So I had something kinda cool happen to me yesterday. I had to go to the post office to mail something. It was Friday at 5 so there was this huge long line. Plod, plod, plod through the line. And I got up there, and got your usual tired, end of the day, customers are tired, everybody’s cranky, frontline postal employee. Plod, plod, plod. And the printer kept breaking so she was getting progressively more and more cranky. But finally, it printed my postage, and before she rang me up, I asked for a book of Forever stamps.

She answered, they’re out of Forever stamps, until Tuesday, and looked at me like she was kind of expecting me to get mad. But I just said, okay, well, do you have any regular first class stamps? (Seriously, it’s stamps, who gets mad over stamps?) So she got out the stamp varieties and held them out for me to pick one. I picked out the Black Heritage ones. She immediately perked up and became totally enthusiastic.

The stamp I chose features Anna Julia Cooper, who was an educator, activist, and the fourth black woman in American history to earn a Ph.D, from the Sorbonne, no less. She asked if I’ve got a passport, and when I said yeah, she said that she’s got a quote in there, and I promised to go look for it. She was telling me how they get to learn about all kinds of history, every time the Post Office puts out a new stamp, and how much fun it was. And she was just so enthusiastic, telling me all this stuff about this historical figure that I’d never heard of. It was, like, Instant Happy Postal Worker, just add stamps. It kind of made my day too, actually.

The passport quote is: The cause of freedom is not the cause of a race or a sect, a party or a class – it is the cause of humankind, the very birthright of humanity.

So now I have a story, I have learned something new, and I have stamps. Pretty awesome, huh?