-
In the Attic with St. Francis
- University of Nevada Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
: : 96 : : :: In the Attic with St. Francis :: After a night of turning the bedsheets into a choppy sea while playing more torture games in my head, I woke to the day of summer solstice— June 20, 2002. A clear day. A stunningly bright day. I was still an emotional prisoner in the infamous attic in Denver, but when I looked out at the tops of the trees from my third-story perch, they seemed to be singing about sunlight. Something in their greenery seemed hopeful. It was solstice , after all. The turn of the seasonal wheel seemed the perfect time to stop feeling sorry for myself. Not having thought of it for years, I suddenly remembered how I’d once loved stamp collecting. As a young girl, I used to order postage stamps from the back of comic books. When the postman brought the envelope stuffed full of canceled stamps and I grabbed it out of my mother’s hands, I ran to my room, retrieved my maroon-colored album, spread everything on a card table, and spent hours looking for the right square for each stamp. Licking the back of transparent hinges, I attached stamps to the pages and swooned when I found the pretty ones from France, Hungary, and Madagascar. The sight of them had made me long for those places and those stamp makers who understood such beauty. In the Attic with St. Francis : : 97 I showered and dressed. Almost excited about something for the first time in months, I ran down the stairs and outside to the garage where most of my belongings were stored. Searching through several stacks of boxes, I found the one marked “Yearbooks and Stamp Albums.” I opened the dusty box, pulled out two even dustier albums, then carried them back upstairs where I wiped their covers with a damp dishtowel. In the green album, I’d begun a collection of U.S. airmails, and in the blue one a haphazard collection of commemoratives with no rhyme or reason except that I’d always loved beautifully engraved stamps. When I was a young mother, I’d often waited in line at the post office with a child in my arms and one or two at my side for the express purpose of buying a block of the latest commemorative. For some unknown reason, I hadn’t made much of this pastime to my family. Not that I was secretive, but I wasn’t sure they’d appreciate my private pleasure in such small pieces of perforated paper and glue. Turning through the pages of the green album, I marveled at the huge amount of history each page evoked—the nation’s and my own. Something about the airmails had always fascinated me, maybe because an airplane was a modern Pegasus, a chance to fly up, up, and away and disappear into the sky, ah yes, into infinity. Before too long, I found myself opening cupboards in the attic, searching for the phone book and turning to the yellow pages to locate a stamp shop—an endangered species. Voilà! I found one in Old Aurora on East Colfax, not too far from where I was staying. It didn’t take too long for the shop’s philatelic expert to talk me into buying one of the first three airmails printed in 1918. The particular stamp that attracted my attention happened to be the uninverted, much more common, right-side-up version of a very famous stamp known as the Inverted Jenny. It was a blue “aeroplane” printed against a red background. “I wish I had the money to buy the real thing,” I told him. [3.93.173.205] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 14:28 GMT) 98 : : r a w e d g e s “It only costs about $950,000, give or take a few dollars.” “Last time I heard, it was $800,000.” “Depends on who you talk to,” he said, “but the price is definitely going up. It was a printer’s mistake, you know.” He opened a drawer and brought out a folder filled with specialized plastic pages. “You’ll need some of these to keep your stamps safe from heat and time.” “That’s fine with me.” “You know, only one hundred out of some two million were printed upside down. If the misprint had been caught, it would have been considered “printer’s waste” and tossed into the circular file. But it was accidentally sold over...