I'm just returning after a LONG absence of 30-plus years!
I believe my philatelic life began when I was about five. My father was an avid stamp collector, and gave me some of his duplicates (nothing valuable, obviously). I put together a very rough album made of construction paper and glued (yipe) the stamps inside. They were colourful and they introduced me to other countries. A little later, I got packets of stamps as gifts. You know, the cheap ones full of CTO stamps with colourful pictures on them. I was fascinated by them, even as I wondered what "Magyar Posta" or "Republik Osterreich" meant.
A little later, I decided to narrow my focus to stamps I could easily obtain. Canada was my main focus, but we would also get mail from family in the US, England, and Yugoslavia from time to time, so I had little collections of those countries as well. I loved sorting the stamps, checking the catalogues to put them in order, and arranging them just so on quad-ruled pages. I carefully soaked stamps off envelopes. I went to stamp shops with my dad and filled in the gaps. We had older copies of the Scott catalogues that were discarded from the library.
Alas, as I reached my teenage years, other interests replaced stamp collecting. Piles of envelopes remained unsoaked, and I was no longer interested in visiting stamp dealers with my dad and other old men. The stamp albums languished on a shelf, ignored.
My father died when I was in my 20s, and I had all his binders full of stamps and not much of an interest in keeping them. Eventually I brought them to a stamp dealer, where there turned out to be little of great value, but the dealer told me he could tell the collection was well loved and well taken care of at one time.
I'm now 47. Every so often I'd find myself browsing websites about stamp collecting, looking at the stamp designs, and feeling waves of nostalgia wash over me. Maybe it's a midlife thing, wanting to return to simpler days. Thus, I have decided to become a philatelist once again. I'm focusing on Canada for now. I've ordered a few lots of Canadian stamps from
ebay and have thoroughly enjoyed sorting them and placing them in an album.
Here's to many more years of stamps!
PReynolds
Posted 09/08/2024 11:31 pm
PReynolds,
