Postage stamps have so much power, with them you can mail anything, anywhere. Well, almost anything, excluding the list of stuff that hangs on the wall of most post offices that are big no nos, but it’s still a cool idea to me to think that with just a few stamps you can mail something pretty much anywhere. One of my first “jobs” as a child was to go into the post office and buy a “book of stamps please.” I learned at an early age that stamps are powerful, you can mail a letter or a birthday card, pay a bill, send a package, exciting things can happen when you have plenty of stamps. I know the world is quite a different place than when I first learned how much could happen when you licked the back of a tiny stamp, attached it to an envelope and threw it in a mail box, and then of course, double checked that it slide in there, it’s all exciting stuff. But now a days when you can pay bills on-line and send an e card around the world it seems stamps are less and less popular. Yet it’s still true when you need a stamp you can not find a substitute to place on that mail, even gluing your money to it is meaningless. If you need a stamp you still have to get a stamp and there lies the power. Yesterday I was waiting in line at the post office to buy several books of stamps because I was completely without stamps for days and therefore felt out of sorts, powerless. As the little girl in front of me counted to her surprise, ten people in line I was oddly comforted that some things don’t change as much as we think. We still need stamps, some folks still mail packages, some people still pay their bills the old-fashioned way, some of us still wait in line and some little girls have it as their chore to buy stamps.
I know there are plenty of ways to deal with mail these days and stamps are nearly out of vogue but I’m sentimental when it comes to some things and today as I’m making my list of things I’ll do when I finish traction I feel powerful because I now have in my possession three books of “forever” stamps.