My kitchen has just a single lone window above the sink. Not that it’s a dark kitchen, no, the layout is open, one side opens to an adjacent living room, the sliding glass back doors, and a breakfast nook lined with windows. So my kitchen gets plenty of natural light. But that kitchen window above the sink is one I constantly look through as I hand wash dishes. I contemplate many a thought as cold or warm water runs over hands. The window looks out into the backyard. From that kitchen window I can see my small lawn in the center of the yard, the Japanese maple that looms bright red all year long, my pergola, various vegetable plants, and lounge chairs.

Here on this kitchen window sill is an array of ornamental things: A small plastic golden cat that I bought in Taipei. It’s chest covered in mandarin labeled coins. It’s black eyes forever open. The left arm in constant movement when the sun is out. It gives a soft satisfying tapping sound, like one of a steady clock, as it times away the day with its small solar motor.

You’ve seen these cats before.

They adorn Chinese and Japanese restaurants and stores. It’s supposed to bring good fortune.

And this little cat has done just so.

I bought it on a sweaty side street in Taiwan’s capital back in 2019. Since then I’ve led myself to believe that this cat is a part of my good fortune. The stock market has steadily climbed upwards since then. I’ve made good financial decisions since my purchase of the little golden cat, saving half my income for years, diversifying my portfolio, paying down debt, working hard to demand a high income.

I sometimes feel, or I want to feel, as if this cat has played a secret part in my good financial position.

When I’m making coffee each morning that little cat stares at me and I stare at it. It’s ticking arm lets me know my money is at work somewhere off in the ethers. It’s a reminder of my duty to my future self; handle business today so tomorrow can be enjoyed. Except, years have passed, and everyday is “today”; when will tomorrow finally arrive? But that’s a subject for another post.

Next to the ticking Taiwanese good fortune cat are some relics from my youth. A small statuette of the Virgin Mary, with one hand missing. Broken off in some unfortunate fall or packing box, I can’t even remember what happened to be honest. I also don’t recall where I acquired this little catholic statue.

A small icon of Santo Niño de Atocha, another catholic idol, encased in hazy glass on a very worn wood stand is beside the Virgin. This Santo Niño used to belong to my grandparents. Growing up when I was a young boy, I remember seeing it in my parent’s bathroom, on their bathroom window sill. Now it’s in my kitchen window sill. This little Saint has spent the last 40 years, maybe more depending where my grandparents kept it, living on a window sill. Santo Niño is somewhat of a catchall saint for central Mexico. The boy saint means and protects different things depending on what country you reside, in Zacatecas Mexico, he is the protector of miners and travelers (among other things).

When I look at both those religious icons I don’t think about a God. I’m a pretty non-religious person these days and have been since my early twenties. But when I do stop to notice the catholic idols, I think about the long arduous road my family has taken. I think about where I come from, not me physically, but the people who came before me so that I could be standing in this modern kitchen in a middle class house that I own on the prosperous western edge of the United States. It’s now my turn to keep watch over these relics from Mexico, or maybe I should say they keep watch over me as I do the dishes. Anyway, they are at home on a window sill with the sunlight pouring over them during the day. Relics that my ancestors felt protected them as they went deep into the mines pulling silver for the Spanish, then copper for the Americans before the Mexican Revolution. I think about the hard life of my ancestors pulling plunder from the depths of the hot orange soil of Zacatecas. They kept believing in these things when they left the soil of Mexico and made a better life in the north.

A small grinning yellow cat bus from My Neighbor Totoro is also on the sill. Its back is hollowed out from the top and meant for a small succulent or plant to grow from it. I bought the cat in Tokyo Japan at the Studio Ghibli museum gift store in 2011. Back then, you could buy a ticket the same day you wanted to visit the museum, like we did. It was so easy to do that I thought we could do it again on my most recent trip to Japan last year, some 15 years later. Today the museum is booked out 3-4 months in advance. Completely crazy. Back in 2011, I told myself that one day, if I ever had kids, I’d return and bring my kids to the museum. Well, I returned in 2025 to do just that, but my kids didn’t get to go to the museum because I didn’t do enough research on today’s wildly over touristed environment. I stupidly assumed that just because I did something in the past one way, it would be that way forever.

That happy little yellow cat bus, when I stop to admire it, isn’t a souvenir from my first visit to Japan. It isn’t Hayao Miyazaki’s Studio Ghibli. It isn’t a little planter. It’s Travel. It’s a small window into a time when I had no responsibilities and went where the wind took me for months at a time. It’s a remembrance to an exhilarating time when I didn’t know where I’d be sleeping beyond 2 weeks, so long as I had money in my account. What a glorious time I cannot forget. How travel in my youth has shaped me into the person I am today. It’s infected me with an incurable wanderlust. A curse that I’m not content with staying in one place for too long. An affliction that led me to financial independence and a search for a similar life on the road as one I’ve lived before.

Whether I will ever live like that on the road again, I don’t know. If anything, the little cat bus should remind me that just because you did something in the past, you cannot do it the exact same way today. Things change. That’s easy to forget when we lock in memories into our minds.

Lastly, just to the side of my kitchen window, on the wall, is a key hook. A braided rope looped over a nail holds a small wooden back and three brass hooks. A peeling sticker with the words ‘Aqui Estan Las Pinches Llaves’ is the center piece of the key hook. I bought this thing when I first moved out of my parents house as a young 18 year old sailor. It’s hung all my car keys and more in the time I’ve been a functioning (and non functioning) adult. I don’t have any romantic notions about this piece of wood and brass that I’ve taken with me from house to house to apartments and storage units and parent’s garages. There’s no symbolism associated with it. It simply does its job and its stood with me over the years. It will stay with me so long as I have a dwelling and wall to hang it. It means nothing to me, yet it’s special only because I’ve had it for so damn long, I want to keep having it, till I die.

