I’m joining
a cover exchange club…
Blessed
internet! This is really what I think all the communication tools now at our
prompt disposal are really good and useful for: bridging space and distance, be
it geographic; idiomatic; cultural; economic; political... all the adjectives that
were once synonyms of a humble and perennial noun: difficulty.
When I was
a kid colleting stamps in a shoebox, it was difficult to get access to stamps
from any other country than yours. The more so if you lived, as I did, in a peripheral
region where not even TV was available (what, on the other hand contributed to
my having had a most joyous and happy youth). Since there were some people in
our vicinity who had relatives who had immigrated to the USA, where there was
(and is) a large Portuguese Azorean community, sometimes you’d come across and American
stamp, but that was it.
My father,
who was not a stamp collector, but who also believed in getting to know other
people and in bridging cultural divides, once told me I should get a pen pal.
A Capital -
that as the name of the now long gone newspaper I believe to be the culprit - used to have a
small section every month or so where it published addresses of people looking
for penpals. I chose one from Teresina,
Piauí, Brazil, since I could only write in my mother tongue.
Armed with
my 10 year old scant cultural baggage and scanter warehouse of words, I pulled
a sheet of paper from my school notebook and wrote the traditional opening
sentence that has graced millions of such letters before me: “Hi, my name is
Pedro and I live in Portugal in Santa Maria Island, in the Azores, an
archipelago in the Atlantic Ocean, and I am 10 years old”. I also added that I
was collecting stamps and that I would love to have some Brazilian ones.
My father posted
the letter, because I hadn’t the means (too few coins in the piggybank) to do it. And I forgot
about it.
Months
later, the postman rang once (he never needed to ring twice, for me). He handed
me a nice cover, bordered in green and yellow stripes. On the top right corner,
a couple of stamps. I was ecstatic. The more so when I carefully opened the
cover: along with a nice letter from a girl who was twenty something years old,
I believe, but who had been kind enough to reply to my childish missive, a bunch of used stamps lay between the folds
of the letter.
The stamps
are long lost, my pen pal wrote me a couple of letters more and that was it,
and i grew up to collect a lot of other immaterial things like stories from books,
songs from records or friendships from people I came across along the way.
But it all boiled down to bridging space and
distance, and that’s why today I joined a cover exchange club.
