Last year we had the people shouting “buy stamps!” as a way to save the United States Postal Service from a business man appointed by the old businessman president. We shouted this to each other despite the fact no one writes letters or really sends anything with stamps much at all, compared to what we used to do. I write letters, so I was like, sure, and didn’t think much more about it until now.
I just sent my friend Bob a letter. Like me, he is an appreciator of the random beauty that can be found in stamps, a lover of zooming in on what a country would represent to itself through this thing that is, if I’m remembering right, legal tender. Meaning it is equivalent to cocaine-laced paper bills and dirty coins, and theoretically can be used in their place. I wouldn’t try picking up a pack of cigarettes with a partially used sheet of Kwanza commemorative stamps, but that might be an interesting conversation to have in June (especially if your stamps have traces of white powder visible).
I addressed the letter and placed the stamps without too much thought, but which stamps, I did think about a moment. Bob lives in Canada, as do a number of people I write to. The USA has a standard stamp for any international destination, but they’re usually uninteresting. Stuff that will not be offensive or surprising to anyone in any country, I’d guess; flowers; trees.
(interestingly, Canada used to issue one just for mail to the States, at a rate lower than all other international destinations, I suppose because of the amount of business and people that flow back and forth over the border, to which Canada’s economy is highly dependent.)
Bob’s a writer, so I guessed he’d seen every one of the Harlem Renaissance collection I’d been working through for a year. Definitely had seen Marvin Gaye. He lives within a 5 minute walk of a picture postcard view of downtown Detroit, from across the river, so I wouldn’t have been able to resist that one.
Eid I’ve been sticking on everything lately. It actually was Eid like a month or so ago, when, you know, Israel was trying to get a war going again, which Hamas is always happy to oblige. Never one to miss a chance to root for the underdog, I was pretty happy to observe the American stamps celebrating the end of fasting for Ramadan are of the issue that is without a denomination. Denoted Forever Stamps, this makes the Eid Forever a somewhat surprising one to see in a country that invented forever wars in the Middle East, and maybe amusing for the fans of Borges and his Orientalist-type settings for some of his more bizarre stories about eternity. So Eid Forever.
In the true spirit of randomness, the beautiful and surely expensive to produce moon landing 50th anniversary caught my eye, the silvery metallic of the grays shining next to the dull gold on the Arabic script on the Eids. Perfect. Didn’t the UAE or someone just announce an Arab country was going to space? Cool. How cool is it to maybe inspire Bob to write a poem set in the near future about a little girl in the occupied West Bank who watches the shuttle launch on her mom’s phone and goes to astronaut school in Qatar? With a stamp!
The last one is obligatory. I don’t actually know what the current USPS charge for International is right now, just that when I bought a hundred bucks worth of stamps, two Forevers was ten cents shy of a first class letter to Canada, so I got a couple of sheets of ten cent stamps too. If you’re not the type to end up with a bunch of stamps orphaned by a penny before we made a stamp good even after the end of the world, the 1¢, 2¢, 5¢ and 10¢ stamps tend to be less spectacular than the pop culture and historical commemoration ones that have splashy ad campaigns and in-PO marketing. You might remember win the movie Fargo, Margie’s husband is a wildlife painter, in hot competition with another North Dakota local for his painting of a duck to appear on a two center.
(Margie cheers him up when he says no one uses 2¢ stamps, and she’s all, “Oh sure they do! When they go and change the rate, everyone ends up with all these stamps they can’t use anymore, and then everyone needs the 2¢ ones!”)
(Also, isn’t it weird to realize as you’re typing a blog post you’re considering previously unconsidered anachronism when you’re trying to give an example of something everyone would know? A movie from 1995 is ancient history, probably. Sending mail at all, let alone stamps with denominations, steampunkish)
The 10¢ I have I actually like. There’s a very designey element to the image of a red pear, a varietal of which I’ve never had, with a stem exactly the same color as the ripe fruit’s skin. The typeface is made remarkable by being to my eye exactly the same shade as the fruit. Against the slightly warm white background, it’s pretty striking. Especially when you get in close and see that it’s as detailed as the usual photorealism-type small money stamps. It’s usually impossible to see any detail on a building or a person, but here, because of the monochrome effect of so much bright red, the details slowly reveal themselves to you if you sit and stare.
Hopefully you do that. Then I will know the universe is truly perfect and imaginary, that somehow sitting and staring at stamps is a thing not at all strange to suggest as a way to reveal the secrets of the universe to ourselves, and people who do find each other, like this, right here.
Like the business self-help writer Seth Godin says, “People like us do things like this.”