you tracking with me?

   I've heard stories about a little boy in Italy or some other foreign land who writes something like this on a small suitcase:

I'm sending this suitcase around the world to have an adventure and tell me about it. Please put something inside it to tell of where it has been and what it has seen, and pass it on to someone else. When it is full, please send it back to me at 1234 Pepperoni Street, Firenze, Italy.

   And from time to time (or maybe everytime for all I know) this suitcase will travel from Italy to Austria to England to the US to Singapor to Thailand to Canada to Italy again and become gorged on souvenirs, postcards, and other memorabilia - treasures touched by many people, cultures, and experiences.    But it's not just for little boys in Italy anymore. After all, what is so alluring about such a feat? The attraction of having these tangible mementos from a string of stranger's lives is two-fold. First, there's the fact that it connects that little boy with these cultures that he may very well never get to experience. It's likely that there's a postcard of the Grand Canyon in the suitcase; the person who put it there probably has known about the wonder of the canyon for years, even if it's a first visit whereas our little Italian may have read of it only once in a blurb about America. But to have a postcard from the actual location from a person who was there with his or her own hands and eyes? This is much more visceral.
   Second, such a successful endeavor connects the lucky recipient of the suitcase with the individuals in the chain. Don't you think it would make a statement about the nature of human kindness to know that 10, 15, or 20 people have passed on your suitcase with goodwill after including a little gift? And those within the chain can likely sense that there's a tiny thread of comaradery among those who have continued to pass on the suitcase.
   So bring yourself back to the present. What can I as a 20-something do to partake of these phenomena? Unfortunately, unless you are bold enough to try something like what the little boy on Pepperoni Street did, I don't think there's too much you can do. A few years ago, I was enchanted by a website called bookcrossing.com, where you can register a book with them, and then leave it in a public area. The idea is that the person who picks up your book can login and tell where they found it, read it, and send it on its way. I did this with "The Cather in the Rye," but nobody ever reported it on the site, so there goes my faith in human kindness. Seriously, it would have been fun if every month or so it showed up in a new set of hands in a new place.
   Just recently I saw a dollar bill with a stamp on it (which I believe is illegal - to mark US currency) that said you could track this bill online. I went to wheresgeorge.com and entered the serial number and where I received the bill. According to the website, someone received that bill in a town 45 minutes away just 84 days earlier! That's an average speed of... well, the site did include such statistics but I don't remember them. So now you can track a dollar bill.
   All of these methods of tracking must achieve a few things to be deemed successful:

it must include a physical item that can be personally handled
it must include a way to record where and when it was handled
and above all, it must be consistently recorded by each person in the chain.

So... does anyone have my copy of "The Catcher in the Rye?"

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