The World in a Shoebox - June 2008

Some background before you read: ‘Just Guys’ is a men’s social group that meets every Wednesday up in Augusta. Each meeting revolves around a particular activity. It could be a guest speaker, a particular topic for discussion or it could be something lighter like a movie or a game night. A few weeks back the topic of the evening was collections - guys were invited to bring in and share something they collected. That inspired the following story and I shared a scaled down version of it with the group that night. Lew heads up the group and his partner Jim is a regular; they are good friends of mine.

 

The World in a Shoebox

 

A while back I had a conversation with Lew and Jim. We got to talking about upcoming Just Guys events and the collectors’ night came up. They asked if I collected anything. My initial response was no, but after a moment’s thought I remembered I still had my shoebox of postcards from when I was a kid. They asked a few follow up questions and it became clear, at least to me, that it wouldn’t be something worth sharing with the group. Shortly afterwards at a Wednesday evening gathering, Lew was making announcements and brought up the upcoming collectors’ night. He, quite blatantly, looked right at me as he encouraged people to bring in and share their collections. “What…” I thought to myself, “he’s got to be kidding.” And I proceeded to feign ignorance, “Gee, I wonder why he looked at me?” He turned and continued on explaining that you could bring in anything: postcards, this or that were all fine. It’s not that I felt any pressure but I was amused by his…subtlety.

 

            I couldn’t visualize any interesting way to display several hundred 4 by 6’s of the Wisconsin Dells and other tourist hotspots so I pretty much dismissed the whole idea of presenting my collection. What I didn’t realize, however, was that the seal of time and neglect that encased the box had been broken. I woke up the next morning and all I could think about were those silly stacks of postcards. I hadn’t paid them much attention in years yet I had hung on to it through several moves, including the recent move to Maine in which I had abandoned most of my belongings. If someone sends me a card I’ll hang on to it or if I go to a new place I might pick up a few souvenir cards and add them to the stack but I haven’t opened the box more than a crack, to slide in the new acquisitions, since lord knows when. Still, there was some history in that collection and I started to ponder why I couldn’t let it go. So many times, I came close to giving or even throwing it away but I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. I got so caught up in thought that morning that I lost track of time and was late for work.

 

            I have a tendency towards obsession; all I could think about for the rest of the day was that collection. I tried to piece together how I got started with it and suddenly it brought me back to childhood. Postcards to me were like baseball cards to most boys. I had started with the typical baseball card collection. Someone had given me their old cards (probably would be worth a fortune if I’d hung on to them) and I organized them and tried to acquire more but I wasn’t very in to chewing the crappy bubble gum that came with the cards and I had no real interest in baseball. I was forced to play little league for four summers and hated every moment of it. However, once I started with the postcards, I couldn’t get enough (my obsessive tendencies started young).

 

            I’m not sure exactly how or when this fascination began. I’ve started piecing together events that most likely influenced me in that direction but I doubt I’ll ever remember where that first card came from. Back in the 60’s and 70’s the arrival of certain annual publications caused quite a stir around the house. Of course the Sears catalog was the biggest, the complete one not the little seasonal ones. We’d spend hours gawking at the toy section, the console TVs, or the giant stereo speakers that were bigger than we were. However, my biggest thrill came when my dad would pick up the new year’s version of the World Almanac. I don’t remember him ever looking at it, but I spent hours studying the book. I went right to the geography section and started memorizing all kinds of facts. I knew the all the biggest countries in terms of populations and landmass; I could tell you all the biggest cities, the longest rivers, the tallest mountains for every continent. I’d study the population and size rankings of all the states. And I spent hours and hours going over every detail of the atlas section. I don’t know what motivated it, but I became a geography geek.

 

            There were five kids in my family and for as many years one of us would get to have their family birthday party at Grandma and Grandpa’s. My year came on my eleventh birthday. As I think back on it, I don’t know why it was such a big deal. They lived in a modest apartment in one of those enormous complexes that covers several blocks. There wasn’t much for kids to do: they had a laptop pinball game (manual, not electric of course) that was good for about 20 minutes of entertainment and that was it for toys. Mom and Grandma would be busy chatting and getting the meal prepared. Dad would attempt to hold a conversation with Grandpa, which was no easy task as Grandpa was half paralyzed from a stroke suffered years earlier. Despite his condition, he was not going to give up his cigars and over time the smoke had permeated every square inch of the apartment and, by the end of the evening, us as well. It’s unfortunate that is the only image I have of him; I think he was an interesting guy and I know my mom had a deep affection for him. Anyway, unless there was something good on The Wonderful World of Disney, the five of us had to resort to fighting amongst ourselves for entertainment (we were very good at that). At mealtime, there was only room for four at the table so the adults ate there and the kids spread out around the living room with TV tables – at home we would have been able to eat together.

