About a week after we returned from Texas, UPS delivered a box to me containing a few hundred postcards. Amanda Castleman, a friend of Ed Henderson’s, had arranged to send them to me. They represented his bequest to me. The last time I saw him, he told me I would get his collection of postcards after he died, and so I have.

The other day I took them out of the box and put them under the noonday sun.
The beads were a lagniappe. Yuriko recognized them at once as beads that a pilgrim would wear to do the 88 temples on Shikoku associated with Kōbō Daishi.

That image wasn’t impressive enough, so I stacked them up, and added a ruler for perspective. About 8 inches of postcards. Some of the bequest cards are blank ones that Ed acquired during his many travels, with their numbers a kind of rough guide to how highly he esteemed a place. A fair number are thus of Alaska and Venice. But there are also cards from (noted here at random) the UK, Norway, Iceland, France, Germany, South Georgia, Hawaii, Yap, Canada, French Polynesia, the Caribbean, Mexico, the Balkans, Turkey, Mali, South Africa, and more. The dude got around.

Then there are the cards other people sent him. Many of them are from me. It’s odd looking at a bit of paper you focused on one, two, or five years ago and then put out of your mind. Or sent more recently. In the box is the last card I sent to him, obtained at the National Museum of the U.S. Air Force, which pictures Bockscar. On it I wrote, “We already dropped the big one to see what would happen.”

A bit cryptic, unless you know that I was answering an email Ed sent to me on May 1 of this year, which had this subject line: Hmm. The entirety of the message was: “Had a very odd dream last night, most of which is lost, but not you singing randy newman’s political science.” (Ed typically didn’t bother with capitalization in nonprofessional writing.)

Ed also collected hotel and motel postcards. Many of them are in the box, too — some of which I’d sent to him over the years, used or blank, that I’d picked up at resale shops. Increasingly that’s the only place to find hotel or motel cards, since hotels and motels rarely offer them any more, with the recent exception of the Munger Moss Motel in Missouri, which still has cards of itself for a small fee.

All of these add considerably to my agglomeration of postcards, “collection” not being the right word. The blank ones are in drawers and boxes, and those I’ve received over the years (many from Ed) are tucked away in files and other boxes, their value almost entirely sentimental.

How many all together? I don’t know. Might be better not to count.