Stamps in place

This morning I sorted through my dad's stamp collections. Stamps. One by one, carefully torn from the edge of an envelope, delicately glued to an impassioned letter, faithfully sent around the globe in the hands of a stranger, patiently waited for in a distant hemisphere. 

One stack for Argentina, another for Finland. I sit here waiting for Skype to ring from England or Israel and am struck by these tiny pieces of paper, their intricate illustrations packed between four small serrated edges. With a buzz, I am interrupted by a text message; I speak to my cell phone and effortlessly send a text to a friend in South Africa. One stack for Thailand, another for Senegal.

Where my dad grew up in Johannesburg, South Africa, he felt in some ways more isolated than his grandparents may have in their boggy Eastern European shtetl. Not only was he confined to the edge of the earth, next-door neighbors with Antarctica. He was also suffocating under a wicked government. During the Apartheid years, the South African government would not allow certain foreign music into the country, nor South African money out. This racist system was a magnificent prison, both for the darker-skinned peoples who were oppressed by the it, and the pale pricks who benefited from it. All were locked in. My dad, a chlostrophobe to the core, could only dream of traveling and traveling and traveling the world. He peeled off these stamps, one by one, until at the age of 25, he encountered those countries they were sent from. On that grand voyage, my dad gathered the experiences that shaped his life into the American he is today.

Now I am ready to stamp around the globe.