Transit is a function of being. Preparing for travel involves the same players: staples (garments we trust not to wrinkle, or to at least trust to regain their shape when exposed to steam) and interlopers (grains of sand from distant beaches, crumpled receipts repurposed as gum wrappers). When we pack for travel, we are assembling a condensed, but still functional representation of ourselves.
Whenever I travel with my mom, I’m always in awe (and set on edge) by the way she inhabits temporary spaces. Even when staying in a hotel for one night, she’ll unpack almost entirely, leaving her jewelry on every surface, actually hanging her clothes in the narrow hotel closet with the pull-down iron. Tangent: these closets strike me as the kind of space that is not really intended for use, but whose absence might seem strange in the familiar layout of a bedroom. The hotel is the large intestine and the hotel room closet is the appendix, vestigial at best. Nevertheless, each morning my mom would manage to gather up all the small pieces she had scattered, assemble them, and leave the room untouched. I don’t recall her ever forgetting anything.
My mom moved to the United States from Greece when she was eight; a move that involved a two-week sea voyage. When I spoke with her recently, she told me she doesn’t remember bringing anything with her. When I was eight I traveled with a jewelry collection, composed of — essentially — repurposed trash. Rubber bands of different colors. A brass necklace turning orange at the places where it touched my neck. A congratulatory wristband I got from participating in my school’s “Jog-a-thon.” When we stayed with my grandparents, I’d fold up the jewelry collection and put it in a tiny blue ceramic box that was waiting on the bedside table. I remember fastening onto objects at that age — possessing something was a tiny assertion of power. Alongside the staples I’d bring with me were the interlopers I’d bring back: a toy I found on the floor at a restaurant, a chip of sea glass. Once I became so convinced that a piece of kelp I’d found was a beached mermaid that I insisted on transporting it home in a plastic bag full of seawater. It didn’t make it through TSA. Collecting these items — and choosing which were significant enough to make a journey — felt like an echo of something I’d be doing for the rest of my life: figuring out how to put myself in transit.
Collecting things in this way transforms ordinary objects into something that is sacred. The value established — even arbitrarily — acts as an appendage of safety. A buffer against participating in the world with nothing but your body to represent you.
This kind of ownership is not inherently attached to any sort of monetary value, and is often explicitly devoid of it. Often the items you select as a child are things that have been rejected or are otherwise deemed only marginally valuable, by other people. When my mom was on the boat, her brother got in trouble with their parents for stealing a beige toy car. This was the only object she can pinpoint with significance from the two weeks. She doesn’t remember if he actually stole it — he claimed to have found it abandoned next to the pool. The item as contraband, distinctly not a gift, is made only more valuable. The act of taking away only makes the sense of rightful ownership stronger.
Found (or stolen) objects are more precious because their ownership is not ordained. When I lived in Montreal, I made a practice of collecting little things I found on the street, because these objects seemed to have played a role in finding me. Finding something in that way feels like a conversation. When I moved into my second apartment in Montreal, I found a tiny Barcelos rooster on the sill of my favorite window, which displayed a curation of objects behind the glass.
Curation is another way objects can become extensions of the self. Finding and arranging constitutes a dialogue with something intangible but resonant. Objects are made sacred by moving together.
When I was growing up my parents would assemble little boxes of loosely related things (tufts of grass, a marble). I still have a few of them, see below. Curation indicates that objects respond to permission. It’s also an aesthetic skill, it relies on an understanding of the relationship between texture, significance, time period, or any other form of context. A curation of objects intuits transit, things pulled from different states to a brief moment of stasis, arranged to reflect a pattern otherwise unseen.
When I think of the boxes my mom would assemble (and the many more that she deems to be “lost” in the depths of my parent’s garage back in Albuquerque) I think of the absence of objects when she was growing up. The beige car. The way imagination can spontaneously generate and ascribe significance. It is simultaneously the biggest argument for — and the biggest detraction — from the real existence of “value” as something that can be described and exchanged. The loose grasp on the adult laws that govern value allows you to operate outside the boundaries of these laws as a child. It is this refusal to buy into ordinary structures of value that forms one of the central tenets of play. That pistachio shells or stones have the same function and power as money. That you might collect a handful of sea-soaked stones, and watch them depreciate as they dry in the sun.
Curation, although operating with a more conscious recognition of value, is itself a kind of play. A giving and taking of the sacred. An exercise of agency, that feels more like being chosen to participate. Imagination, alive and well.
I too know a lady who unpacks every last possession at every opportunity!