(no subject)
Collected Works
Some little boys collect army figures; others, baseball cards. They, I imagine, would, in their teens, embrace an open interest in guns, or sports. As a kid, I wanted nothing to do with guns, and the only sports I liked were jump-roping and tetherball, “soft-contact” sports that did not require talent or hand-eye coordination.
Instead, I collected stamps.
Not that I did not previously possess other collections. My parents bought me miniature cars and a racetrack, but I didn’t race them. I took them all outside, and banged in the tops with a hammer, occasionally removing a wheel or hood, and then stacked them atop one another in an effort to create a junkyard labyrinth. I was pleased with my efforts for ten minutes, but then realized that I didn’t have enough miniature cars to really make it resemble a labyrinth, certainly nothing small insects would get hopelessly lost in, and so my interest dwindled and I abandoned them outside. Apparently, those little cars were expensive, as well, so my “modifications” to the cars were never repeated.
I also collected rocks at one point, but this was generalized to “nature” and then generalized further to “things I wanted to make into potpourri” by dumping a bunch of lawn trimmings and rotting bark in a bowl with the rocks and spraying my mother’s perfume on it. This hobby also did not go over well.
So my parents decided they would involve me in a hobby that did not involve using a hammer or digging through a lawnmower bag: stamps. I adopted philately, the delicate art of stamp collecting, the unmistakable brand of any cool elementary school child. What better way to impress your friends at that young and perilous age than with your broad knowledge of watermarks?
And I didn’t care for the rare stamps, like those with the inverted planes worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, or any of the boring, dichromatic United States stamps at all. I was interested in the stamps with colorful images of flowers or tropical pants, and filled great books with rows of two-dimensional floral arrangements. So I wasn’t just a philatelist, I was a burgeoning homosexual philatelist. I was obviously the most popular choice in P.E. when we played basketball and divided into teams.
I also liked obscure countries that no longer existed or had been subjugated by the imperialist Europe. I would spend dollars on one stamp because it was from Inini, or Majorca, or Azerbaijan. These names could have been totally fabricated and sold to me and I never would have second-guessed it. “The country of Xiqbltar? With a vase of roses on it? I’ll take it!”
My stamps were bought from a store in Simi Valley, creatively named “Ernie’s Stamp Store.” Ernie was a cantankerous seventy-something war veteran whose store always stunk of envelope glue and cigarettes. I would sometimes comb through his lettered boxes, searching for another Inini gem to add to my collection. But most of the time, my parents would just buy a package of several thousand stamps for whatever exorbitant rate I was ignorant of at the time. I picked out the most garish floral ones from the bunch, but most of the others, with the heads of political notables I cared nothing for, were relegated to a large lamp box in which I stored the rest of my stamps. Consequently, lots of countries put disembodied heads of kings and potentates on their postage and I used to think these were kings whom the following ruler had beheaded.
I was a hit at parties. Parents would brag about their child being on the All-Star baseball team or graduating from Weebelos to Boy Scouts, and my dad would confidently say, “Christopher can name every country in Africa,” and then I did, in alphabetical order. I think most people fortunate enough to hear me rattle off the list were thunderstruck that I knew more geography than they did, but they never would have known if I had forgotten Swaziland anyway.
Consequently, I could also read in more than twenty-five languages: my reading, however, was limited to the word “postage,” so I don’t know about its practicality for traveling, but it is an achievement I think few fourth-graders could boast.
I could spend hours, sifting through the lamp box, perfectly enchanted with 25 pounds of used postage. But then, one fateful Christmas, I opened by chance not my stamps first, but a Super Nintendo system, and not long after that day all my stamps, including the entire compilation of Hungary’s native wildflowers, were shelved in the lamp-box next to the Pogs, not to be opened except when I forgot why I had a large, beat-up lamp-box in my closet. From that point, my attention was diverted to protecting the spoony bard with my dark knight and dragoon.
I guess that was the end of my illustrious philately stage. It could have been worse, like an interest in samurai swords or paintballing, right? Huge dork, perhaps, but huge dork with no broken bones. I don’t have much to show for my stamp collection now, though I think the box is still posing a fire hazard in one of the closets at my house, and if someone casually drops a reference to French Guiana, I know its colonial name and can remain at the peak of the conversation, at least until someone transitions it to guns, or sports.
