Ephemeral

Enticed by the prospect of adding to my postcard collection, Tab and I journeyed to an ephemera show in Allentown, Pennsylvania. Stephanie had agreed to watch the boys for the day, so Tab and I set off around 9:30 a.m., footloose and childfree.

We enjoyed the rare opportunity of being alone in the car. At first I wondered what we would talk about for an hour and a half, but I needn't have worried; our conversation never lagged, despite the fact that I was pretty sleepy, having stayed up late to work on a Press deadline the night before.

We stopped once at one of those rest stops in which several fast food places are situated around a central food court. I decided I needed a wakeup jolt, so I stopped at Cinnabon for a latte. Heading back to the car with my coffee, I watched the people who were walking into the rest stop. They each wore the groggy, self-absorbed look of someone who just woke up from a deep sleep. I've seen that look on faces at rest stops up and down the East Coast.

I'd never been to Allentown, before. Thanks to the Billy Joel song, I was expecting a dreary industrial metropolis ringed by crumbling factories, the pathetic remnants of a dying steel industry. (Well we're living here in Allentown / And they're closing all the factories down.) Instead, the city--what I saw of it looked much like any other moderate-sized Northeastern city: hilly, winding streets, semi-detached houses, mixed-use neighborhoods.

The show was being held in the Allentown fairgrounds. Signs on the exhibition buildings read "Poultry" and "Rabbits and Cavies."

"Cavies? What are cavies?" I asked Tab.

"Large rabbits, I think."

"Like hares?"

"I guess." (I found out later that cavies are actually guinea pigs.)

We found the main expo building in which the show was located, paid our entrance fee, and went in. It was a long hall, wide enough for six aisles. Although billed as an antique papers and book show, there were dealers there with campaign buttons, record albums, stereoscopic views, medals, patches, and other curios. The paper ephemera was plentiful, too: prints, engravings, sheet music, movie one-sheets, publicity photographs of stars, magazines, and, of course, postcards.

Tab and I wandered up and down the aisles, stopping wherever we saw a postcard dealer. I was looking for Skowhegan and Portland, Maine, postcards as well as old postcards of Wellesley, my alma mater, and Trenton's Cadwalader Park, a place I loved in my childhood.

Most of the dealers had their postcards organized into boxes by topic or geographical region. We made a great team, Tab and I. One of us would take a Maine box and the other a New Jersey or Massachusetts box and rifle through them to find any possibilities. I love that Tab has become as enamored of postcard collecting as I. He has a great eye and sound judgment; whenever I questioned whether or not to buy a postcard, I'd ask his opinion.

Before I fell into this hobby, I never realized how many people collect postcards...and how many different kinds of postcards there are. Under the topical categories, I saw boxes for postcards of bicycles, railroads, airplanes, airships and zeppelins, babies, every kind of animal, twins, holidays, various professions, even disasters.

We talked to a dealer who is a member of a Pennyslvania postcard club. As he told us, in the early decades of the twentieth century, many people didn't have phones so they used penny postcards to communicate even with nearby friends and relatives.

"No one gets rich selling this stuff, do they, Tab?" I asked, looking around at the dealers and collectors. People buy and sell postcards for the love of them, not for the money.

Although we mostly confined ourselves to the postcard dealers, occasionally I drifted over to the collections of antique photographs. My niece collects old portraits, and I can understand the appeal. I like to study the faces in the pictures and try to figure out about those long-dead people.

"Look, Tab," I said, holding up a black and white photograph of a solemn baby dressed in a long white gown, the usual attire of infants one hundred years ago. "Just think: once this baby's mother loved this picture, probably hung it up on her wall in a place of honor. Now nobody even knows who this child was." I couldn't help feeling a little melancholy. All those faces, once beloved but now unknown.

People are born and die, but their possessions remain behind. Human beings are the true ephemera.

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