Intergenerational Paper Aquirement

Paper leads to googling old addresses in Philadelphia PA. 

 

Over the past few months I’ve been helping my mom clean out stuff from her house. Since she’s lived in that house for almost fifty years, things are stuck in every corner of the place. I bring in empty boxes and take out full boxes. I bring in plastic totes and then stack them over there. It feels like a process that’s going to continue forever. While it seems we’ve accomplished a lot in this process, piles tend to pop up in other rooms after disappearing in the first one. There’s less in the house. I know we’ve made progress…I think.

My main job is to do something with my dad’s books. Most of books I bought for him. He wasn’t great at telling me exactly what he wanted to read, but I chose things that might work. Mostly I bought books about war and men in war…and war and guts and blood and stuff. No novels! Anything painfully specific about World War II would normally work. That could be able some mission in North African or Japanese prison camps in Southeast Asia. If I found those at a thrift store then I bought them. Maybe he’d read them, and maybe they’d get stacked up in the back room. I did this for years and the stacks got bigger and bigger.

Then there were the books that he had acquired on his own. Some of them were random books he told me he bought in New Orleans at one of those books by the pound places. He had a whole set of encyclopedias from 1915 as well as a set about American authors. They looked nice but they weren’t of much interest to him. You didn’t actually read them you looked at them. When I was a kid and playing in that back room, I remember incorporating them into my play. They were great for making buildings for my GI Joe’s.

Lastly there were the books that were handed down to him. These were clearly older than the rest, some of them going back to the middle part of the 19^th century. Flipping through one of them, I noticed my grandmother’s maiden name written in one. It was a children’s book from what I assume is the 1920’s or early 1930’s. Clearly, she hadn’t written her name in the book. It was a fancy calligraphy type of printing. No child could have wielded a pen in this fashion, no way. It was odd seeing her name in the book in the exact way I’d seen names printed in anonymous books for years. So much of my time has been spent going through mold ravaged tomes, and none of those people have been related to me. When I saw her name in the book I paused, and put that one off to the side. I’ll keep that one.

While I love books and spend most of my time moving them around the world, they’re not always unique. Looking through old things, especially old things from my parents’ house, I’ve looked for personal items. My dad wasn’t one to have a dream journal or a notebook full of random notes, but I’ve found scribblings on pieces of paper. He had terrible handwriting.

Out of all the piles I took to my car and then “processed,” (donate, moved upstairs, kept or ripped up) I came across something from my dad’s uncle, my great-uncle, Ken. Ken was a unique, fidgety guy that came from the exotic land of Cape May New Jersey. He lived most of his life with my great-aunt (my grandmother’s sister) in a house in Philadelphia Pennsylvania. When the two of them retired they moved into my great grandparents’ house (the one my great aunt grew up in) in Lexington North Carolina.

Ken collected stamps and things related to mail. When someone was born, he made a book of stamps for them, or at least he did for me as well as my father. I have mine at my house. My great aunt sent postcards. Before I got involved in mail art, I sent postcards a lot of unadorned postcards, many of which went to her at the ancestral manse in Lexington.

Obviously, I ended up with my dad’s book of stamps and other postal ephemera. I didn’t ask my mom if I could take it, but I didn’t figure she’d mind. It was one less thing she had to account for, something I doubt she had ever looked at. The book ended up in the back of my car and then made its way upstairs where I got a closer look.

There were two books. One book was just “First Day of Issue” stamps. I came across a bunch of these many years ago, some that were at least eighty years old. Worried I was cutting up something of value I did a little sleuthing and found no one really collected them anymore. At best they were going for a dollar. I cut those up. Outside of the first day of issues were some un-cancelled postcards, maybe twenty or thirty. Although these can be redeemed for the value on the front, someone would still have to put extra postage on them to get to today’s rates. All of those will go to Richard in Illinois. He uses those all the time. I even found a postcard sent to my great-grandparents from the 1970’s.

The most intriguing part of the collection were the un-cancelled stamps with the years they were issued in chronological order. They started in 1969. The book I was given started in the year of my birth, 1981. While I like the look of these books, I’m more interested in the practical use of the stamps. Shit’s expensive! In other words, what I saw was “free postage.” After all, I had a stack of things that needed to go out but didn’t have any stamps. All I had to do was transfer the stamps over and then drop them in one of those blue boxes. I sat there and thought. I flipped to the next page, more stamps. The collection went for about twenty years. Dozens of dollars of stamps right there for the taking.

I was looking at these books on my desk. The stamp books were surrounded by reminders of the thousands of hours I’d spent making my weird things. After peering around the room, I looked a little closer at his creation. This was his passion, a passion that somehow ended up on my desk almost sixty years later. In no way could I break that up. No way could I toss out or use up such a creation, such a beautiful collection. Unfortunately, this is a conundrum that someone will have to work through for all of my bullshit. I have thousands of pages of written things, collages, handmade books…not counting all of the non-personal items. Books, DVD’s, and weird pieces of paper with faces of rock starts on them. What do they toss out and what do they keep? How do I tell someone decades from now what is important and what they can quickly toss in the trash or drop off at Goodwill? Intergenerational paper acquirement keeps running downhill. I feel sorry for that next poor-bastard to deal with my shit. Sorry Miles.

My response to all of this was to investigate and then make more stuff (paper) from my inquisitiveness. One of the cards in the book of mail ephemera sent to my dad, had my great aunt and uncle’s address in Philadelphia on it. Strangely, I’ve retained the street name, it’s never left me although I haven’t been there in thirty years. When I was 12 or 13 I went to visit them in Philadelphia one summer. The three of us ran around the city for a week. They were great hosts, we went to museums and even to a minor league baseball game in Redding. It seems the Phillies were out of town the whole week.  I distinctly remember the kitchen that overlooked the street out front. At the time it felt like I was in the busiest city in the world. When I looked out the front window at my parents’ house, all I saw were a couple semi-manicured fields. In my 12 year old brain, looking out that kitchen window in Philly I saw an urban metropolis. In my 44 year old brain, I was in a post-war suburb of Northeastern row-houses. While it was exponentially more urban than what I came from, this was not really the city. This was the place where middle class people went to to avoid the city. It was a place they could have cars and a small yard. I loved looking out that kitchen window. Caroline often had the window open in the morning, the traffic screeching down the street. Periodically the sound of a city bus would come rumbling by. Who knows, I might have even been treated to a gunshot while trying to go to sleep: a sound that connected both the city and the country for me. One night, while I was sleeping in the back TV room, I thought someone was in the house. I remember staying very still on that fold out mattress. I don’t know how long I was frozen for, but I realized the sound was coming from the nearby neighbors, something I had never experienced before.

There’s gold in them thar paper. Pieces lead to pieces, story to story, and then…more paper. Add the postage and move along. I hope this story fits nicely in a pile in an unused part of your house.