September 14, 2020

Silver Tweezers

I have started, more by accident than anything, collecting stamps. I had been thinking about writing a short story about a character who tries to impress a woman by getting his face on a stamp. It turned out though that you could order customized stamps with your face on them from the post office so it sort of made the idea a little less compelling. But by the time I found out, I had already bought a few books about stamp collecting and even ordered a few packs of stamps from Amazon in order to get started. I was now going to collect stamps. I went to my friend David’s house and he showed me some of his Israeli stamps. I recognized many as stamps my father had collected and it brought back some warm memories. David asked me what I was planning to collect. Was there some sort of theme or category? I said I really didn’t know. Maybe stamps from places I had lived in or visited he suggested. And I said yeah, that might be a good idea. We had lived in Singapore for 2 years and I was interested in the history of the region. So I went back home and started looking up stamps from Singapore and from Malaysia. I wasn’t looking for anything specific but then I stumbled upon the twenty-five-cent Malaysia. I knew that stamp.

This is a picture of the twenty-five-cent stamp from Malaysia. If you look closely, you can see the year. 1972. That is when I first saw it. I was thirteen. It was three weeks after my bar mitzvah. I was seeing it again 48 years later.

My father like, I suspect, many men of his generation, collected stamps. He did not buy stamps. He did not trade stamps. He did not go to stamp shows or correspond with other stamp collectors. He only collected stamps from envelopes he himself received in the mail. He was very fastidious about that. This, he believed, was how stamps should be collected. Our family and the few friends he had knew this, and would always send a letter, never a postcard, whenever they traveled abroad. He had a nice collection, and while most of the stamps were from Israel and Canada, he had stamps from an impressive list of countries. All teased from letters he had personally received in the mail.

He soaked the envelopes in a bowl of water, gently and delicately removed them with silver tweezers which had once belonged to his father, dried them on a red checkered terry cloth towel, then finally pressed them between volumes of the 1970 World Book Encyclopedia. I think it was letters N and M, as they were the heftiest. He then put them in a stamp album. The albums, they were olive green, were arranged chronologically. He had no categories. Did not separate by country. He entered the stamps as he received them. He would work on his stamps on Sunday mornings after a breakfast of ful (fava beans which are an Egyptian staple) and pita, hard boiled-eggs, and raw onions.

He collected stamps. That is just what he did. I never heard him talk about it. He never pulled out his albums to share with guests. I would sit with him on the kitchen table after my mother had cleared the remains of Egyptian days gone by. I did not eat ful in those days but Sunday was sweet cereal day - usually Cap’n Crunch, so I looked forward to it as much as my father did.

I don’t remember having conversations with my father during those mornings. If we did, it would have been hard to hear because the Grundman record player would be blasting, well, blasting might be an exaggeration - Beethoven or Mozart, or Schubert. He knew all the music intimately and would sometimes close his eyes in bliss in anticipation of a passage. He would praise the piece, speaking words in French or sometimes, if the music really moved him, in Italian, and I would nod my head in agreement. No other words were exchanged. We just went along with our business and I would be given unspoken tasks.

He let me rip the corners off the envelopes, let me soak those corners in the bowl of water. He let me fold over the terrycloth towel and pat the stamps in an effort to speed up the drying process. He let me put the stamps in between the volumes of the encyclopedia, and I would look up at his face to see if today he would be ok with me sitting on the encyclopedia - depending on his mood - in order to really flatten the stamps. In time, he even let me enter the stamps into the album.

But he never let me touch the tweezers.

I don’t think it was because he didn’t trust me. I think it was because it was the task which gave him the most pleasure. He attacked it with surgical precision, angling a bedside lamp he carried into the kitchen just to have the best lighting. Truth is, most of the stamps quickly detached themselves from the envelope and ended up floating like lily pads in the bowl where they could easily be scooped up and laid out on the towel. But sometimes the stamp glue proved too stubborn and my father would pull out the tweezers. We both knew that another twenty minutes of soaking would probably do the trick but we also both knew it would deprive my father of the pleasure.

He would hold up the impeccably extracted stamp, hinges perfectly intact, and say “ah ha” as I stared wide-eyed. My bar mitzvah was coming up in a few weeks and, along with being called up to the Torah, I hoped a turn with the tweezers would be my rite of passage. The family was all abuzz about my bar mitzvah. For all the usual reasons but also because my father had invited Terry Humphreys.

