On the Third Day of Christmas

Today, the Third Day of Christmas, I mailed my Christmas cards. Well, I mailed seven of them. I took them to the North Buffalo Post Office. It was about zero degrees. There was a line, how about that? Perhaps others too are observing the 12 Days of Christmas!

Carefully I selected a variety of Christmas designs. Stamps are kind of cheesy these days but the Madonna and Child stamps are not too bad, and I kind of like the caroling stamps too. Or I did before I saw how tiny and cheap they are. Well, still cute, with the "Fa la la."

Fa la la la la la la.

I wished the clerk Merry Christmas and she said the same to me. When I mailed my cards I asked if she would take my picture and kindly she complied. That was nice of her! Now we have that nifty picture up above.

The seven envelopes I did get done looked spiffy.

Anyway. Seven down, about 107 to go. That is all right!

I am enjoying myself!

French and Forever Stamps

Yesterday I had an international letter to mail so I went to the Post Office. I was writing to the Josef Krips Association! It is in Switzerland.

I am sending in my membership forms. As a Buffalonian I wish to be part of the organization that celebrates our former Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra music director. Plus Leonard Pennario played with Krips on several occasions. They admired each other.

Joining the Josef Krips Association is thrilling because all correspondence is conducted in French and I am beginning to regret that at Sacred Heart, I talked and gossiped with my neighbor all through my French classes. I remember Sister Pat saying, "This is French class. This is not Country Club!" But alas. Or zut alors, as I should say. That is all water under the Pont. (Pont is bridge. I remember that.)

A trip to the Post Office is always thrilling too. It is an adventure because you never know what you will find.

Remember that other time I was mailing overseas letters? What mess that was!

This visit was less dramatic. The clerks were casual and kicked back as if they had not a worry in the world. One of them took a package to be mailed and lobbed it across the room into a basket quite a distance away. Did he make the basket? He did! "Nice shot," I said.

Luckily the clerk I got did a nice job of stamping my correspondence to the Association. It was not like that other time.

She used a round stamp! That is it up above. "Stamp," by the way, is "timbre" in French. I had to use the word in an email to the Krips Association the other day. It is funny, just a tiny bit of correspondence and you start learning all these words. My French is 300% better than it was just a couple of weeks ago!

I was shocked at the Post Office to learn that now all stamps are Forever Stamps. As I walked back to the office I puzzled that out.

On the one hand it is convenient because you can keep using the stamps and they do not get outdated.

On the other, what if you have extra ounces in the envelope or something, and you need extra postage? How do you figure out what your various Forever stamps were worth? Would you have to use just a number of Forever stamps, foregoing the savings of a few pennies per extra ounce you used to get? I am not sure I like the timbre of this.

There is one other ominous overtone. All I can think is that this means the Post Office is failing.

They want your money up front!

Going postal

I have been on a letter-writing binge. It is as if I am Emily Dickinson!

Or Mozart!

Or Leonard Pennario! He was a great letter writer too. He wrote a million letters and remember, he wrote one of them right down the street from my house.

Speaking of Pennario today I wrote letters to two people for the book, the actress Joan Fontaine and also Nicholas Rozsa, the son of the composer Miklos Rozsa, who wrote that wonderful concerto as a present for Pennario.

I am so virtuous!

How this started was, remember the other day when I went to my high-school reunion? I went home and wrote a letter to the nun who was at the reunion because I like her so much and at the reunion she got me so weepy. And every time I run into her I keep thinking I will write, but being a slug and a Schuft I never do. Well, this time I did.

But zut alors!

Is the stamp situation driving anyone else crazy?

That is my letter to Sister Maria pictured above. Look at all those stamps crammed into every corner of the envelope! The letter looks as if it is coming from India. And it is only traveling a couple of blocks!

Luckily being a nun, Sister Maria is probably used to getting letters from the Third World so my letter will not shock her. That is what I am hoping anyway.

The problem is that postage is going up so fast that I cannot keep track of it. And I do not have time to use up the stamps that I have. So now I have two huge glassine envelopes full of all kinds of stamps, some of which have no amount printed on them, so they just sit there. It is as if I am back in my stamp-collecting days!

My favorite is the "H" Rate Make-Up Stamp. Does anyone in the world know what it is worth? That is the "H" Rate Make-Up Stamp pictured at left. It is the stamp of mystery!

How about the tiny flimsy square stamp that is just the Statue of Liberty and the flag, with no numbers? That is a goodie too. That stamp is so unrecognizable that I cannot even Google around and find a picture of it.

If I use these stamps, will the Post Office recognize them? I do not know. So I do not use them. Meanwhile, my letters look more and more as if they come from the Third World.

And the Post Office wonders why we do not write more letters.