the images of (from smallest to largest): Lenin, Stalin, Kruzchev, Brezhnev, Chernienko, & Gorbachov.
I also have a modest collection of Roman coins, most of which are unidentifiable bronze slugs, plus one silver denarius (w portrait of Septimus Severus). There is one, however, that is worth mentioning. It’s a bronze as from around 330 AD, showing Constantine on one side and an image of Sol Invictus on the other. Which means that we have the first “Christian” emperor, together with the Roman god whose feast day was celebrated on the winter solstice (December 25 by the Roman calendar). Nice little touch of historical irony. I carry that coin with me as a conversation piece.
I picked up a piece of sea glass on a rocky beach at Napflion in Greece. It looks too thick to be from a modern beer or wine bottle, but who knows? It’s very pretty – a luminous green that turns almost black when wet.
When my father’s mother died about ten years ago, we cleaned out her house to prepare it for sale. One of the items we found (and the only thing I claimed) was an old desk fan right out of a 40s private eye flick. My father tells me it was the first oscillating fan ever sold in Lake Charles, Louisiana, and caused something of a stir in the neighborhood when his parents brought it home. When I’ve saved up a little money, I’m going to see if I can get someone to restore it.
A few other things worth mentioning that aren’t mine per se, but are in the family.
My mom’s grandfather lived on a farm in Kentucky that was once home to a Cherokee (I think) village. For years, tilling the soil was followed by the ritual of looking for arrowheads, and quite a number of them were found, along with at least one war club. My parents have a framed aerial photo of the farm, with a few of these arrowheads set into cut out spaces in the matting.
During WWII, a number of German P.O.W.s were held at Fort Knox. My mom’s father was a contract worker on base, and since he spoke some German, spent time overseeing a couple of the prisoners. One of them had been a woodcarver before joining the Wehrmacht, and, using some scraps of wood and dull razor blades, carved a beautiful image of two songbirds on a treebranch. He crafted a frame for it, coating the wood with a sawdust texture. Before leaving to head back to Germany at the end of the war, he presented it to my grandfather. That carving is one of my family’s most prized possessions.