Terry Humphreys was my father’s boss. Somehow the subject of my bar mitzvah had come up in the lunchroom. Terry Humphreys said he had never been to a bar mitzvah. He was, he said, very interested in Jewish rituals. My father nodded his head and that is where it would have ended if my Uncle Henri, who had been quietly eating my Tante Nandi’s poulet soffrito and fasulia out of a large red Tupperware, had not decided to pipe up and say, “You should come to the bar mitzvah.” Which really left my father no choice.

I’m not sure what the French or Arabic equivalent of ‘throwing someone under the bus’ is, but it would have been pointless to say it in either because my Uncle Henri was convinced he had just done my father a huge favor. Either way, I had gone from the most nervous person in the Zevy family - I was reciting all the prayers, my haftorah, reading from the Torah, and had a speech to give to boot - to being a distant runner up.

At issue was who to sit Terry Humphreys and his wife, Clara, with. He would obviously be with my Uncle Henri and his wife, my Tante Nandi, but then who? Terry Humphreys and his wife Clara would be, aside from my friend Stevie Sheen, the only non-Jews. For a while, my father thought of inviting more colleagues from work and creating a Sherwin Williams table. But my mother convinced him the late invite would be in bad taste. In the end, he chose my Uncle Roger and Aunt Mira. Both were Egyptian Jews but Uncle Roger had grown up in England and had just a hint of an English accent. It was the best we could come up with.

In the end, it did not matter because Terry Humphreys had to cancel because he was going on a business trip to Malaysia. So, I went back to being the most nervous family member, had a bar mitzvah which went off more or less without a hitch, and did not think of Terry Humphreys until three weeks after my bar mitzvah when a very fat envelope, postmarked Malaysia, arrived in the mail. I tore into it and discovered a very nice note and 100 US dollars. It turns out that when Terry Humphreys asked my Uncle Henri what the appropriate bar mitzvah gift was Uncle Henri had replied “Cash is traditional.” Which is not entirely true but he was doing me a solid. $100 was a shit-load of money in those days. Until then, the best gift I had received was a Sanyo cassette player from my Tante Racheline and Uncle Solly.

After much debate and discussion, my father agreed I would put 50 in the bank and could spend the other 50 - I had my eye on a mini pool table - on whatever I wanted. My father then handed me the envelope which had contained the magical hundred dollars and said “We don’t have stamps from Malaysia.” Little did we know that three years later we would be living on the Malaysian peninsula in the city-state of Singapore.

I only soaked the envelope for ten minutes. I knew what I was doing. I wanted to use those tweezers. But the stamp, the Malaysia twenty-five cent, was not ready to come off. I ripped it in two.

I had gone from elation to fighting off tears. Stamps were holy in our house. My father handled them like newborn babies. We could no more rip a stamp than we could rip a page from the Torah I had read from three weeks earlier. My father walked over from the sink where he had been scrubbing a pot and examined the damage. I braced myself for a stern lecture but it never came. “Those other two stamps are nice,” he said, referring to the other Malaysian stamps which had been on the envelope. “Soak them for ten more minutes and we’ll try again.” But the stamps detached themselves in the water all by themselves and I never got to use those silver tweezers. Not that day and never again. I still sat with my father some Sundays and performed my tasks. But then I stopped - interests took me elsewhere. I think he may have stopped at some point too. I was much, much older before I realized it probably didn’t have anything to do with collecting stamps after all.

I order the twenty-five-cent Malaysia from HipStamp for $3.25. It arrives four weeks later from a dealer in New Jersey. It takes me fifteen minutes to extract it from the cocoon where it has been safely ensconced.

It’s nice. I look at it through my newly acquired magnifying glass. Nice. It is mint. Then I put it in my blue stamp album.

The stamps on the envelope from New Jersey are US 32 cents. They are of a soccer ball and a basketball. I already have four copies of those but I diligently tear the corner along with those of the other envelopes I received this morning and drop them into the popcorn bowl I use as a soaker.

The doorbell rings and it is my friend Downtown Darren Brown. We chat on the front porch for a while and by the time I get back into the house the stamps are already detached and doing the backstroke on top of the bowl.

I use my new silver tweezers to pluck them out of the water. I put the stamps in my olive green album.

The end.