Postcard.

This is another nonfiction essay assignment.
---------------------------
    I am using a postcard from Washington, D.C. as a bookmark in Moby Dick. Kaitlyn, who has never been to Washington, D.C., but does love collecting other peoples’ postcards, sent it to me with a filled-out punch card to Townshends tea house downtown unceremoniously taped to it. Her benediction states “Take yourself (and a friend) our for a cuppa on me! XO, K.” So, with this postcard, she sent me a cup of tea. The “Message Here” segment on back of the card (except for the place where she had taped the punch card) is crowded with her endearingly illegible cursive, leaping awkwardly across the cardstock with all the grace of a beautiful, dying bird dropping out of the sky.
    The postcard could not exist without the standard postage rate stamp. When postcard stamps were first introduced in July 1928, they cost one cent. 40 years later, they cost five cents. This year postcard stamps cost 33 cents.
    I am nine. “I’m going to write myself a postcard so I can remember this!” After this proclamation, I scrawl about the meal we are eating at the Sisters diner, the antique shops we visited, how much fun I am having, and how much I love my aunt from Florida. I truly believe that, if I do not write as much as possible on this postcard, these memories will be lost. I will surely forget everything as soon as I arrive home. So, as I scribble on the card with a gel pen, I imagine my extreme delight when I open the mail box to find a postcard from myself that will remind me of how much fun I had in Sisters on that day long ago, last week.
    Postcards owe their existence to Dr. Heinrich von Stephan, a German postal official. However, while the Germans were busy debating the value and practicality of a card with a universal stamp that could be purchased before being mailed, the Austrians put it into use in 1869, a year before the Germans. The United States began using the postcard in 1873. The postcard has always represented a snapshot of someone’s travels or daily life, and is the only such snapshot that can be affixed with a stamp, tossed in a mailbox, and delivered to the recipient, all without an envelope.
    Finding blank postcards in a thrift or antique shop is always a bittersweet discovery for me, not entirely unlike finding a treasure chest beneath the clutching hand of a corpse, though less morbid and ghastly. I flip through the stack, and wonder who purchased that postcard from the Alamo, packed it up carefully, so as to avoid creases in the cardstock, brought it home by car or air or train or boat, over some hundred miles, and then donated it to Goodwill in company with old dishes and outgrown shoes. Postcards have to be the most disappointed of all inanimate paper products. They are manufactured with a destiny in mind; to offer the selected recipient a brief glimpse of your travels or your hometown. Postcards are potential moments of intimate handwritten connection, sparse and intentional lines of text meant to share the story of a journey or the feeling of walking down an unfamiliar, or familiar, street. However, for those homeless postcards that were never addressed, never allowed to achieve their sole purpose, there is a sort of transition house here in this cardboard box in the thrift store. Old postcards can experience a rebirth here. They are offered a second chance to fulfill their mission to deliver news too romantic or brief to be shared in a letter. “I am offering these postcards a second chance at life,” I say to myself, walking with my head a little higher towards the cash register. Does that make me some sort of postcard hero?