The spoon thing may have begun somewhere else in some other city, but let’s say, for this story’s sake, it began in Denmark, where I lived in a squat building in the heart of a tangle of shawarma shops. I rode bicycles there. I must have done other things, obviously, but all I remember are the bikes.

The sun sank earlier than it should have, and each afternoon, we’d outride it, race to the commuter bridge just past the university building where we’d sit in the yellow light, all the more rich for its transience, and drink grocery store wine. We clattered our bikes together in measured piles like prepped herbs and we were beautiful, steeped in that half-glare with our 6-krone wine and our practical footwear and we knew it. Travel is funny like that, makes you blithely aware of what you might look like in a photograph.

We’d go to dinner, then, at dim little haunts that sloped downwards. We walked down the stairs from meandering cobblestone walkways into tiny restaurants, paneled with licorice wood, crammed with rosy bodies breathing heat, and lit with candles, everything glowing blonde. We’d eat pickled fish, beet soup, and potatoes baked so as to look expensive and afterward, we’d have thimble cups of coffee knighted with caps of foam, served with teaspoons, tiny and gold and precious.

Bicycling home, I’d feel them in my pockets, the teaspoons jangling like keys and Christmas carols. I’d hear them clink against one another, applauding themselves. And I’d ride past the bridge, now empty, left tidy under a blue-black sky silhouetted just barely at the hems of the canals below. I’d ride past the sleepy bars and the downstairs restaurants and the milky gray of apartment buildings slurring into one another and I’d cry because I’d only be this beautiful temporarily and wasn’t that humiliating. The cliche of it, I mean.

Some five months passed like that. Then, I arrived home in New York with 14 teaspoons and a strange lilt in my speech. As it happened, the foreign little knot in my dialect did not take long to undo itself, but the teaspoon thing stuck. Even now, it’s a bad habit.

At dive bars, anniversary dinners, and natural wine bars in Brooklyn, I have a tendency to pocket teaspoons mid-meal. Souvenirs — proof that I’ve tasted things, that I’ve gone Here and Here and Here to do so. To the left of the kitchen sink, I’ve been raising a modest zoo of teaspoons, all different breeds. If you saw them, you’d laugh. You’d wonder how any one drawer might possibly house so many things with so little in common, teaspoon-ness aside.

When I empty the dishwasher, I hear them greet one another as they clank into their designated silverware partition. They still sound to me like a round of applause, musical and brief.