If you do enough living, you tend to gather objects, small monuments to significant moments of your life. Call these objects souvenirs.
As the Oxford English Dictionary explains, English borrows the word souvenir from French. The word can refer both to remembering, the act of memory, and to a memento, an object that holds a memory.
Memories and mementos can be lost. In his poem “Souvenirs,” Jim Hendrick meditates on such loss in the wake of the Eaton Fire.
Souvenirs
So many things were
Lost in the fire.
Photographs, matchbooks, buttons,
Mardi Gras beads I’ve tried many times
To throw away.
Pens, shells, and menus,
Hair pins and posters.
Just the debris of life, chock full of memories.
Hotel towels, your father’s ball cap (“No Fat Chicks”),
Magazines, ashtrays, foreign coins, and CDs.
They’re all there, and much more,
Forgotten, half remembered,
Now ashes,
Life, the collection
Of souvenirs
Passing through my fingers
Like snow turning to water.
— Jim Hendrick
Jim Hendrick is a 75-year-old resident of Pasadena. He is a poet and abstract painter. He is deeply involved with Pasadena Village, a vibrant organization of seniors whose mission is to foster independent living in a spirit of mutual support, enrichment, and inclusiveness.
Local News Pasadena (LNP) publishes poems grounded in current news events from the greater Pasadena, California area. Submit your own poetry here.
