Two offerings for today's #stampoftheday which, as seems increasingly be the case, will take on digressions that will include 26,000 lightbulbs, the Grateful Dead, an unsuccessful effort to monopolize the …
Be well. Stay safe. Fight for justice.
Work for peace.
In April of 2020, not long after the COVID-19 pandemic began, I had an inexplicable urge to dig into my late father’s stamp collection, which had been sitting unexamined on my shelves since about 2012. I created a challenge for myself: each day find a stamp that was somehow connected to that day, write a short blurb about it, and post it on Facebook with a picture of the stamp. I thought I’d do that for a few weeks. But the pandemic continued and what started as short blurbs became a year of daily essays that not only discussed historic events, famous people, and obscure Americana but also recounted personal and family stories and examined how these decades-old stamps shed light on a host contemporary challenges. Thanks to my daughter Rebecca, every one of those 365 essays – from the early succinct ones to the later rambling ones – are collected on this website, where you can view them by date, by broad category, or by whether they were my “personal favorites.” I hope you enjoy reading them as much as I enjoyed writing them.
Historical Figures & Events
Delving into the people and events that shaped history
Culture & Society
Exploring Americana artifacts and other obscure areas of US history
Contemporary Issues
Discussing the pandemic, 2020 politics, and other recent happenings
Personal & Family Lore
Recounting stories from my childhood, “adulthood,” and family’s history
Featured Essays
Author favorites
"The Goldberg Variations" That's what Nisa, my amazing sister-in-law said has been helping her through the past, difficult several months. It wasn't a random comment. Every Passover, over dinner, we go around …
"I thought this was supposed to be a work of fiction," a member of my book group wrote just before we met to discuss Philip Roth's "The Plot Against America." …
A bizarre and troubling stamp honoring the group behind many controversial monuments honoring the leaders of the Confederacy is today's #stampoftheday. Issued in 1951, the 3-cent stamp commemorates the final reunion …
A bear so famous that he needed his own Zip Code to handle all his fan mail lurks behind the scenes of today' #stampoftheday, a 4-cent stamp honoring Forest Conservation …
While today's #stampoftheday pictures two extraordinarily (almost scarily) wholesome youth, the story behind the stamp leads me to some of my favorite lyrics from West Side Story (with a brief …