You would think that after writing 337 #stampoftheday posts, that a stamp could no longer surprise me. While you'd usually be right. Today you are wrong. The stamp that surprised me …
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
For about two decades, maybe longer, we've ended our Passover Seder by singing "Amazing Grace." It's always late and we're full - of food, spirit, love, and hope, and other …
Believe it or not, chicken is the focus of today's #stampoftheday, which is a posting I've been looking forward to since I first saw this stamp in my late father's …
On April 18, 2020, I wrote a short, paragraph-long Facebook post that started: "though I've had them for years, it's only in the last year that I started to look …
"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 …
We never spoke about it, but I suspect that my father had a particular soft spot for Joseph Priestly. As someone trained as a chemist, my father would have known of …