Then followed a pull tab, a bottle cap, a pancaked bullet, an antique shotgun shell, a 1957 wheat penny, and a 1946 silver dime.
Ann Carter is a 70-year-old gun owner in Kentucky who keeps her grandfather's antique shotgun shell on a chain in her safe.
Longing, nostalgia and loneliness also permeate the 1950's boxes, replete with one memento mori after another, from effigies of doves to flowers, antique photographs, shells and bones.
To buy: "Sunray Fan of Pyrene Shells" necklace, $545; "Antique New Guinea Kina Shell" necklace, $1,500; "Moroccan Hamsa Pendant" necklace, $1,850.
Pauline Oliveros and her Deep Listening Band offered spacious meditations on conch shells, didgeridoo, antique cymbals and Tibetan horn, with digital processing by Jonas Braasch replicating a cistern's cavernous reverberations.
For a candle-powered alternative, Zodax (www.zodax.com), based in Los Angeles, showed a new, delicate set of hurricane lanterns called Carina Capiz ($15 to $45), wrought of translucent capiz shells with antique copper wire in a basket-weave pattern.
Meris Blumstein and Kenny Blumstein, the Corcoran Group (212 539-4966; www.corcoran.com MAINTENANCE: $2,350.63 PROS: This co-op blooms with details like ornate moldings, stained glass windows and antique doors in a loft shell.
Her dress was also made of tanned hide, decorated with bits of shell and the old antique beads called "greasy yellow" and "ruby-red whiteheart" and "German blue".
Be sure not to miss the antique Japanese folding screen, the capiz shell chandelier and the 20th century carved painted wood Buddha.
The old town is littered with tiny bars; there's the famous Bar Pilar (Calle Moro Zeit, 13; 00 34 9639 10497) with its appallingly good patatas bravas and clochinas – fat mussels whose shells litter the floor, and lovely, antique St Jaume (C/Caballeros, 51; 00 34 9639 12401).
