The Secret of the Three Rings
A Rabbit Hole Mystery
This is going to be a pretty short one, especially for those of you who identified the three rings in the photo immediately. Still, it combines a lot of my favorite things.
As I’ve mentioned ad nauseam, I’m way into postcards. Part of my obsession includes looking for the perfect postage stamp holder. There are plenty of nice ones out there, but I’ve been holding out for one that speaks to me.
I know how sad that sounds.
If you’re not familiar with how they look, here’s a sampling.
In my search for postage stamp roll holders, I discovered there were such things as stamp wallets. In fact, there’s an entire culture of stamp collectors who focus on wallets and other portable stamp holders.
Some come in sterling silver, others are swag from the late 19th and early 20th centuries with bank names or vacation destinations embossed on them.
That means there was a world where it was common enough to need a stamp while you were just out and walking around that industry responded with a line of products to simplify that process.
I think of postcards as kind of the tweets of their day. In cities, it wasn’t unusual for a postcard sent in the morning to be delivered that evening, if you were in a big enough building, say.
So you’re walking along in downtown Chicago and decide you want to dash off a note to a friend across town. You grab a postcard, write your tiny missive, reach into your wallet or purse for your stamp holder, put the appropriate postage on it, and drop it in a letter box.
I was open to having a stamp holder because I could put it in my portfolio for when I send letters or (more likely) postcards on the road. I came across these in my search.
Monogrammed postage stamp holders? I mean, what do I need more than that? For $5 (and $7 postage and handling) they were mine.
I couldn’t imagine anyone monogrammed these wallets because the circles looked a little corporate, as if they were a logo. Also, most of my research indicated that these wallets were more often bank or insurance company giveaways than not.
There were five whole minutes where I held out hope they were swag from the company my grandfather worked for. He was a carpenter for O’Melia Outdoor, but that logo looked like this:
The thing was, the logo was really, really familiar looking to me, but I couldn’t place it, although I know by now several of you are frustrated by my ignorance. The logo appears on many of my favorite buildings on the planet.
It’s the symbol of the International Order of Odd Fellows, an old-timey fraternity. I take notice every time I see an Odd Fellows building because there is a good chance it has skeletons in the walls.
I had heard that one of the Odd Fellows public services was paying to have the dead buried and that sometimes they would just wall up corpses they couldn’t find a place for. That is (tragically) unlikely. They do have skeletons that they use for their initiation rituals. Today they’re props but in olden times the were real, actual skeletons on hand for the ceremony.
Occasionally, people find them in defunct Odd Fellows Buildings.
So my stamp books obviously belonged to an Odd Fellow with the initial “R,” right?
Wrong you sexist!
The Odd Fellows are a Fraternity, which as any fool knows can’t exist without a Sorority.
Meet the Rebekahs
Even though the Odd Fellows three links didn’t click with me immediately, I was searching for a logo that was three links above an “R” and this is what I found.
You can, today, if you want, purchase china used by the Rebekahs sorority for their fancier functions.
According to the Odd Fellows website, they are called the International Association of Rebekah Assemblies (IARA), and originally the Daughters of Rebekah.
Now, the story of Rebekah in the Bible is Old Testament bananas. Though she didn’t have and daughters famous enough to make it into Genesis, she had a couple of sons, Jacob and Esau. Here’s the link to the Jehovah’s Witness version, which is probably the most positive spin anyone had ever put on the story.
My version goes like this:
Issac, who was Abraham’s son (the one God wanted dead), sent out for a relative to marry after his first wife died. He didn’t want a local girl. They came back with Rebekah (Abraham’s brother’s granddaughter) who eventually gave the much, much older Issac twins. The oldest twin Esau was ugly and hairy while the younger Jacob was beautiful and pure.
Esau studied the old religions and Jacob studied the ways of the real God. Issac was old and blind so Rebekah decided to trick him into leaving his kingdom to Jacob. She dressed Jacob up in goat fur so he would feel all hairy when his father laid hands on him to anoint him heir.
So Esau comes back and is, like, “Hey!”
Issac says, “Well, I can’t take back a blessing, I guess you’re fucked. You guys should probably start an eternal war between followers of the “real” God and everyone else.”
The end.
I think the point is that Rebekahs put God first, although a case could be made that the sorority was made to cheat the blind.
I actually like that angle better, in a feminist, allegorical way. Like, the men are blind and bullheaded, so Rebekahs trick them into making the “right” decision. Afterward, rather than admit they made a mistake, the men double down on the women’s preference, making up some bullshit reason that makes the trickery look like part of their original plan.
Anyway.
I guess my stamp books were annual giveaways since there are two. The white one is fancier because it has plastic dividers inside to help you keep the various stamp denominations separate.
Keep the Faith,
Tony
PostScript
As always, please consider joining Substack (it’s free, don’t let them pressure you) and participating in the cool conversations going on here. I assure you you’ll find tons of writers worth reading.
I’ve been making even more use of my Notes page, which you can check out here.
Here are a couple I like from me.
Here are some from others:
TR