Some little boys collect army figures; others, baseball cards. They, I imagine, would, in their teens, embrace an open interest in guns, or sports. As a kid, I wanted nothing to do with guns, and the only sports I liked were jump-roping and tetherball, “soft-contact” sports that did not require talent or hand-eye coordination.
Instead, I collected stamps.
Not that I did not previously possess other collections. My parents bought me miniature cars and a racetrack, but I didn’t race them. I took them all outside, and banged in the tops with a hammer, occasionally removing a wheel or hood, and then stacked them atop one another in an effort to create a junkyard labyrinth. I was pleased with my efforts for ten minutes, but then realized that I didn’t have enough miniature cars to really make it resemble a labyrinth, certainly nothing small insects would get hopelessly lost in, and so my interest dwindled and I abandoned them outside. Apparently, those little cars were expensive, as well, so my “modifications” to the cars were never repeated.
I also collected rocks at one point, but this was generalized to “nature” and then generalized further to “things I wanted to make into potpourri” by dumping a bunch of lawn trimmings and rotting bark in a bowl with the rocks and spraying my mother’s perfume on it. This hobby also did not go over well.
So my parents decided they would involve me in a hobby that did not involve using a hammer or digging through a lawnmower bag: stamps. I adopted philately, the delicate art of stamp collecting, the unmistakable brand of any cool elementary school child. What better way to impress your friends at that young and perilous age than with your broad knowledge of watermarks?
And I didn’t care for the rare stamps, like those with the inverted planes worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, or any of the boring, dichromatic United States stamps at all. I was interested in the stamps with colorful images of flowers or tropical pants, and filled great books with rows of two-dimensional floral arrangements. So I wasn’t just a philatelist, I was a burgeoning homosexual philatelist. I was obviously the most popular choice in P.E. when we played basketball and divided into teams.
I also liked obscure countries that no longer existed or had been subjugated by the imperialist Europe. I would spend dollars on one stamp because it was from Inini, or Majorca, or Azerbaijan. These names could have been totally fabricated and sold to me and I never would have second-guessed it. “The country of Xiqbltar? With a vase of roses on it? I’ll take it!”
My stamps were bought from a store in Simi Valley, creatively named “Ernie’s Stamp Store.” Ernie was a cantankerous seventy-something war veteran whose store always stunk of envelope glue and cigarettes. I would sometimes comb through his lettered boxes, searching for another Inini gem to add to my collection. But most of the time, my parents would just buy a package of several thousand stamps for whatever exorbitant rate I was ignorant of at the time. I picked out the most garish floral ones from the bunch, but most of the others, with the heads of political notables I cared nothing for, were relegated to a large lamp box in which I stored the rest of my stamps. Consequently, lots of countries put disembodied heads of kings and potentates on their postage and I used to think these were kings whom the following ruler had beheaded.
I was a hit at parties. Parents would brag about their child being on the All-Star baseball team or graduating from Weebelos to Boy Scouts, and my dad would confidently say, “Christopher can name every country in Africa,” and then I did, in alphabetical order. I think most people fortunate enough to hear me rattle off the list were thunderstruck that I knew more geography than they did, but they never would have known if I had forgotten Swaziland anyway.
Consequently, I could also read in more than twenty-five languages: my reading, however, was limited to the word “postage,” so I don’t know about its practicality for traveling, but it is an achievement I think few fourth-graders could boast.
I could spend hours, sifting through the lamp box, perfectly enchanted with 25 pounds of used postage. But then, one fateful Christmas, I opened by chance not my stamps first, but a Super Nintendo system, and not long after that day all my stamps, including the entire compilation of Hungary’s native wildflowers, were shelved in the lamp-box next to the Pogs, not to be opened except when I forgot why I had a large, beat-up lamp-box in my closet. From that point, my attention was diverted to protecting the spoony bard with my dark knight and dragoon.
I guess that was the end of my illustrious philately stage. It could have been worse, like an interest in samurai swords or paintballing, right? Huge dork, perhaps, but huge dork with no broken bones. I don’t have much to show for my stamp collection now, though I think the box is still posing a fire hazard in one of the closets at my house, and if someone casually drops a reference to French Guiana, I know its colonial name and can remain at the peak of the conversation, at least until someone transitions it to guns, or sports.