 

            In spite of all that, I was thrilled that it was my turn for the special birthday. Now that I’ve been a teacher for several years, I realize that it’s not the reward itself but the recognition of getting that reward that motivates a child. Why else would they bust their butts for a little gold star? It’s criminal what I can get kids to do for a single Skittle. So this was my turn for that little extra recognition on my birthday. My interest in geography and maps hadn’t gone unnoticed. My present from mom and dad was the National Geographic Atlas. Not the smaller, paperback copy but the oversized, hardcover version. It doesn’t seem so big to me now but at the time the book seemed huge. I couldn’t have been more thrilled and to this day it is the most meaningful present I’ve ever received. I look at it now and see it’s very outdated: the Soviet Union still exists; there are two Germanys and one Czechoslovakia. There are 50 states, I’m not that old, but Africa looked a bit different back then. Still, I’d never give it up; I’ll be buried with that book. About the same time in school we were studying US geography. We had to know all the states and capitals and all kinds of other information. The unit ended with a big exam and I outscored everyone in the entire grade level and received recognition for that. My fascination with geography had peaked and I began dreaming about seeing the country and traveling around the world.

 

            As I mentioned before, I don’t know when I picked up my first postcard though I’m sure it went hand-in-hand with my growing interest in geography. I began picking up cards everywhere I went. At first it wasn’t easy as we didn’t travel much as a family. We lived in a suburb just outside Chicago and I have a bunch of cards from downtown. Those were most likely acquired when we’d take the train into the city to see the windows on State Street at Christmas time. Then there was the three days we spent at the Wagon Wheel Resort in Rockton, IL. Not sure where that is? It’s just north of Rockford. Still doesn’t help, does it? Rockford is about an hour and a half west of Chicago and the supposed setting for the Rosanne Barr show if that helps you paint a picture of how exotic a location it is for a vacation. Still I do have postcards of Rockton. Then there was the fabulous weekend in downtown Milwaukee. The highlight of that trip was seeing Sonny and Cher in a restaurant and getting their autograph. Like many Chicagoans, many of our vacations were spent on a lake in Wisconsin. Not to be discouraged, I started collecting postcards of the lakes of Wisconsin; I have forty-five lake shots and ninety Wisconsin cards altogether.

 

            Occasionally my parents would get a card from a friend, which was given to me once it was read. However, the collection really expanded when my grandmother heard of my interest and gave me the cards she had collected over the years. Suddenly I had cards from across the country as well some from other countries. I was touched that she would give them to me, she had seventeen grandchildren after all, though I think it is save to say that I was the only one that collected postcards – it wasn’t an especially popular hobby. I’m not sure how she got wind of my interest; I suspect mom had something to do with it. Mom was not big on openly expressing emotions, it wasn’t her style, but she had a way of doing little things that showed she was in tune with what you were feeling and that she was there for you. Grandma’s collection consisted largely of correspondence from friends. But there is a bunch that didn’t have notes. I don’t know if those were places she had been, if friends had picked them up for her, or their personal significance. Unfortunately, she passed away shortly afterwards and I never had a chance to ask.

 

            A few years later, there was a significant shift in the family dynamic. My mom had a run-in with a near fatal illness and my dad’s MS started getting more severe. At the same time his brother suddenly insisted on being bought out of the family printing business leaving the small company, and subsequently my dad, in a financial bind. Between his illness and running the shop by himself, traveling, for my dad, even little trips to Wisconsin, was no longer going to be possible. My mom recovered but something had come over her; she wasn’t quite the same. I won’t go too much into that other than to say she suddenly developed an interest in traveling. I think it was more about exposing her kids to new possibilities than it was about her own enjoyment. Either way, it was something that became important to her. Due to circumstances and finances, we only got in two trips over the next few years: one to California and one to the Smokey Mountains. California was a bit of a fiasco but Kentucky and Tennessee were wonderful. Getting back to the postcards, I have 20 from that trip to California and 75 from Kentucky and Tennessee. More importantly, I broke out of the Midwest – now the country, and the world, were mine to explore.