I bring up the key hook because it spurred me to write this morning as I waited for my water to boil for coffee. I noticed the key hook, like really noticed it for what it is. I use it every single day, yet I never stop to think about it, nor should I. But this morning I did notice it. This spurred me to look around at the little knick knacks on my window sill in the kitchen, and I thought to myself: why do I own these things and display them like pieces in an art museum on my sill? Honestly, I feel like an old person thinking about it, well, I am a middle aged person, not old, but certainly not young. Anyway, I’d told myself that I’d never be one of those old people. You know, the kind with worthless knick knacks displayed around the house.

Why do I have these things?

What will become of them when I die?

They are mere trash to anyone else. Yet to me they mean something. I’ve attached intangible priceless values to these little things. They are memories and dreams. They are superstition and history. They are extensions of me. They hold my past and future. And when I die, so will their meaning. They will end up in a landfill most likely. All the meaning tied to them lost forever. In a way, I’ve secretly blown life into them like some sorcerer. I keep them alive, like one does a houseplant, but instead of water and sun, I give them memories of my life. I allow them to take me back to places I’ll never go to again. They take me through time. Across oceans. They are doors to different times in my life. Bookmarks to flip open a page of mind to when I’m cleaning a bowl or chopping vegetables. In return for keeping these objects all these years, these small objects give me back parts of my life that I might not think of.

Maybe now that I’m old, I’m beginning to understand why old people keep junk, (ahem) I mean, trinkets or knick-knacks around. I’ve always been one abhorrent to the idea of owning too many things, especially things we do not use everyday, and knick-knacks are the epitome of needless materialism. My hopeless dream is to live a life with ownership of just enough, no more, no less. Maybe a 38 liter backpack full of material possessions. I joke often with my wife when I ask her why we own so many cups: “There’s only four of us living in this house, why do we have 20 cups?” I’ll ask with half hearted irritation when trying to put the clean dishes back into the cupboards and they don’t fit. In the personal finance community, much thought and discussion has gone into the perils of materialism. Capitalist driven consumer culture has convinced us to buy more than we need, hence the tendency for home owners to end up with junk.

It’s too often that the things we come to own, as the years go by and we have places to store them properly, we simply forget we ever owned or cared about our once prized possessions. We tuck these possessions away in some cardboard box or bin and let dust settle on the closed lids. We keep our possessions high up in cupboards we don’t often reach for. We tuck them under our beds, in the back of closets, into attics, and, god forbid, storage units which we pay for. But among those material possessions, the stuff we don’t hide away, some of us, me obviously included, begin to cherish certain things. Don’t get me started on my dusty book collection of books read, half read, and yet to be read nearly lining my book shelves in our spare room. My old leather tool belt, along with a myriad of specialty tools sits dormant in my garage. I don’t think I could bear having to part with my old worn tool bags. The same goes with my set of Candlestick Park seats that were gifted to me on an old job and now sit in my garage, used more by my children than me. I doubt my kids will ever know or appreciate the old Forty Niner and Giants stadium seats like I do. They’ll never know the glory these seats witnessed with Joe Montana, Jerry Rice, Willie Mays, Barry Bonds, or Will Clark performing their magic before those seats.

I’ve always dismissed the consumerist notion that owning a great number of things signifies wealth–for the middle class at least. The personal finance community routinely scorns and throws overbuying under the bus, for good reason. Buying too much is a problem. Owning too many things does become burdensome. That old saying: do you own your things or do your things own you? has always stuck with me, and been something I’ve feared. I think of Gollum, the river hobbit who finds the One Ring with his cousin in The Lord of The Rings. There comes a point when Gollum murders his own cousin to gain possession of the One Ring. Then of course, the ring comes to control him. There is a hidden message here in this masterful work of fiction. How possessions can corrupt the mind. How we attach more meaning than should be to objects.

Now that I look around my home considering everything I’ve just written, I’m surrounded by these little things I’ve mailed or carried home from abroad. I have wooden bowls and knives from Japan. Small Moor’s Heads from Sicily. A large painting on my wall from Guatemala. Russian stacking dolls from Moscow…each item has a story. It’s the story of me. But do I have too many of these little things? I don’t want to love my possessions, especially these special ones I’ve noted, and yet I do. When is it time to rid myself of these possessions that seem to have latched their hooks into my heart and start anew? Alain de Botton, the Swiss born British author once wrote: “We need things to remind us of who we are.” The more I look around my house and see these little things, the more I relate to what Alain wrote. These dusty little possessions aren’t just things. They are extensions of myself. I think a life devoid of treasured possessions is a colorless life. Yes, freedom is letting go of things, but there is a pleasure that cannot be denied in the ownership of possessions.

After this little self reflection, I will certainly think twice when I encounter gift shops and souvenir stands in the future. The majority of them I completely ignore and stay away from these stands. A waste of money for cheap junk, I like to think. And that’s true, but when I have indulged, I find that after some years, I’m extremely happy that I wasted my money on ‘cheap junk’. Like stocks compounding in value over time, so do my little cheap pieces of junk from abroad. In fact, these little pieces of junk, some have even magically turned into treasures. When buying a souvenir, it’s never the object itself you are buying. It’s the memory. One that photos even sometimes fail to convey because they are too specific in their details. With a souvenir there’s room for the mind to wander through a memory. When I’m in my kitchen making coffee at 4 am or washing the dishes each night after dinner, lost in my daily routine, room to wander through a memory is a welcome sight for a weary dreamer.

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What are your thoughts?