I lick and stick fifty-eight cents worth of postage on every envelope I mail despite the fact that forty-four cents is sufficient. I’m not in the habit of showering undue generosity upon bloated government bureaucracies nor am I trying to impress my letter carrier with an ostentatious display of postal excess. I just have a lot of twenty-nine cent stamps.
When my father died, I inherited a veritable cornucopia of postal commemoratives to hobbies, music, and history preserved indelibly on sheets of scored, gummed paper. (For the younger readers, “gummed paper” is a phenomenon of a more primitive age, before the overindulged MTV generation grew into whiny, self-absorbed impostors of adulthood demanding self-adhesive stamps to save the whales, horses, shoe leather or whatever it is that manually operated, saliva-activated glue comes from.) Muddy Waters, Hank Williams, marines on Guadalcanal, scuba divers, bloated puffer fish and grinning dolphins: if there’s a “29” in the corner, I’ve got ‘em. A lot of ‘em.
My postmaster, a hardnosed librarian-esque overlord of all things bundled, sealed and stamped has assured me that I can’t exchange them for new stamps. And I mean “assured” in the “if you ask me just one more fucking time I swear that as certainly as I’m cloaked in this something-vaguely-akin-to-paisley mu mu, I will call the sheriff” sense of the word. So I’m forced to use them two at a time, which is undoubtedly all part of some sinister plot concocted in the shadowy linoleum-clad halls of Post Office Central to extract more money from simple, unsuspecting glue lickers like me.
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