 

            Somewhere along the way, as my collection grew, I began to organize them into scrapbooks. I had a couple for US cards and one for foreign. I got myself a bunch of construction paper, a ruler, tape and a set of letter stencils punched out of cardstock. Each book was sorted by country or state and arranged alphabetically, of course. If there were only one or two cards for that particular locale I carefully centered them on the page. If there were more, I created a flip chart for that page, or pages for some places. I measured carefully so they lined up straight down the middle of the page and spaced the top edges precisely the same distance apart. The stencils were used to create a page to mark the beginning of each section. Again, each letter was perfectly spaced horizontally, vertically, or diagonally for the longer names, across the page. I don’t know how long it took me to complete the scrapbooks, but it was quite an undertaking. I have since dismantled them for ease of storing but many of the postcards still have scotch tape on them. I didn’t realize how hard it was to get tape off without ruining the picture.

 

            Traveling on my own started after I graduated college. About a year later I landed my first real job: business suit, train downtown, high-rise office building, the whole nine yards. To celebrate I planned a spur-of-the-moment car trip to Canada with my brother and sister. It was my first trip outside the country. That is, if you consider Canada another country, to a Midwesterner, San Francisco is more foreign than Toronto, but technically we were outside the US. To date, I have been to forty-seven states, three Canadian provinces, Kenya, Costa Rica, Puerto Rico and several countries in Europe. There is actually a chart of how much time I’ve spent in each state – nerdiness knows no bounds. My goal is to get to South America, Asia and Australia by the time I’m sixty. It’d be nice to include Antarctica but that usually involves a brutal boat trip from the southern tip of South America. I don’t think I’d fair very well as I get motion sickness rather easily; just watching movies in Imax theaters makes me nauseous. I take plenty of pictures of each new place visited, but also pick up some postcards as a backup and as a way to document some of the sites seen.

 

            Traveling has led to some other collections as well. I started taking super-8 movies of places we visited – be glad that didn’t turn into a collection; it could have made for a very long evening. I try to hang on to the visitors’ maps of the national parks I’ve hiked. Unfortunately, sometimes I forget and throw them out when cleaning out my pockets at the end of the day. I’ve bought a number of coffee-table books with photographs and write-ups of the different places I’ve been. I enjoyed thumbing through those but they’re pretty bulky and I ended up donating them to a library before moving to Maine. From time to time I’ll buy some street art from places I visit: a painting from Prague, batiks from Kenya, pottery from New Mexico. That collection is still small, but once I get a little more settled, I’ll continue with that. The postcards are the only things I’ve been consistent about. They’re small and easy to transport so I’m sure I’ll hang on to them for the time being. Someday I hope to pass them on to a young person that might have an interest in them. It’s tough to compete with Nintendo and Wii, games but I have faith there will be a little boy or girl that could appreciate the sentiment of an old collection.

 

            In that original conversation with Jim and Lew we talked about how wonderful it is to hear somebody present something they’re passionate about. It doesn’t matter what it is as long as they’re able to convey their zest for what they are sharing. They talked about someone at the last collectors’ night that was reluctant to share but once he got going he absolutely captivated the audience with his enthusiasm for the hobby. Initially, I saw that as a reason not to share – I wasn’t passionate about them; I hadn’t given much thought to the postcards in years. Then it dawned on me that there is a reason why I kept them all these years and continue to add to the collection. At one time they were very important to me; they represented a love of geography and a desire to see the world. As I look back, I wonder if there wasn’t a subliminal connection to my mother and grandmother as well, were we three generations of girls who dreamed of traveling? No way to verify that now, but it’s nice to fantasize about conversations we might have had as a way of remembering them.

 

            There really is no good way to present a postcard collection. They’re not of particular value and hardly rare. Even as I write this, I look at the shop across the street and it has a postcard display out on the sidewalk. Still, who doesn’t like getting a postcard in the mail knowing that someone took a moment out of their day to share their adventure with you. Like any collection, the items themselves are only part of the picture. The stories behind them - how we got started, the sentimental value, the ways they motivate us - that is what makes sharing a passion appealing. It’s been interesting for me to go back and revisit the postcards. I spent a little time sorting them out again, only this time I focused on how I came by them. I have stacks of the ones I got from Grandma, the ones people sent me, the ones I bought myself and the ones that are a mystery. At one time the postcards represented dreams of the future and places I was going to travel. Now they represent a journey to the past and people I’ve connected with over the years. In recent years in my classroom, I’ve presented Social Studies lessons about how something can be a treasure even if it isn’t worth a lot of money. I usually use the atlas as a model; maybe next time I’ll use the postcards.