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http://redclaydiary.com/
or read his story:
The Self-Addressed Stamped Envelope Time Traveller
When he was a kid he used to dig into all those little classified ads and small display ads that were everywhere within the magazines and paperback books he read.
Back then, he would send off for anything he could afford and he would order anything that was free because he liked to get things in the mail…he liked to receive packages and envelopes from faraway places…he liked to open those packages and envelopes, never knowing what was inside each of them because by the time they arrived he’d already forgotten what he had ordered.
He enjoyed reading ads that touted services and items he felt he could never afford, and he always kept a mental list of things he would purchase if he suddenly had the means to get anything he wanted, and he even wondered how he would feel if he could purchase any and everything he wanted.
If that were the situation what could he hope for thereafter… what would his dreams be like after he had bought up everything in every ad in every magazine?
As he grew up and passed young adulthood, whizzed by middle age and verged on the edge of ultimate maturity he still liked to dream about those mail-order things he never got when he was a child. He daydreamed about the faraway places he would never travel to.
Now, as an adult, he at last could afford those mail-order items. But where were they?
The ads were no longer the same. The mail-order stuff he could buy now was different, inexplicable, not of his generation and time.
One day he passed by an old junk shop and saw a stack of magazines…the kind of magazines he read when he was oh so young…the magazines that had lurid pulp illustrations on their covers…the magazines that were packed with adventure and fantasy and humor and…ads.
On impulse, he bought those magazines and took them home to dream. A harmless and pleasurable act.
And one day, when he wasn’t really thinking too seriously about what he was doing, he bought some antique penny postcards and started mailing off requests for free things and more information, to the addresses that existed only when he was young, addresses with zone numbers in them, to companies that were so important in their respective communities that they had not needed street addresses—just the name of the city and state, you know. The very act of filling out those postcards was so nostalgic, so natural.
Then, he felt satisfied and drifted back into his memories of childhood and imagined what it would be like to actually receive mail from those long-departed places.
And one day, the packages and envelopes he had ordered started pouring in and he knew at that moment that he was at last in a place where no one could deny him his dreams and fancies…and after that he went about smiling to himself quite a bit more than one actually should smile at himself in times like these
© Jim Reed 2015 A.D.