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.