A Sunday With My Father's Stamp Album, the Gum Gone Yellow

6:10

Sunday. The sun hasn't reached the porch yet.

My father's album sits in the bottom drawer of the cabinet, wrapped in an old towel. Three years now and I haven't opened it. Nobody made me, and I don't know why my hand opened the cabinet this morning. Maybe just because there was nothing else to do.

Cloth cover, corners worn down to grey. When I open it, the smell is old paper mixed with dried paste, a smell anyone who grew up in a house with a collector knows at once. I set the album on the dining table, pull out a chair, and don't yet dare turn a page.

7:30

The first page holds twelve stamps in three rows. A crane, a stone bridge, a tram running down a street whose route nobody remembers anymore. Under each stamp, my father wrote a few words in pencil, the handwriting leaning right like someone in a hurry. I read each line without touching.

Then I touch. One stamp in the third row is stuck to the page, the gum on its back gone yellow, the color of strong tea, and when I lift it with the tweezers it doesn't come away clean. It drags a thin skin of paper up from the album page.

The left corner of the stamp tears off, a piece the size of a rice grain.

I sit still. The tweezers are still pinched in my hand.

First I think: my father would never have torn one. He gripped lightly, set stamps down with two fingers like placing a dragonfly. But after thinking that for a while, I remember it wasn't his hand that caused this. It was years of damp, the humid seasons shut inside a drawer. Gum can't withstand time. Neither can paper. The stamp did nothing wrong.

I set it back down, torn just as it is, on a clean scrap of glassine beside the album.

9:15

Bin, the neighbor's boy, eight years old, comes over and stands on tiptoe to look past my shoulder.

"Grandpa, can you mail a letter with these stamps?"

"I don't know."

"Why don't you know?"

"Because I never tried. Back then my father kept them, and I never asked."

He thinks it over, a finger pointing at the tram.

"So where did this one go that even you don't know?"

I laugh, then stop laughing. He asked it right. The value printed on the stamp is in a currency nobody uses now. These stamps were made to be stuck on something that had to travel, and my father kept them back, a whole life, and let none of them go.

11:40

Lunch. I eat standing in the kitchen, my eyes drifting toward the dining table where the album lies open.

I catch myself starting to count. This set is missing two. That set is missing one. Page five has an empty slot, and under the empty slot my father wrote: "waiting." Waiting for what, I don't know. I stand there chewing rice and counting what's missing, my mind running off to ordering, to asking the people in the club, to how to complete the set, while what's right in front of me I haven't looked at.

I put my chopsticks down.

The moment you lose the thread is the moment you think you're being productive. I go back to the table, and this time I don't look at what's missing.

13:20

I can't nap. I go and open the window for air and pull the curtain against the sun, because my father always said an album must never sit in sunlight. Then I turn more pages.

Page seven has a stamp smaller than all the others, pushed well out of line, like a kid standing in the wrong spot in a class photo. Under it my father wrote: "traded at the tea stall, one Wednesday morning." That's all. No name of who traded, no name of the stall.

I sit thinking up possibilities. Which stall? Who handed it over? What did my father say that day? The more I think, the more details I add, and I realize most of it I'm making up. A Wednesday morning nobody told me about, and nobody will.

"Dad, which stall was it?" I say aloud, in a house with no one else in it.

The house answers with the refrigerator starting up. I laugh by myself.

15:00

The light through the window has leaned over. I take the little magnifier my father kept in the pen box, set the glassine on the table, and look at the torn stamp.

Through the lens, the perforations around it appear like the teeth of a tiny comb. I've never looked at them. I count eleven on each side, and the seventh on the top edge is broken in half. The blue of the crane isn't one color: it's made of tiny dots, dark blue overlapping pale blue, sitting close like grains of sand. Who engraved it, a person or a machine, I don't know.

I look for a long while. The torn stamp is still beautiful, in a different way.

17:50

Hạnh, a neighbor, stops by to borrow scissors and sees the album.

"You opened it, sir?"

"Yes. Three years before I could."

"Is that all right?"

I don't answer in time.

"When my mother passed, I left her sewing box untouched for four years. Later I realized nobody was making me open it. Open or not, either is fine. But if the sadness goes on too long, you should talk to someone who listens, a family doctor, or whoever. Don't carry it alone."

She says it in an ordinary voice, the way you'd talk about the scissors. I find myself nodding.

I once read a piece about an old name on the first page of a book and the objects you hold for someone. I don't yet know whether I'm holding this album for him or for myself. Maybe both.

19:30

Evening. I close the album but don't put it away, letting it lie on the table a little longer.

I haven't done much today. Peeled one stamp and torn it. Looked through a lens. Failed to answer a child's question. But one thing I noticed when I sat back: these stamps have lain still their whole lives, and still they haven't stood still. The gum yellows. The paper darkens. The blue of the crane fades a little each humid season, so slowly nobody sees it in a year, and you only see it when you open the book after three years.

My father was like that too. The photo of him on the cabinet hasn't changed its gaze, yet in my memory his voice has shifted, smaller, farther. Like parents' graying hair that you only startle at one day.

I can't draw anything grand from this. I only know that today I looked.

Before sleep

The album is still on the table, open to page one. I leave it open.

Tomorrow I may look at page two, or not.