Mr. Wilson kept his stamps in an album on the dining room table, and one afternoon Dennis Mitchell came through the door and the stamps went everywhere. I was about ten, and I laughed. It took me another sixty-five years to work out what I had been laughing at, which was a man's entire retirement blowing across a living room.

What Mr. Wilson Did All Day

George Wilson was retired. The show never bothered to say from what, because in 1961 it did not matter; a man of a certain age had a job until one day he didn't, and after that he had a yard, a hobby, and a wife who wished he would go use the yard. What the show did tell us, week after week, was that he had stamps.

They were his subject. Whenever the writers needed Mr. Wilson doing something that Dennis could interrupt, he was at that table with the tweezers and the little glassine envelopes and the magnifier, and the comedy came from the interruption. But take the six-year-old out of the scene and look at what is actually on the screen: a man alone at a table, arranging small pieces of paper in an order that mattered to nobody but him.

I don't remember anyone ever asking him about them, either, not seriously. Dennis may have asked, but Dennis asked about everything and heard little of it, and Martha tolerated the album the way one tolerates weather. The hobby, as a plot point, lived in a sealed room.

I thought the stamps were the joke, but they were not. They are the answer to a question the show never got around to asking, which is what does a man do all day once nobody needs him to do anything?

Heigh Ho, Heigh Ho

Here is the mold I grew up inside. One went to school, and one got a job, and one was productive. That was the word. That was the entire moral content of the thing. And being "unproductive" was definitely presented as a moral failing.

And "productive" had a specific meaning nobody ever said out loud. It did not mean serving humanity. It did not mean leaving the place better than you found it, or raising decent kids, or looking after the patch of earth you happened to be standing on. It meant you turned out something somebody else could sell for more than they had paid you to make it. The margin was the point. We are the machinery.

Believe that for forty years and retirement stops being a reward and becomes a diagnosis. This is why so many men of my father's generation did no planning for it whatsoever—not the money, I mean the days. They could not picture themselves not being productive, and not once in their lives had anyone suggested they were allowed to just be for its own sake.

So they fussed over stamps. Or coins, or model trains, or the lawn, which in the suburbs of that era could absorb an unlimited quantity of a man's remaining life. They found something with rules and a little equipment and a sense of progress, and they did it at the dining room table until dinner.

Leaving One's Stamp On The World

I want to be careful here, because that last section could be read as looking down on Mr. Wilson, and I am not doing that.

Mr. Wilson loved his stamps. That is the part that matters and the part I missed at ten. He wasn't killing time; he was spending it, intentionally, on something that gave him back nothing anybody could put a price on. Perforations. Watermarks. A country that had not existed since 1918. He knew things about those stamps that nobody else on that street knew or wanted to, and he knew them because knowing them pleased him.

That is not a consolation prize for a career that ended at sixty-five. That is the actual prize, and most of the people still busy trying to be productive never get anywhere near it.

Now, personally, I have never had the faintest interest in stamps (although I loved mail, until it devolved into nothing but advertisements). I could not tell you what a watermark is (in regards to stamps) without looking it up, and I am not going to look it up. But I understand loving something that produces nothing, because I have one.

My Stamps Have Hyperlinks

I am retired, and it was not my idea. There is a good deal of history behind that sentence that I am not going to unpack here. What I will say is that I would not go back. The job ended. The days did not, and it turned out I had something to put in them.

I started this website more than a quarter of a century ago. There are essays on it, and photographs, and travel, and family, and arguments I have been having with myself about physics and God and the correct way to build a web page. It is the cluttered attic of one specific life. And I fuss over it exactly the way Mr. Wilson fussed over that album—constantly, cheerfully, and to no practical purpose at all.

Some of the fussing is real work. Some of it is not, and the part that is not is my favorite. The site title jiggles a little when you run the mouse across it; nobody requested this. Pages animate into place as they load, a fraction of a second of motion most visitors will never consciously notice. Double-click the page information and it copies itself to your clipboard, formatted and ready to paste into Facebook, a feature I built because I got tired of doing it by hand.

Nothing on this website is "productive". Nobody is paying me. Oh, I suppose I could put ads on the site. But I hate that on other sites; I'm not about to do that to mine. So there is no margin, no buyer, nothing here that anyone could resell for more than it cost to make. It is a jiggle. I put it there for the joy of self-expression, and then I kept it because I liked it, and those are the only two reasons I need anymore.

Help Yourself

Here is where Mr. Wilson and I part company.

Mr. Wilson was possessive. The album was his, the table was his, the door was shut, and half the comedy of that show ran on a retired man defending a hobby from a small boy. I have thought about that a great deal more than the writers ever did. He had exactly one thing that was his, so he guarded it, and the guarding cost him the only company on offer.

My "stamps" are pages, and I would like your fingerprints all over them. Read them. Send one to somebody who would enjoy it. Copy the link—double-click the page information, remember—and paste it wherever you like. Tell me if I am wrong about something; people do, and it is usually the best part of my week.

Mr. Wilson heard the door open and reached for the album. I hear the door open and think, oh good, somebody's here.