Philately.

In a way, we are all philatelists, because according to Britannica, the word comes from 

the Greek philos, “love,” and ateleia, “that which is tax-free”; the postage stamp permitted the letter to come free of charge to the recipient, rendering it untaxed.

Who doesn't love anything that's free of tax?

And yet, my attempt to be a brilliant philatelist failed, sometime around my tenth year.

I certainly did like to collect things in my childhood -- comics, Hardy Boys books, Matchbox cars, G.I. Joe stuff, bottlecaps, baseball cards, and so on. So, no surprise that at one point I responded to an ad like this: 

I had heard about the value of really rare stamps like the Penny Black and the Inverted Jenny, and I'm sure that piqued my interest. I was quite excited when I got a big sack of stamps in the mail, from foreign destinations of which I'd never heard, some very colorful and pretty. 

And then... nothing. I didn't know what to do with them. Sit around and look at them? That was fun for a while. Mount them in a book? Sounded like a lot of work. 

What I did was freak out when the company sent me another bushel of stamps, because that's how the deal worked -- you got the first pack for free and agreed to pay for the next. I didn't have any money, and I would have had to ask Mom to write a check, and she might have told me the truth, that I was a dummy. So instead I wrote the company back and claimed with great anger that I had not received the stamps for which they were billing me. 

I never heard from them again. 

In time, like the rest of the things I collected (except many of the books, which I still have, and all the comics, which I sold), the stamps wound up in the landfill. I conceded that some of us are not cut out for philately, and that included me.

Occasionally I'll see a story in the news that says younger people are developing an interest in stamps, but also stories that say the grand old hobby is on the wane. I hope that the former is true. Stamp collecting, like classical music and Latin, is a thing that I just can't seem to get into but have always thought to be a sign of civilization. I think we need more civilization these days. The haters of civilization have had their way for a while now, and it's not looking good. 

I'm sorry philately was not for me, but I admire and appreciate that it exists. I hope it will continue to do so.