We pulled into the flea market parking lot on a Saturday
afternoon. From the car, the stalls seemed to go on forever, but when we got
out and started walking closer, we realized that many of them were empty. It
was hot, and for many of the vendors, the parking lot was not full enough to
warrant a full day.
“It looks like we got here a little too late. Do you still
want to walk around?” Adrian asked me.
“Yep,” I answered, as I pulled my hair into a ponytail. With
the sun beating down, I could understand why people were packing up to escape
the afternoon heat. “There are still some people in the pavilion. Let’s look
over there.”
Adrian grabbed my hand and we started toward the shade.
I smiled at Adrian as we stepped out of the sun and into the
shadow of the pavilion. There were still dozens of vendors, each one with a
table full of potential treasures. We slowly made our way through the aisles of
booths, looking at everything from antique cookware and key collections to not
so antique Garfield lunchboxes and boom boxes. About halfway through the winding
labyrinth of stalls, we stopped at a booth to look at prints of old maps, when
I saw a small box on the corner of the table. Inside, were hundreds of old postcards.
I thumbed through the pictures, taking care not to bend the
fragile corners. In the box were pictures of monuments, hotels, scenic
overlooks, and historic buildings. I pulled a card featuring a motel from
Morristown, Ohio out and flipped it over to check the price. And that’s when I
saw the writing on the back and realized that these small rectangles of
cardstock and ink were so much more.
Fast forward to the present day, and I now have more than
fifty postcards in my collection, the earliest one dating back to 1903.
Every time I enter a thrift shop or go to a flea market, I
thumb through the postcards, always checking the back for messages. Because
while most collectors value the condition of the card and the picture on the
front, what interests me most is the message.
When I hold a postcard in my hand, I am touching a piece of
history. It is not a big piece of history, like going to see the Declaration of
Independence at the National Archives, but a personal, intimate history. I am connecting with an individual from the
past who had family vacations, arguments with loved ones, made stupid mistakes;
I am holding a piece of a real person’s life.
We know that there was a past. We read books and watch
movies about it, we learn about it in school. But all too often, I feel like we
forget that these were actual people, with lives very similar to our own. The
postcards provide, for me, a keyhole glimpse into a past life.
Take the following postcard from June E. to Dolores Simpson.
June is just letting her friend know that she completed her curtains. It is an
ordinary letter, but it shows me what was important to these two women on one particular
day in 1967.
Two of my favorite cards in my collection come from
children. The first one is from Buddy, telling his parents he had a fun day. No
description of what he did that was fun, just that statement, complete with
backwards letters.
The other comes from Pam. She describes her hotel room to
Carol, making sure to include the fact that her “bed is lumpy”. Pam is probably
in her forties now, but her trip to Montauk Point will ever live on. It’s not a
stretch for me to imagine getting these very same postcards from one of my
brothers, telling me they had a good day, or that their bed was lumpy.
Some of the postcards are funny, like this one from an
unknown (to me) person. Hopefully Mr. and Mrs. Robert Palmer knew the author.
The fronts of the postcards are not completely lost on me.
It’s always fun to find postcards from places I have been, like these ones from
the Biltmore House in North Carolina and Toledo, Ohio (the fact that someone
sent a postcard from Toledo just makes me giggle). These are places that I am
familiar with, so to see them in postcard form sent by people before I was born
is a real treat.
These postcards are not just pictures on a card, but
snapshots of an individual’s life. I can look back at a time so very different
from my own, and in all the differences, still find similarities. And I find
that fascinating. I can only hope that someday, in some little forgotten shop, someone
will find one of the postcards I have sent or received and feel exactly the
same way.