A la recherche de mon pere mort

My mother is having some work done on her basement. To help get things ready, we went over there last weekend.

We found many, many old things of my father's. Some junk, which have been thrown away; some maybe not junk, which will appear soon on eBay; and some ephemera, with which this little essay will deal.

My father, who died in 1982, was an avid amateur photographer. He was also a traveler; in his youth, he spent some time in Europe, later working as a civilian for the Army surveying beaches in France, and still later he enlisted and served in the Army Corps of Engineers. Throughout this time, he continued to take photographs and write postcards. This was the treasure-trove we found in my mother's basement.

Although we kept the letters and photos, we, perhaps foolishly, threw away the postcards.

And this is the source of my quandary: like my father before me, I am a hopeless pack-rat. And while I knew these postcards were junk, I thought to myself that they might have some value to someone, somewhere, a collector of ephemera, perhaps.

Even worse is what I didn't think of until last night: the postcards were the only record I had of my father's travels in Europe as a young man. This is the stuff of memoirs.

And now they're gone to a landfill somewhere.