Souvenirs
I hate graveyards and old pawn shops
For they always bring me tears
I can’t forgive the way they rob me
Of my childhood souvenirs…
Memories, they can’t be boughten
They can’t be won at carnivals for free
Well it took me years to get those souvenirs
And I don’t know how they slipped away from me…
Broken hearts and dirty windows
Make life difficult to see
That’s why last night and this mornin’
Always look the same to me…
Memories, they can’t be boughten
They can’t be won at carnivals for free
Well it took me years to get those souvenirs
And I don’t know how they slipped away from me
(from Souvenirs, written by John Prine)
On January 30th 2000, John Prine performed on the PBS television show Sessions at West 54th, which was kind of an Austin City Limits type show if you are familiar.
Prine, in his intro to the song “Souvenirs” described how he got a job at this club in Chicago after an open mic type short performance. He was to play an hour on Thursday nights and had to write more songs to fill the hour.
In his day job, John Prine was a mailman.
After four or five weeks he decided he needed to change it up a little and he told the story of how he wrote the song Souvenirs. “So, I wrote this song on the way down to the club…(pause laughs)…wish I could still do that”…(laughs again).
Man, can I relate to that.
I got an email from my cousin Judy last evening.
Judy is kind of the matriarch of the Norwegian side of the family now.
Included in Judy’s email was a photo of her as a child with my uncle Teddy (Theodore) and some memories she had of Teddy and some of my other cousins.
My uncle Teddy was my father’s younger brother. Teddy passed away in 1982 at the young age of forty-nine. It was tragic for our family, and I still miss him today.
Like John Prine, Teddy was a mailman, and worked for the Oceanport Post Office for twenty-six years.
He was larger than life, always whistling, always had a big idea to make money like flying fresh fish to upstate New York, or buying concrete molds to make and sell garden ornaments.
And you could always hear him coming on his mail route because he was always whistling.
Recently, I had the unusual opportunity to share some time with my siblings, since we are all spread out, that doesn’t happen very often anymore. My California brother Gary came east for a couple of weeks to see our mother and the last weekend of May, Kim and I visited my home town of Oceanport for an event my sister Pat had going on.
Growing up, Oceanport was home to the U.S. Army post Fort Monmouth. I have a lot of childhood memories involving Fort Monmouth. Armed Forces Day festivities on the parade grounds; going to the post movie theater to see Martin and Lewis movies and the place where my crush on Connie Francis first started; bowling for the first time at the fort bowling alley.
The Army has since moved on, and the property is now being redeveloped for commercial and residential use. One of the larger commercial development projects is with Netflix and sound stages.
Ironically, one of the streets that takes you from the old Oceanport east gate to the west gate at Eatontown is called the Avenue of Memories.
That weekend, in addition to The Avenue of Memories, I took Kim for a long walk along the streets that made the blocks that were my childhood haunts.
Up Main Street past the spot where my grandmother’s house once stood and the duplex rental property she owned next door, gone now and replaced by a new intersection. But still visible is the garage with the apartment upstairs where my brother Carl and I lived temporarily one year, and where my grandmother kept the 57 Chevy below. My grandmother would take us to the beach in North Long Branch in that 57 Chevy.
And from that same view I could see the house my father built in the background.
We passed the Oceanport Hook & Ladder fire house that was so much a part of my family’s life growing up.
We went up to the Wolf Hill School where my siblings and I, as well as my mother and father, in fact, attended school.
Down the blocks of Pemberton Avenue and past the houses of friends, classmates, and cousins.
I am pretty sure Kim was bored to death, but at least we got some steps in.
Just before Kim and I left for home in Virginia, my sister gave me an item that my grandmother had given her. It was a medal, a souvenir really, from the Drittes Deutsches Turnfest (Third German Gymnastics Festival) which was a massive national sports and patriotic event held in Leipzig, Germany from August 2 to 5, 1863. It probably belonged to her father or grandfather who came from Germany.
According to the internet and AI, “Souvenirs” by John Prine is a poignant reflection on the bittersweet reality of time passing, lost innocence, and the precious, irreplaceable nature of memories. It explores how the physical markers of our past slip away and how unresolved grief can cloud our perspective on the present.
The bittersweet reality of time passing…
The irreplaceable nature of memories…
Memories, souvenirs…they don’t all have to be medals that we can hold in our hands.
I can still drive down the Avenue of Memories and at least some of those experiences come back to me.
I can walk the blocks of my childhood neighborhood and reflect on those physical markers that are still there and I can acknowledge some of those that have now slipped away, but still manage, at least for time being, to allow me to put a story to that memory.
We can come across and share old photos, like that of Judy and my Uncle Teddy, and the irreplaceable memories that a photo can bring and capture them forever in an email just as Judy shared with me.
Because like John Prine wishing he could “still do that,” the passing of time makes for less of those spontaneous inspirational moments and more difficult for words to be captured and those souvenirs saved and shared.
And now, since I risk saying “the passing of time” one more time and this becoming more of a word salad than it already is, I will end by encouraging you to save your stories, save your souvenirs, they are irreplaceable, and need to be shared.
It took years to get them, they can be gone in an instant.
Postscript:
Who would have thought, gymnastics was that popular in 1863, that Germany would host a gymnastics festival. In fact, it turns out Leipzig has hosted thirteen of these festivals including the one in 1863 and the most recent in May of 2025 that included 80,000 participants and 750,000 visitors. Gymnastics was never very popular with me, you should have seen me flopping around on “the horse.”
And yes, when I was about nine years old, I had a huge crush on Connie Francis. I still like to listen to her sing.
I have written about John Prine before, in April of 2020 when he died as a result of complications of Covid. If you are not familiar, he is worth the listen.
