I am spending the day working at UPenn's Fine Arts Library, the glorious Frank Furness building in which I get nothing done because I am too busy gaping at the surrounding beauty. In the lobby there are slips of yellow paper, called bao die, tied to two cardboard trees in celebration of Hong Kong's Lam Tsueng Wishing Tree tradition. On each is written a wish. Pictured above are some of my favorite. The last reads "I want to be an honest man and a good writer," which is about all many of us could wish for.
The Romance of the Postage Stamp, Egypt & Valentines
I've been reading Gustav Schenk's book "The Romance of the Postage Stamp," which Julie kindly gave me. Written in 1959 it is, as the jacket promises, an absorbing history of this paper currency. These two passages came to mind. The first, in light of the events in Egypt:
That a person's communication - in other words, his active contribution to the world, his real and genuine freedom - could travel from London to the Scottish Highlands for only a penny was remarkable enough...; but behind the economy in money and time lay a still greater triumph - the confirmation of the sovereignty of the citizen. It was an unlimited penny freedom for the middle classes, a total victory for liberalism.
And the second, in honor of Valentine's day (within a discussion of the adhesive agents used at the time):
A Frenchman, however, a great epicure, held an entirely different opinion. A love-letter of his from the 1850s has been preserved.: 'The stamp, O love of my life, which you placed on your letter, I swallowed with delight because I knew that you, my angel, had licked it!"
Which reminds me of the story told by author and illustrator Maurice Sendak who received fan mail from a young admirer, replied and, weeks later, got a note back from the boy's mother thanking Sendak for the postcard which her son, so overcome with excitement, ate.
The Write House III + Soldiers' Angels
Adding to The Write House series part one and two: two snaps from the holiday correspondence table set up to send letters to service members (via the White House flickr feed).
I like: the idea (has it been done before?), that they are hand written notes, the mailbox (but is it functional or decorative?), the uniformly sized cards and festive green marker, that correspondence is a part of the holiday tradition. I'm less enamored of: the lack of envelopes or (I'm assuming) a design on the reverse -- is this a post card?, the idea that service members get some weird mass of generic greetings (how are they delivered? In sacks at the base?), the unoriginal border and holiday message, and that the cards are sitting on that table in plastic shrink wrap. Come on, people. The next photo is of Bo cookies methodically laid out on parchment (by the way: my fingers often look identical to the pastry chef's). Can't you set these cards in a basket? Small quibbles, really. In fact, the qubbles underscore a larger issue which is that each of us should be inclined to write a service member a hand written note on our own accord. In fact I feel guilty that I haven't done so before. The most important thing is any type of gratitude expressed to our troops. SO:
Then I started Googling and of course there is such an organization called Soldiers' Angels. The idea is this: you sign up for three months of letters, to a different soldier each week. There are 1166 soldiers waiting to be adopted (did I choke up while writing this? Yes, I did.) You can also donate to this very worthy cause.
The men and women serving our country have been on my mind lately. In my other life, I am a journalist. I recently returned from Virginia where I worked with the ever-talented Amanda Lucier creating audio stories for her photo column, While You Were Gone, which documents the lives of military families while their loved ones are deployed. You can see and hear one of the stories we worked on together here. There are so many people in the world who deserve letters...and that will be the topic of my first post for 2011.