The Last Word On Nothing

It was a year and a half after my internship at NPR, and I was in the habit of calling Joanne Silberner, who was then on NPR’s staff, for advice whenever I got a terrifying new assignment. I suppose this makes her one of my first journalism mentors. At the time, I’d convinced the magazine where I was an intern to send me to Switzerland for a story. I’m sure she gave me practical advice on how to report in the field and get what I needed for my story in a foreign country. But the piece of advice that’s stuck with me was this: Get a souvenir you will use in your daily life.

This led to a pleasant afternoon in Lausanne, in which I went from shop to shop, asking, “Est-ce que vous avez des montres de Tintin?” I used my dictionary and my lousy middle-school French to cobble together the question: Do you have any Tintin watches? Tintin, boy reporter, hero of the Belgian comics I devoured (in translation) as a child, was just the thing to commemorate my first time reporting overseas.

Very little of my time is spent reporting overseas. Most of my time is spent at home in my apartment. But I was reminded of Joanne’s advice on a sunny Saturday morning this winter as I folded laundry. A lot of my laundry is made up of tea towels. A tea towel is a dish towel, and no I don’t know why they’re called that. I just know that they’re widely available in Europe as souvenirs. I have tea towels from castles and museums and villages. I have so many, I use them instead of paper towels most of the time.

I folded a towel printed with British birds and their calls. I folded a souvenir of William and Kate’s royal wedding in 2011. I folded a beautiful blue and red linen tea towel modeled on the Liechtenstein flag–an unusually classy piece of the collection, purchased at Liechtenstein’s charming national museum. I folded a favorite, a white cotton tea towel from a village I passed through on a walk in the English countryside, printed in blue with drawings of the village church and the village pump. It’s not much to look at and it smells kind of funny, but it contains a whole memory: To get it, my walking buddy and I followed the instructions pinned to a sample towel in the church to a nearby farm, opened the door to the greenhouse, left £4.50 in the box, and took a tea towel, all within earshot of the M4.

So Joanne’s advice certainly stuck. I wear necklaces from my travels all the time. My Tintin watch is still here, although it now needs repair. And once a month or so, I sit down with a stack of clean tea towels and remember each trip as I pull it straight, fold once lengthwise, fold in quarters, eighths, and add it to the stack.

Photo: Helen Fields