(In honor of the recently released Mr. Rogers stamp.)
As a young child, I was just like any other rambunctious
rapscallion. As the Terror of the Neighborhood,
I was ready to get down and dirty with the best of them. There was nary an ant
I wouldn’t burn with a magnifying glass, (by the way, who lets kids go around
with magnifying lenses? We clearly aren’t looking for clues to solve murders,
nothing good can come of it.) Nary a fly whose wings I wouldn’t pull off.
Pushing kids into mud was a pastime of mine. Petty arson, light breaking and
entering and vandalism? Sign me up!
But of course, all that is par for the course, and I’m sure
you knew that stuff about me already. But I bet there’s something about me as a
kid you didn’t know…
…I collected stamps!
In my youth I was an avid Philatelist.* My interest has died
down over the last few decades, but there was a time when I’d go swimming in
pools of stamps like Scrooge in his money bin. Of course, all of the stamps had
been previously mailed, so they were absolutely worthless, but I always hoped
that I’d get that one upside-down airplane stamp. You know, the one from Brewster’s Millions**. Literally the
only stamp anybody thinks of when they think of valuable stamps, (except for
that topless Harriet Tubman stamp, but those are really hard to find.)
I grew up at the bottom of a dead-end street. A few houses
up from me was a nice old lady named Mrs. Smith. She was called Mrs., but she
lived alone; her husband having died years earlier. I’m not sure why, but she
had boxes and boxes, (and boxes) of stamps from all over the world. American
stamps, French, British. Stamps from Greece, Italy, Oompa Loompa Land. It was a
treasure trove of mostly valueless, but still very interesting, little pieces
of paper. The interesting part was in imagining where the stamps had traveled,
what they’d seen, what kind of letters they’d been involved in. Love letters?
Dear John letters? Ransom demands? (I imagine a really dumb kidnapper who sends
the note by mail and stupidly puts his*** return address on the envelope,
making the entire police force piss themselves laughing.)
I’d go with my friend Alex and my sister. We’d sit on Mrs.
Smith’s living room floor for hours, sifting through the boxes, taking whatever
caught our little numskull eyes. I only collected American stamps, because I’m
a goddamn patriot, through-and through; I bleed red, white and blue! But the
other two Philistines took their collecting international. A pox on them, I
say! Who needs a stamp of Queen Beatrice of South Hamptonbergshire or wherever,
when you can have a Fat Elvis stamp? (he was actually “Young Elvis,” but I
would draw his belly to the size I desired.)
I collected a lot of pointless stuff as a kid. I have
hundreds of Garbage Pail Kid cards, MacDonald’s toys, Mad Magazines, Pauly
Shore movies, morning stars, bellybutton lint. You know, the usual. But by far
and away the most pointless thing that I collected was also a pastime for my
entire family. The whole Hutcheson Clan got involved in this foolishness:
collecting Kool Aid points.
Remember those? On the back of Kool Aid packages and
containers were little parts of the label you’d cut out that’d say something
like 1 Point, or 5 Points, or what-have-you. And then you could redeem for all
types of “prizes” like a beanbag chair, or a Kool Aid Man stirring spoon or
other vital sundries. What fun! For years, nay, decades! My family of Kool Aid
junkies would collect and horde these points, just waiting for the day Kool aid
would finally offer something good, like the Batmobile or (if I had my
druthers) a Japanese hooker. Instead, Kool Aid just stopped doing the whole
points thing entirely, thereby making our years of collecting incredibly
pointless.
And don’t get me started on Pepsi Points and the Harrier
Jet.
*Japanese for “He who
fornicates with stamps.”
** Classic Richard
Pryor!
***Or her. It’s the 21st
century after all!
