My father was a partner at a class-action securities firm in the 1980's and had an ongoing legal case in Oregon. I didn't know what this meant, but he would return to New York from his business trips with a stupid dad joke and a small spoon. It was an unimportant thing. My father and I were apart from the time I was 1 until the time he died.
For most of my childhood, spoons were the souvenirs I wanted the most, almost as much as I wanted to be with him. My father and stepmother went to Hawaii with one of my sisters. He kept a souvenir from his solo white-water-rafting adventure in Arizona, and he was a clean-shaven attorney by the time he left. He brought back a spoon with a replica of the Eiffel Tower on it.
People brought me things. I came to own spoons from airports in Israel, China, Japan and Yugoslavia after my stepmother's father started a second unofficial career as a world traveler. When I went to college, the curio cabinets on the walls of my bedroom were filled with spoons from when I was a child. They were kept in a closet until I stopped collecting. I went to real-life places that I had never been to.
The first American souvenir spoon was made in the late 1800s and was adorned with George Washington's profile. The 1893 Chicago World's Fair had 27 million visitors and spoon-collecting became a hobby. It is not possible to say what people were thinking when they collected spoons a century ago, but I think that it was a form of travel that was carried out through gifts from friends and family. For the world to unfold through the magic of finely etched silver or nickel may have been the same as for the toddler waiting at home for her spoon to arrive. The level of artistry displayed by these spoons was something that other keepsakes couldn't match. The details on the Windsor spoon and the motorcar atop the one from Detroit brought me joy in a way that a gift-shop shirt or a vial filled with pink sand never did.
I flew between Boston and New York every other weekend until 1998 when I divorced. Not a single spoon was purchased from either airport for 108,000 miles flown. I have spoons from other places, instead of the ones from my parents.
I found my spoon collection again after moving. I ordered the appropriate ones for them because they were still in their cabinets, which were never quite right. When my father gave me these spoons, he promised that we would see these places together. I was going to give something back.
My father wanted to travel the world after retiring. He died after being diagnosed with A.L.S. at 55. He told me about his bucket list in the last weeks of his life. He would not live to see the Canadian Rockies, the cliffs of Ireland, or the sea of New Zealand. After he died, I booked a solo flight to New Zealand, where he had shown me on the computer. His ashes were in my possession. I didn't purchase a spoon.
The house my father and stepmother shared is no longer available. Old childhood treasures have been traveling back and forth between me and my parents. My 5-year-old son has never seen them and I have never visited them. I watched him run his thumbs over my spoons and see Paris with its ridged Eiffel Tower and New York with its cherry-red apple.
My son has taken to collecting spoons himself now (his first, the Virgin Islands, was a proud addition to the cabinet), and he likes to look at the collection the same way that I did: not as a mark of where he has already been, but as a sign of where other They are used to keep my father alive in the eyes of his grandson. My son holds the one from Hawaii with the ersatz pineapple, and I can say that he was here. Between now and then it is a tether. "He was here."
Hannah Selinger is a writer.
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