Stamps in the Time of Covid

Of all my conversations on unPlanned, I have found my conversation with David Luberoff the most beguiling. David tells us about how he planned to write about a series of letters that his father sent to his mother when he was a young G.I. in Europe during the Second World War, but when he actually sat down to do this, he was diverted for some unknown reason to his father’s stamp collection instead and found himself writing a post on Facebook every day about a different stamp from his father’s stamp collection. It all started in April of last year, at the start of Covid, and what began as a whim developed into a full-scale project, one that continued up until this April, when he finished up his writing by ending on his father’s birthday. A full year of writing. A full year of learning about stamps. A full year spent with his now deceased father, perusing this collection that was an obsession of a man decades ago, that ended up on shelf, and then was bequeathed to the son long after the father was gone.

It’s David’s reflection not only on his father’s life, but also on his own life and then as well on all the historical markers that are commemorated in these stamps, it is this that I find so beguiling.

It is also perhaps that David and I share a New York connection, so his reminiscing about the 1969 Mets in relation to a stamp about the 1964 World’s Fair, these all have some meaning to me. Or his remembering driving across the Verrazzano Narrows Bridge with his mother, a memory sparked by stamp honoring the bridge.

Also, he spends a lot of time thinking about public monuments, a subject that also fascinates me. He does so in relation to stamps commemorating Confederate soldiers, which is so timely in this year of George Floyd’s murder at the hands of Derek Chauvin.

It is also that ever-human sense about “a world gone by.” Stamp collecting is not what it was. As David points out, FDR was a passionate stamp collector. Hard to imagine a president, any president nowadays, having that same hobby. There’s just too much else to distract. As I write this, for example, I am processing a video on my other computer while listening to the Doors on YouTube. The Doors, btw, make it into one of David’s posts.

I find myself returning to my conversation with David again and again in my mind — one of those quirky events that in some ways isn’t about anything, but in other ways is about everything, life itself.