In 1985, I spent several months living on the island of Java, in Yogyakarta, having traveled there with a partner in the evening of our intimacy. I sat out nights with our mutual friend Muller, a Sumatran who was studying at the University, on the grass mats of Jalan Malioboro, smoking Kretek cigarettes and drinking sugary tea, and spooning up repeat servings of gudeg, a simple local dish perhaps, but with friendship and smoke and inconsequential conversations — I can't recall even how much was spoken in Indonesian, or English, or not spoken at all — the long evenings were excellent.

 

You may know something of the region in which I stayed: famed cultural hub in the center of the island, the most densely populated place on the planet, presenting fine silver-work and woodcarvings, musical instruments and high-art batik to the world. The best of the jet set would return from such a trip laden with cheap goods for friends or for sale.

 

Somehow objects bought cheaply can never quite escape the stamp of "commodity", however. I returned with very little. I returned without my partner, without silver or carvings or wall-hangings. With almost no photos, since I told myself my eyes would be my camera. I suppose they were, and the film has faded somewhat with time.

 

But beyond the stuff of the senses which, while possibly faded, is still so intense and precise: the smell of melati trees lining the road; the deafening chorus of frogs in the rice padis outside my window; the charcoal braziers puffing out small clouds and delicate road-side dishes; faces of friends… beyond all that there are these things of value. I still possess one; I find it amazing it is still intact.

 

I had gone with Muller to the Pasar Baru to find a few small gifts. There, and at that time, the Rupiah was heavy undervalued against the dollar, so that the overbearing weight of my annual salary was compounded with an exchange rate that made me a prince. Strange to have such value, when I am such an ordinary person back home.

 

As a prince, I was subject to the harga putih, the "White Price" that foreigners not in the know would expect to pay at these shops. The price was what you haggled for, and on that particular day, I was a bit peeved, after having been in town for five months, to be treated like a gaping tourist. I pushed a hard bargain, ran the price down and down.

 

At some point, as the price of a pair of sarong has dipped to a couple of dollars a piece, Muller plucked at my arm and said, "You know, the shopkeeper earns a fraction of the cost, the women from the country who make them another fraction. Maybe a good bargain isn't the most valuable thing here…"

 

And maybe the lesson was. Here it is, rolled around me as it was night after night as I slept in the student quarters or the guest room of a fine and caring professor: a yellow and black plaid man's sarong, a couple of yards of cloth sewn into a tube, and worn as pants, or shorts, or sheet. This 22-year-old scrap of cloth, softened by age, is one thing that I would not wish to lose.

 

~

 

I also own a solid steel wok, which I bought a few years before that Indonesia trip, when I first began to experiment with international cuisine. My brother Michael, feeding my interest, bought me a cheap Chinatown chopping knife – one of the most useful and sturdy tools I have ever used in my kitchen. All these fancy corers and pans and juicers and whisks… two items I would not lose: that knife with its cracked handle and it uneven edge (dinged from chopping through chicken bones and wearing the whetstone irregularly), and the wok, now blackened with age and incessant use for the past 25 years.

 

~

 

Small things: Michael sanded a small rectangle of ebony to a smooth night sky, and laid in tiny circles of silver to be the starts of the constellation Cygnus, the swan, who rides the waters of the Milky Way in its northern night sky.

 

A watch with no hands on it, dug out of the backyard earth by my Great-uncle Olaf, one of the gentler and kinder men to have cared for me.

 

An enormous polished agate I found while searching for them with my brother Paul, along a Minnesota roadside.

 

~

 

A 1972 Mossman six-string guitar – worth a lot of money now, perhaps, but so much a part of my composition that its value will never be realized. It is worth the sound of its string under my fingers.

 

~

 

There must be other objects I would miss… but perhaps not miss so much. Even these, attached as they are to different times, and to the different self which inhabited each one, even these small things of value… in the end are simply warmth for the heart. Tomorrow one will be lost, the next day another will fail. And I can only smile at the beauty each carried for so many years through my life, like flowers that refused to drop their petals, the best purchases I ever made… I doubled my price for a sarong, and it warms me two decades later.

 

I guess you do get what you pay for.