What We Keep

“My strat” sounds cooler than it is because it isn’t a Stradivarius or Stratocaster. It’s my straw hat—a boater, like they had in the ’20s. We had to wear them at Winchester, my boarding school in England, along with a jacket and tie. We couldn’t be bothered to say “straw hat.” Just “strat.”

We’d treat our strats like shit, and at some point the housemaster would say, “You’re holding a piece of straw, and that won’t do.” I got a new one my senior year, which is the one I keep on the wall of my bedroom, where you’d hardly notice it.

I was 15 when my mom and stepdad, who were both teachers, left New York for a sabbatical in England. They didn’t believe there were actual schools in California, where my dad lived; they thought everyone out there was making movies and fighting Indians. Winchester had the best academic rep in England—and I had no business being there.

My strat brings up the most delicious Dickensian memories: All of the classrooms at Winchester were stone, all the kids had fingerless gloves, and everyone’s suits were shabby. But even sullen teenager me would look around and say, “This is the most beautiful place and these are the best teachers in the world.”

There’s some guilt at how much work I didn’t do and how much I didn’t live up to what I wanted to be there; a lot of the things I was going through didn’t have acronyms yet, and if it wasn’t English or history, I almost physically wasn’t able to study. But the teachers were phenomenal, and although I was originally supposed to go back to New York after a year, I decided to stay. I stayed for the education… and then I abused it. I basically majored in dropping acid.

So while my strat really serves no purpose—it’s not like I’m sporting it when I go barhopping—it’s this absolute tangible reminder that my life was once that weird and that old-fashioned, that I lived through this crazy experience of being dropped into a hermetically sealed time capsule, a 600-year-old, all-male boarding school in England.

There’s a certain amount of pride—well, not exactly pride, more like ownership—and a little delight at having been part of something that shouldn’t have existed in the modern era.

I’m not a collector of things. I’ve walked away from a lot and I have thrown away a lot, including a perfectly healthy relationship. So I’m real good at moving on. But the strat is different. There was never a time I didn’t want my strat. There was never a moment when I was like, “I’m over this.” I was at Winchester until I was 18, but, in a way, I never came back.

It does nicely on the wall.

~ Joss Whedon, writer, director, activist, creator of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Los Angeles, CA

I met Kevin 40 years ago, when we were both working at the service station. We did gas, oil, air, windows, lube, everything. My wife and I had split up and his wife had left him, and every night after work we’d sit around for hours together drinking beers, Kevin playing guitar and me trying to figure out the harmonica. We’d tell stories about our relationships and our lives, and it filled an emptiness we both probably had at the time.

My first harmonica was a C harp, but there’s this Marshall Tucker song Kevin always played, “In My Own Way,” and it’s in the key of G, so I bought this Hohner Marine Band G harp. That’s the song that kinda got me started. Back then, Kevin used to say he hoped we’d have a friendship that when we were a hundred we’d be going to the coffee shop on Saturday mornings. We don’t go to the coffee shop, but I’m 60 and we still get together three, four nights a week.

~ Dan Pruitt, radiologic technologist, men’s prison; Archer City, TX

This has always been an object of wonder for me, but I’ve never talked to anyone about it. Even my husband didn’t know the story—and we’ve been together 20 years.

The first week of first or second grade, we were asked to bring something in for show-and-tell. I walked around our tiny apartment in Chaska, Minnesota—by then my parents had divorced, my mom was a single mom with three kids, we were poor—and we didn’t have anything interesting or cool for show-and-tell.

I decided I’d bring this murex shell. It was given to my mom by her father, who was in the army in the Philippines in the ’40s and ’50s. It was spiny and glorious. It had an air of mystery. But there was one problem: I wanted to say that I’d found it on an exotic beach. That’s what I wanted people to think. For my story to work, though, I would have to separate the poufy red velvet pincushion part—which was glued into the crevice—from the shell. I used a butter knife, and I can still see where I made some progress. My mother came upon me and told me I couldn’t do that. She said, “You can take the shell—but as it is, like a pincushion.” I remember thinking that that ruined everything. I wanted so badly for people to think I’d found this shell. I was in tears. I was obliterated. And I didn’t bring it.

The shame about being poor goes all the way back, and having a glorious shell was the opposite of that. You know, there’s what you remember now but also what you remember imagining then, and I remember that even then I had this image of myself as the kind of girl who would be walking on an exotic beach, who would find a magnificent shell like this. It was not only that I was there but that I found the shell. I wanted to be lucky. It was also about beauty, about the ambition to be venturing out in the world and in a far-off place. What I knew was that I wanted to be something that I wasn’t, that I wanted people to see me as someone who I wasn’t. I’ve come to realize that it wasn’t that I wanted to deceive but that I wanted to become.

