jeffery druzba is dreamy

Unimpressively Sweet

1976 was a year of special pride for a lot of people in the United States. The US Mint and the USPS each celebrated the year with special issues. Your standard bicentennial quarter and the 50 state flags stamp issues. Of course, your parents, and their parents as well, thought they were the only people in the world who would possibly have the foresight to save these things. And so now, we have things like this and like this on E-bay. That’s right. People take your standard bicentennial quarter, plate them in gold, and sell them for 50 cents.

My Aunt Dolly made a homemade album with all 50 state flag bicentennial stamps and included a mint condition sheet of all 50 at the end, carefully wrapped in a produce bag she, I suspect, procured from the produce section of the local Price Chopper and placed into her pocketbook, specifically for the purpose of protecting that mint sheet of stamps. When you have a mint sheet of stamps, of course, you can’t just let them sit out: they must be protected! After completing the homemade bicentennial album (complete with hole reinforcer stickers to prevent the pages from tearing out), my Aunt Dolly placed the album in a folder and then in a brown paper bag, wrote what it was on it as well as some helpful identifying information should it fall into the hands of some distant relative in the year 2376: “Bicentennial Year – 1776 to 1976″ and “1916-1976 – 60 years – by Dolly.”

I find it strangely sweet that my Aunt Dolly took so much effort to make and document what, to most people, is probably an unimpressive homemade bicentennial stamp album.

Ebay tells me that the mint sheet of 50 state flag stamps runs about $10. If it were just a sheet of stamps, by itself, I’d probably sell it but, given this homemade album it is a part of, I think I’ll just put it all back into the box it was in and put it away for another 10 years and see what happens – just because that’s what Aunt Dolly would do.

• May 24th, 2004
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