collections and recollections

I have a friend who is a deltiologist. If you are of average intelligence like me, you probably don´t know what a deltiologist is, like I did until a few weeks ago, when a definition question came up during the Monday Pub Quiz and this incredibly smart and cultivated man, being one, obviously knew the answer: “How do you call someone who collects postcards?” 

A deltiologist.

Though the vision of any kind of collection gives me a sense of smothering and I doubt I´ll ever start one, I find the idea of boxes and boxes of postcards (as long as in someone else´s home) romantic and enthralling. It surely has to do with the “object of desire” itself, for I am one of the few remaining people that loves to send and receive real letters and who still sends postcards who are actually physically carried by a mailman. Quite sad – though somehow understandable – that the new technologies are killing older epistolary traditions but indeed I had to acknowledge that “times they are a-changin´” when in a post office in a southern European country, last year, I had to wait over 15 minutes for the clerk to go dig, in some dusty back office, some postcard-suitable stamps. Had I asked him to please bring me some tea and Parisian macarons, it would have been easier, I reckon.

Finding out that this friend of mine is a passionate deltiologist was for me delightful, for it gave me a chance to…send postcards! And not only once or twice a year from some exotic holiday venue to some friends who would open their mailbox and look at this rectangular piece of paper with baffled surprise, No no! I could send nearly every week a postcard to a man who would open his mailbox, smile his little oh-so-mannered British smile and then climb the stairs to his flat wondering in what box my postcard would better fit.

I don´t always send the best postcards, and sometimes I play the ninny by sending the most kitschy postcards I can find. One of my favorites was from a former military and now low-cost airport in the middle of nowhere. The layout, the graphic and the picture were so appalling, that I was almost ashamed as I handed it to the cashier to pay. The postcard was so ugly, it literally made me laugh.

Today´s postcard to my deltiologist friend is an old one which has been sitting, lonely and bored, in a drawer for years. It´s a postcard depicting a glass door of the Casa Battló in Barcelona. I have been to that splendid city only once and only for a handful of days. I remember I was happy. I remember strolling down the Ramblas with a light heart. I remember standing in front of the Sagrada Familia with unexpected and overwhelming bewilderment. I remember secret codes, cheerful nights, carefree days, full of energy and hope. I remember walking on the top of the Casa Battló and thinking “I am in a fairy tale and this roof is a benevolent dragon!”. I remember leafing through the guest book and reading, with a full heart, “we are here, and we are in love”.

I would have never imagined that deltiology would indirectly carry me to sunny, lively Catalan streets on a dreary September afternoon. Pleasant surprise indeed.