The shell pincushion now sits on a shelf in my bedroom. Looking at it, knowing I had those thoughts of who I wanted to be and what kind of life I wanted to live, and knowing that I’ve done it, is the most beautiful, the truest thing. It’s the core of who I am. The shell is like this present: It holds in its very being both the girl I was and the woman I became.

~ Cheryl Strayed, author, Wild and Tiny Beautiful Things; co-host, Dear Sugars podcast; Portland, OR

I’m not attached to many objects, but on my bookcase is a small cup where I store my treasures. It has one of Jerry Garcia’s guitar picks, three acorns from exactly where Thoreau’s cabin was at Walden, a chunk of the Berlin Wall, a slug from a Civil War–era rifle, and a little stuffed bunny my daughter bought me. And then I have a Greek drachma from approximately 300 BC with the face of Alexander the Great on it.

I think it was in 1996, not long after Jerry died, that I went to London to supervise The Illustrated Trip, an encyclopedia of the Grateful Dead. My wife and I were at the British Museum and had plans to meet some friends, and I was aware we had to get going. But when we walked out of the museum, there was a coin store right across the street. I said, “Come on,” and we raced in. I walked up to the guy and said, “I want something really old.” He put this drachma in front of me—smaller than a penny, slightly bent out of shape, the profile of Alexander on one side. I took one look and I said, “That’s it.”

I happen to be a Buddhist, and one thing you can associate with Buddhists is the idea that “this too shall pass, all things change, all things go away.” And yet this coin has endured. It has no value in the conventional sense—it cost maybe $30—but it connects me to the ongoing pageant of human drama, to the human story of life, to someone who had it in their pocket 2,300 years ago. Someone—maybe many people—wanted this coin very much, sweated over it, maybe died for it. It makes me feel human to touch it. Hey, what is life if not the things that make you sentimental?

~ Dennis McNally, cultural historian, the Grateful Dead’s publicist for 23 years, Jack Kerouac’s biographer, San Francisco, CA

Most military men don’t wear their wedding ring when they’re deployed. It can get caught in machinery or their weapon, and the reflection can attract enemies. But I knew that Michael would never take his ring off. I knew what it meant to him.

We’d only been married a year and a half when he was killed in Iraq. The Casualty Assistance Office told me that he was wearing his ring, that they were going to send it back to me in a manila envelope. But I wanted Michael to be able to wear it to Dover and, eventually, be cremated with it on.

After his death, there were so many dark moments that I never thought I’d come out of. It was like I was falling down a hole, and it took me a long time to remember who I was. My ring has been a part of my journey: I didn’t take it off for seven years. I was only 19 when we got married, and the ring symbolized the love Michael and I had for each other, love in its purest form, undiluted by time. But then three years ago, I put the diamonds from the ring onto this necklace. It’s come to symbolize coming out of my darkness. The diamonds are a reminder of just how indestructible the soul can be, and that I didn’t give up, that I made it through.

~ Taryn Guerrero Davis, founder, American Widow Project; Wimberley, TX

Gizmo was a gift from Mindy Berger for my fifth birthday. I was kind of a lonely kid, and Gizmo became a friend. I had a difficult relationship with my sister; I don’t know if she was jealous or bored, but she saw how much I valued Gizmo and she’d kidnap him. One time, she held a knife to his throat and actually cut his head off.

I had a monster under my bed, and Gizmo protected me from him. But at some point, the monster started to try to get Gizmo; I would hide Gizmo behind my back and the monster would say, “I’m going to stay here and wait for Gizmo.” While he waited, we’d have a conversation. Eventually the monster became my friend, too.

Today, I keep Gizmo on my dresser. He reminds me of that little, scared girl that needed a friend, and of that era when I believed Gizmo might have some talismanic powers to protect me. Part of me is still that scared girl—it’s hard to be a woman in science, it’s hard to invent knowledge—and having Gizmo here, on the dresser… I guess there’s comfort in that continuity.

~ Jillian Wormington, vector-borne disease researcher, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX

Only a tiny percentage of Boy Scouts make Eagle Scout, and a lot of those people lose their medals in time. I was 15 and 11 months when I received this, the youngest Eagle Scout in my troop in Clifton, New Jersey. I keep it in my bedroom in a prominent place on a bookshelf across from my bed.

The “Be Prepared” motto has guided me in everything. I’ve even saved a couple of lives. I rescued a woman from her car after she skidded on an icy highway; I helped father-and-son kayakers who were stuck in roaring rapids and petrified; I pulled my wife from a cold, fast-moving river. I see a direct line from this badge to those actions: the idea of staying calm in moments like that and having the mind-set of being able to say, “I can do this.” Being in scouting profoundly and forever changed me. To me, it’s what WWII was to the guys who fought there. That was the most amazing period in their lives, that was their moment. This was my moment.

~ Peter Osborne, historian, Red Cloud, NE

It’s just a doodle in my journal, but it changed my life.