DO YOU KNOW THE CRITERIA FOR HAVING YOUR IMAGE PRINTED ON A U.S. POSTAGE STAMP?

Well. Do you?

I lived in the U.S. for many years. I had to leave in the end because my visa had expired whilst I was still there and I didn‘t do anything about it. That’s generally frowned upon in immigration circles. I don’t think they’ll let me go back now for any reason which is a shame because I really liked it over there. I think I left my red scarf in a Starbucks too. One day I may write to the Starbucks I think I left it in and see if they ever found it. It was a gift so I would like to be able to wear it again some day.

There are at least twelve criteria that I know of when deciding what goes on a U.S. postage stamp. The first one is this:

1. It is a general policy that U.S. postage stamps and stationery primarily will feature American or American-related subjects.

The red scarf was a gift from a girl who I had quietly loved for many years. For a long time I thought we would never be together and had resigned myself to a consolatory prize of a warm friendship but then through some quirk of the universe it turned out that she had quietly loved me for many years too. We were together for six years almost to the day before it ended, without me really knowing why. With hindsight, that may well have been the underlying problem.

The second criterion is this:

2. No living person shall be honored by portrayal on U.S. postage.

This means that I will never see myself depicted on a U.S. postage stamp. If not for this second criterion I may be able to live in hope that my non-American-ness would not be a total barrier to having my face represented on a U.S. postage stamp, the general policy as quoted in criterion number one presumably not being the be-all-and-end-all of the matter. However, as things currently stand, to have such hope would be futile. This may seem like an unusual hope to have to begin with but I assure you, I know of stranger desires.

After we broke up I fell into a kind of depression, the kind, I guess, that we all fall into when a love we have made ourselves vulnerable to and for turns around and bites us on the ass. I lost my job and my apartment as a consequence of the depression and ended up living in a squat in a warehouse conversion for a while along with about fifteen others. I never really spoke to many of them but I would guess that - from the dazed look in many of their eyes, myself included - at least half of the residents were there for the same reasons that I was; that is, while we weren‘t looking, life came along and whacked us hard across the back the head.

There is a group of people that decides what does and what doesn’t go on a U.S. postage stamp. They are called the Citizens’ Stamp Advisory Committee. Seriously. Look it up if you don’t believe me. If you want to suggest something that you would like to see on a U.S. postage stamp you can write to them. Here is their address:

Citizens' Stamp Advisory Committee
c/o Stamp Development
U.S. Postal Service
1735 North Lynn St., Suite 5013
Arlington, VA 22209-6432.

In the end I ran out of money and when I started applying for new jobs I found out about my visa. I had forgotten all about it because that was the kind of thing she would remember and would then remind me about.

Now I am back at home, where I started out from. I am going to write to the Citizens’ Stamp Advisory Committee to ask if they will reconsider their criteria on portraying living, non-American subjects. I think it would be a nice thing to tell people, that if they ever mailed a letter or a package or a postcard from the States they‘d see my smiling face. Also, every time she writes to someone she might think of me. I won’t mention my deportation to the Committee; I suspect it might go against me, even though the whole procedure was all very civilised and they didn’t shout at me or anything.