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T HE FIRST TIME I show up at the stamp dealer’s office, I consider not even getting out of the car. It’s an unusually cold morning in LA, I don’t have a sweater with me, and I’m fairly sure all I’m doing here is wasting my time.
But my hatchback is filled to capacity with the former contents of my father’s hobby room: pages and pages of books filled with stamps under plastic, large clear boxes filled with thrift shop finds, mostly yellowed letters, unsent or unopened but adorned with a stamp from some other era. If I don’t unload it all here, I’ll have to find somewhere to put it back at my house. And besides that, I feel like I owe it to my father to at least try to do something with his collection. At that thought, I get out of my car and open the trunk.
When I was a kid, I used to accompany my father to thrift shops and yard sales and estate sales on the weekend, sifting through other people’s trash, looking for an old letter, or maybe a deceased collector’s newly unwanted collection. I would ask him what he was looking for then, and he would turn to me and smile, and say, a gem . That’s what stamps are to him, gems. Or were, anyway. Diamonds, rubies, emeralds. He saw himself as a jeweler who could determine flaws and beauty in what looks average to all the rest of us. Once, after we took a family trip to DC and saw the Hope Diamond at the Smithsonian, he turned to me and said: That’s what I’m looking for, Kate. Though I doubted my father would ever find it in the thrift stores of Southern California.
According to my father, the Hope Diamond of stamps will be one that is a mistake. One that will be rare because it was issued too early or too late, because it was printed wrong. And I guess that’s what all these boxes stacked up in the back of my car really signify: his search for some kind of accidental greatness amidst thousands of little paper squares.
All I see when I look at stamps are paper and ink. Stamps are a means to an end, a utility. They get my mail from one place to another, pay my bills, take my letters to my best friend, Karen, who moved to Connecticut last summer. And most recently they’ve sat staring at me, three little flowers in a row, pasted on the manila envelope from Daniel that I’ve left unopened on my kitchen counter. The end of everything. I hate the finality of it and that’s why I haven’t actually opened the envelope yet.
I’m certain that my father, who never much liked Daniel, would’ve been altogether annoyed by the choice of flowers for such a correspondence. But my father doesn’t know. And even if he did, now I’m pretty sure he wouldn’t remember.
The stamp dealer’s office is a nondescript one-room tucked into a strip mall, just near where the 405 meets the 101, on the edge of Sherman Oaks. Not a place I’d expect to find or unearth any kind of gem. But I’m already here; I have an appointment. I take the first armload of boxes out of my car and walk inside.
The dealer, Benjamin Grossman, sits behind his desk, which is covered in a disorganized mess of papers and has a small black-and-white TV perched on the corner. He’s watching the noon news, and the newscaster is talking about the protests yesterday in East Berlin.
He looks away from the TV when I walk in, but he doesn’t turn it off. He’s younger than I’d been expecting after talking to him over the phone. Stamp collecting always felt to me like an old man’s hobby, and I’d expected an elderly dealer. But Benjamin looks like he’s my age, mid-thirties, possibly early forties. He wears wire-rimmed glasses, and has a full head of curly light brown hair. “Mrs. Nelson?” he asks.
I’m still unsure what I’m supposed to do with my married surname. “You can just call me Katie,” I tell him.
“Okay, Katie,” he says, absentmindedly. He couldn’t care less what he calls me. He reaches up and fiddles with the antenna on his television, adjusting the picture to his liking, and I get the feeling I’m intruding, interrupting something by showing up here, even with an appointment.
“Um... what should I do with these?” I shift the boxes. They’re heavy.
“Oh, sorry. Here. Just put them on my desk.” Benjamin lets the antenna be and sits back down. I glance at the mess surrounding him. “Anywhere you’d like,” he says, and I put the boxes down on top of some papers. He leans forward and riffles through carefully for a moment, and I wonder how he became a stamp dealer, what one even majors in in college to get on such a career path. History? I majored in English and work for a lifestyle magazine, where I review movies. It’s not a very well-paying job, but until recently it was, at least, a fun one.
“I’ll go through this,” I realize Benjamin is saying. “And then I’ll give you a call, let you know what I find.” I’ve already told Benjamin over the phone about my father, his failing memory, his inability to keep up his collection, and his continued insistence that there are gems in here. He used to tell me all the time that when he got older the collection could be all mine. And he reiterated that when I moved him into the Willows a few months back. But I honestly don’t know what I’m supposed to do with it. And that’s really why I’ve brought it all here.
I walk back out to my car to grab another pile of boxes, and when I walk back in, Benjamin looks away from the news again, raises his eyebrows. “There’s more?” I nod. “Sorry. I’ll help you carry it in.” He gets up and follows me back out to the parking lot. “I didn’t mean to be rude.”
“It’s fine,” I say, not in the mood for small talk.
But Benjamin keeps talking. “I just didn’t realize how much your father had when we spoke over the phone.” He peers into my trunk.
“He’s seventy-one,” I say, and it comes out sharper than I meant it. “It’s just... it’s been a lifelong obsession for him.” Though even as I say it out loud, seventy-one doesn’t sound as old as it should. Many people at the Willows are older than him, and I’m constantly angered by how unfair it is; the disappearance of his memory feels like a punch, something that takes my breath away, again and again.
“It usually is,” Benjamin says kindly, as if he understands, as if he, too, shares this obsession with stamps. As if I am the weirdo who doesn’t get it. Maybe I am.
After the last box is unloaded, Benjamin Grossman simply says, “Give me a week. Maybe two. I’ll let you know what you have here.”
But I hesitate for a moment before leaving, wondering how my father would feel about this, me leaving his most treasured possessions with this man I found in the yellow pages under “Stamp Dealers.” I’d called and left messages for all three dealers listed. And Benjamin Grossman had been the first one to call me back. “Do I need a receipt or something?”
Benjamin shakes his head, pulls a business card from underneath a pile on his desk, and presses it into my hand. “I’ll call you when I’m done,” he says. Then he adds, “Don’t worry. I’ll take good care of them.” As if the stamps are flowers, something that need to be nurtured, tenderly.
“I’m not worried,” I say. I’ve let something go that wasn’t really even mine to begin with. But as I get into my car, pull out of the parking lot and back onto the 405, I can’t shake this unexpected feeling of emptiness.