3.(8-9) Stamp Collecting

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8. Tommy’s Boxes

Second day at Pink House: Tommy and Kimi open 6 just-delivered boxes in guest room, neatly lined up on table.

   He sits at table, she beside him. “Doll, what you see here are my books, my hobbies, my childhood papers. I been waiting to get a helpmeet to sort them.” He pauses, right forefinger in air. “Did you catch that, Doll? ‘Helpmeet!’ A variant of helpmate, which is what I hope you’ll become.”

   She scribbles in memo. He continues. “I am too tired from office to do anything after coming home nights.” He stops at the face she makes, laughs and continues. “But I thought you might like to look in these boxes. If anything interests you, please set to work on it.”

   Kimi’s childhood was without leisure – No toys, no books, nothing but work – ‘a culture wasteland’, Tommy calls it.  She is unsure how she feels about these objects of Tommy's rich-culture childhood but she is aware that deep within her a pulse is beginning to beat.

9. Stamps

She opens a box. A browned paper-covered Stamp Album!

Stamp? To Kimi, “stamp” means what you press for a mark, which is how people sign documents in Japan. Curious, she looks at the papered-over cover, with Stamp Album ,and opens it and sees pages of postal stamps, country-by-country, alphabetic.

She opens to a page, “ABYSSINIA” and from jungle scenes she guesses Africa.
   The “ETHIOPIE” is printed on the stamp's right edge vertically and with symbols of a language that almost seems Chinese on its left edge. Some stamps have a head & shoulders view of an imposing man with short beard whom, she guesses, is the King.  One stamp shows a Queen, in left profile.

   The stamps are beauties from color alone. Some are sets, differing in color and number marking, which must be money value, she guesses.

   She feels unfamiliar pleasure. She runs fingers over the stamps. She lifts up the book and draws in the stamp smell of the old paper. She flicks the edges of the stamps and sees that gummed hinges stick each stamp to a photo picture of its image underneath on the page. At bottom page, she sees an interesting ETIOPIA stamp showing a distinguished looking old bald European man with white Italian mustache.

When Tommy comes home at 5 PM, no Kimi greets him. He goes upstairs and – Lo! – She is sitting over the album; place and time forgotten, face aglow with happiness.

   He kisses her lightly atop head. “Doll, I see you discovered my stamps.”

   “Yeah, Tommy!” she mimics him, even down to ‘Yeah’.

   “I hoped you'd like ‘em. Say! Where are you there?” He glances at the page. “Egypt! I recognize King Farouk from the fez. I got started, at age ten. Uncle Guy had just got us, and Unc had a nice house and was a bachelor professor. I was very depressed, just moped around and sat by a window, my world shot. My sister, Ali, took things better because she made friends easy.

   “One day Unc comes home with a package and throws it on my bed.” ‘For you, Thomas’, he says. It was this album, new and bright red then.”

   Tommy takes the album from Kimi's hand and hugs it to his chest. She has not before seen him so emotional.

   He continues his remembrance. “On the cover was printed The Junior International Album, Illustrated.”

   “ 'Go on, open it’, Unc said. I did and there, between cover and heading page, was a big envelope of a thousand mixed stamps that Unc bought for fifty cents. They were starters and all are pasted in this book now.”

   He goes to a box and, reaching inside, he comes up with a big, transparent envelope on which is written, ‘5,000 Mixed’. “Here are your starters, Doll.  I got a new, bigger album in there, one I bought to transfer the collection to.” He finds the new album inside the opened box. It looks like a thick dictionary and is titled ‘Scott Master International Album’.

   Tommy gives instructions and shows Kimi pages in back, headed “Information for Collectors,” which she would go over and over again with dictionary.

Happily, Tommy has everything a postage stamp collector will need: a magnifier, a stamp-edge perforation-counter, a watermark developer, tweezers, a small bag of gummed tabs for pasting the stamps in the album, and a stamp-identifying catalog. He had been planning to get back into stamp collecting. He stopped collecting when he went to Harvard and now the urge grabs him again.

   Uncle Guy was not only responsible for starting Tommy on stamps, he also kept the flame burning when Tommy was away at an elite Prep school and then at Harvard. Several months before Tommy left for school, Unc bought him the 5,000 mixed-stamps packet. The stamps were all still gummed to paper torn from envelopes. Tommy guessed then that they had been re-assorted by the stamp company to have a good mix from all over. There were many duplicates he calls "dupes".

   “First thing you do with the packet”, explains Tommy, “is sort each stamp according to country and within country, according to type – airmail, regular, postage-due, special delivery. With five-thousand stamps you need a bridge table and you sit on one side of it with the opened stamp packet on lap, or on side table or chair, and also with magnifying glass to help you identify the stamps and a good light. Then, one by one, you sort the stamps into small piles, each pile a country in alphabet order.” He continues teaching her late into night.

So Kimi is launched into a lifetime of stamp collecting, which not only refreshes one's mind between chores and study but also teaches geography, history, art, language. It is one of many sources that make a cultured person's life rich and happy compared to the barrenness of usual persons who, today, are culturally deprived so that, even when at leisure, their enjoyments are listening to or watching sport event while eating & drinking unhealthily; or dining in restaurant and gossiping; or the other mindless mumbo-jumbo that passes for social life. These "enjoyments" harm the body, weaken the mind, and make suicide an acceptable alternative to the meaningless life. Tommy is making sure it shall not be Kimi's fate.

    To read next, now, click 3.(10-11) Introduction to Seminar