Social Tender

My father’s lifelong postcard collection lines one wall of our shared home office in Tempe, Arizona. Arranged in notebooks stationed on uniform wooden shelves acquired for exactly this purpose. Benignly neglected precisely the amount of time for them to become useful again.

This time to me.

He was a 5-year-old rabbling around a crowd of kids, playing street corner baseball in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Trading baseball cards at first, a social tender among the young guys whose parents had dragged them here from Kansas, or somewhere else. Soon it became postcards, a collectible literature of the places he’d already seen and was getting to know.

This peripatetic paper trail now right in front of me, with Mister 88 still chatting out parental wisdom and political philosophy from his comfy corner chair. As he would (and often does) say, “Well, what now?”

Also, is there any ice cream? Can I have a coke? Where is the remote?

He is still and very definitely human. I am, too. But to have these two angelic intelligences paired together again in pursuit of such folly as a lifetime of postcards. Who wouldn’t?

Over time, the postcard collection swelled far beyond the bounds of his family, professional, and worldly travels. He missed certain places and has filled in those spaces with small paper pallettes that carry not the weight of memory but of desire, curiosity, and vicarious adventure.

Social tender, a tencil term that ties me to my father’s early trades. He worked his way into new circles of friends, different family units, and collegial communities as his young life followed alongside his father’s faculty positions. Eventually, Dad’s profession would take him across political aisles and well beyond the boundaries of polite society once or twice.

What is key to me is the social materiality of his early exchanges. Before dimes, or even dollars, he had those postcards as a way of trading introductions, information, stories, and alliances (White Sox and KU basketball, for Dad). That social practice is the DNA of his professional reputation, leading to outcomes far greater than the substantial exchanges of public funding he accomplished.

I’ve thought to monetize Dad’s postcards outright to the marketplace. Piece out his shop at the end of its run. But what a shame to miss the more glorious values available in there. Traveling through it together, all the places we have and have not been. As a collection, it’s an elegant and relevant cultural relic, too.

Timely and timeless, neatly tucked into plastic pockets. A family wealth stacked and bound, ignored and found laying about eighty-some years later. What does this paternal past have to do with picture-perfect Phoenix today? Plenty. Some of these postcards tell that story, too.

Hanging around with Dad and his collection is like sitting next to a living time machine. His mind is so fluid now, we can easy skip from his childhood to his career. Life loops back on itself. Time is slower, and less orderly. He loves to meander through memories. I like to absorb those histories. In the meantime, we sort postcards, laying down stacks of size, subject, and sentiment that takeover the available tabletops.

He played cards with his father when he was young. So did I, and here we are again.