I don't want to sound like Jerry Maguire here, but it does ring a bell. And bells are all about what this blog will describe, little tiny bells in the back of our heads. I used (and it's been a full fifty years now since I quit that hobby) to collect stamps. It's an antiquated and totally abandoned human pursuit of the pre-computer age, like knitting, a thing that most of you reading this article would have to ask your grandparents about if any odd spark of curiosity somehow ignited in your heads.

But long, long ago, as a boy growing up in that wonderfully enchanted, hippy and music rich era of the late sixties, I was a stamp collector, an avid and fervent one because I started that hobby as an even younger dreamer in France, where I lived from the age of six to ten in the early sixties and where my sister, seven years older than me, fell under its guile and soon addicted me to that mesmerizing pastime.

I'll prove it in pictures, because I know how very foreign it is to most of you, then with words I'll try to prove how rich it was, how enriching to my adolescent mind, the many strange words it contributed to my flowering psyche.

You can see the love and devotion to my stamp album and the hours it took to ink out each page with a quill pen, and the descriptions to each stamp, copied from my previous, printed stamp album, but not to my taste because it wasn't mine. This book was.

Sorry for the poor imagery from my phone camera. I'm old and computer illiterate. But now, as Tom Hanks said in the movie 'Sully', 'let's get serious'.

My stamp book has hundreds of pages, thousands of stamps and definitely took about half as many hours as the number of stamps to compose. It was a labor of love I took to on school nights after my high school homework was done. My parents had a rule that I could never go out after dinner on school nights. I never disliked this rule as it landed me in U.C. Berkeley, while most of my boyhood friends ran amuck after dinner just down the street and ended up in junior colleges at best and in one case, in jail.

It was the beauty of the stamps that mesmerized me. I went to a stamp shop, a philatelist store (to use the forgotten word) on Saturdays and spent my one dollar allowance on the few I could afford, leafing through their binders for hours. You'll notice many in my collection are heavily stamped. That's because those blots lessened the price of the stamp to something I could afford. But I saw underneath the black stains, the postmarks, and extrapolated the beauty that the cruel postman's rubber stamp had deflowered.

Let's bump it up a notch in my 'let's get serious' phase. It was the colors I fell in love with. There's one catalogue that puts a value on stamps, one benchmark, and any serious stamp collector owns it. It's called 'Stanley'. I had one. You could look up your stamp by date and country and it would tell you the approximate value depending on its condition. The adjectives it used for these degradations below the supreme, heavenly 'mint' status, the postmarks being light or heavy and blotting the picture underneath. This taught me a whole new consciousness of beauty. It was a ladder of perception where all of a sudden I visualized a hundred rungs where before I saw only a few.

Better yet were the precise words in this catalogue used to describe the stamps with exactitude. They were the names of colors I'd never known before. But when I saw the stamp and the color in it, and the new word, it was as if a rainbow had expanded exponentially before my eyes and I drank them in.  The nineteenth century impressionistic French painters in oils hardly had a larger vocabulary. I'm talking Renoir and Cezanne.

A few of these words come instantly to mind, with a fondness that equals that of my childhood dog.

Let's start off with one 'cerise'.

In the catalogue it was used to describe to color of a French stamp of 'Ceres' which I had. I imagined it must be some offshoot of 'pink'.

But 'cerise' in French means 'cherry', which I well knew. But it also connected in my adolescent mind with the color of a woman's nipple or tongue and an infinitude of images after that.

And I wasn't the only one.

There's a picture I can't find, but I remember it from many years ago. It's a photograph in black and white from the twenties or thirties in France or maybe Spain of a young woman in the countryside with two cherries on a stem hanging from her exposed nipple. If anyone knows this famous photograph please send me the link, as I wanted to include it in this article.

Also, if you like this post, please comment and I might give you my thoughts on the next stamp colors that come to my mind, 'vermilion', 'cerulean', 'ultramarine', 'magenta'. These words, when you see the exact colors they represent, make you rich. They say the Eskimos have twenty two words for different types of snow. So if you wished to join in an enlightening conversation about snow, you would chose an Eskimo to converse with, an expert in the field. The same applies to colors and every other field of interest. The specialists have a hugely expanded vocabulary, a sound garden of rare words to unfold the richness of their plot, a butterfly conservatory, which once you visit, you will never forget.