I’ve been thinking a lot about my father, who died 20 years ago this week.

As has been obvious from these #stampoftheday posts, he was, for a time, an avid stamp collector. I think his collection started with Scott’s International Postage Stamp Album, Junior Edition. Published in 1933, the book it is almost three inches thick and proudly announces, on its title page, that is pre-defined, already labelled spaces for 27,000 stamps from around the world.

The book’s cover is half of today’s #stampoftheday. The other half is the inside front cover where, my father made a stick figure out of pieces of various stamps, dated it July 1938, and wrote “2,800 stamps.”

I don’t know if that was how many he had or how many he hoped to have. And I can’t count because it appears he later removed all the US stamps from this album, presumably to put them in one of the six three-ring binders that he used for the organized part of his collection of US stamps. Since every page in those jam-packed books started as a blank sheet. This gave him freedom to lay out pages as he thought best, rather than being confined to the pre-labelled boxes in the preprinted Scott album. That fact alone tells you quite a lot about my father who, in moments like these, often marched to his own (probably very loud) drummer.

As I’ve noted in previous posts, the organized part of his stamp collection ended in late 1960. But his “collecting bug” never left him. Instead, it just moved onto other obsessions.

A few years ago, a friend asked me what my father had collected. “What didn’t he collect?” I responded before ticking off, in no particular order, Kachina dolls, Japanese teacups, small model cars, and beer steins from every college where he ever gave a talk. There were a lot of them because as the founding editor of ChemTech, a magazine published by the American Chemical Society he (accompanied by my mother) would regularly spend a week or two on speaking tours that seemingly had him speak at every university or college that had a student chapter of the ACS.

And then there were just random knickknacks. The cabin/cottage/shack my parents owned on Lake Owassa in northwest New Jersey had one large room, a sleeping porch, a small kitchen and a nook taken up by the desk where my father worked when he was at the lake. The many objects jammed into that relatively small space included several large pipes that had been part of a church organ, a wooden black raven that was perched in the rafters, a wooden lobster trap from Maine that served as a coffee table (until someone fell on it), a potbellied stove like you’d find in an old general store except this one didn’t work), two Army bunk beds that dated back to World War I, a musical toilet paper roll, and God knows how many other random objects.

My father was very much in my mind this week because, as I noted the other day, he passed away on January 18, 2001, two days before George W. Bush was inaugurated. As I also wrote a few days ago, in the year or two after he died, we would sometimes joke that he had a good idea what was coming and decided to leave before things got really bad.

I remember that for reasons not worth explaining here, my father spent much of Fall 2000 in a medically induced coma. In mid-to-late November 2000, after he had regained consciousness and most of his faculties, he asked me “so, who won the election?” I think I replied, “funny you should ask. We don’t know.” And I went on to tell him all about the bizarre ending of the Bush v. Gore fight complete with butterfly ballots, hanging chads, and disputed recounts. Since he was trained as a chemical engineer he was bewildered by the rampant lack of technical competence that had gotten us into that mess.

Remembering all of this made me wonder.

What would my father have done if he had lived until January 18, 2017, two days before Donald Trump was inaugurated? Would he have decided that was the time to check out? The question makes it impossible not to digress to say that while I’m not positive, I’m pretty sure that when my mother was in the hospital a few years ago, the doctor doing a neurological exam asked, “who is the president?” I believe my mother replied, without missing a beat, “Donald Trump. Dammit.” The doctor correctly concluded that she clearly still had all her marbles.

Or…

What would the conversation have been like if, having been in a coma since early October 2020, my father woke up in mid-November and asked, “so, who won the presidential election?”

And what if he’d lived for another two decades and gotten to see another memorable inauguration? I think he generally would have approved of Joe Biden’s calls for civility, honor, decency and respect for science. I’m also sure he would have had some choice words for Lady Gaga’s outfit.

I also wonder: what would my father – who had been an industrial chemist and then the editor of a magazine for chemical engineers – have made of the refusal of so many Americans, including the Trump administration, to pay attention to the science?

Finally, I wonder: what would my father have thought of the ways I’ve been repurposing his long-dormant stamp collection?

I think he would have enjoyed the fact that he gave me something that has helped me through these challenging months. He might even be happy that, in an odd ways, he was helping me.

I think he would have greatly enjoyed the various bits and pieces of Americana and trivia, as well as family lore, that I’ve woven into my of my posts (though he might have disagreed with my politics and/or my versions of family tales).

And I think he would have particularly enjoyed the way I’ve been using his stamps. He was, after all, the guy who stopped using the Scott catalog’s rigid layouts and instead “colored outside the lines” by instead creating albums that reflected his eye, his interests, and his passions.

Be well, stay safe, fight for justice, and work for peace.

Or, as my father liked to say (quoting Micah), do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with your God.