The Stamp King in all its glory.

The first thing you should know about The Stamp King, the last stamp dealer in the city of Chicago, is that it is exactly what you imagine it would be: chaotic and jumbled, a space navigable by exactly one person, the Stamp King himself.

I was bringing my dad's stamp collection to its last resting place. I never thought of him as an avid stamp collector, more someone who traveled a fair amount and collected trinkets along the way. But, in the process of cleaning out my parents house following the death of my mother last month, I found a bankers box filled with stamp books, with stamps clipped from mail, and with loose stamps in various envelopes marked with countries he had visited.

It wasn't a collection that I needed to hang onto, so I looked up places that might be able to value it and, hopefully, buy it. Stamp collecting used to be a thing. Based on the lack of stamp stores that came back in my search, it's not much of a thing anymore. But there was one, The Stamp King, way out west on Higgins Road in a nearly-not-the-city corner of Chicago. Further research said it was the last stamp collector store in the city proper.

The second thing you should know about The Stamp King is that you should probably call first. There's not a lot of street-level traffic to the store and when I got there on an absurdly hot day in mid-July, it did not look open. The lights were off, a security gate was pulled across the storefront window. A small sign was taped to the door instructing you to knock on the adjoining storefront, because he was using the computer there. I knocked. Eventually the Stamp King opened the original door, confused.

"Did you call?" was his first question. I had not called. I had a collection of stamps I'd like him to look at, I said, gesturing to the bankers box I was carrying, and he sighed and invited me in.

The place was chaos. Bankers boxes just like mine stacked in wobbly piles to the ceiling. Banks of filing cabinets stood behind a counter that was so covered in piles of dusty stamp books and shoeboxes that you couldn't see it. Unexpectedly at the front of the store sat rubbermaid tubs full of African violets, growing in the diffused light of the dirty storefront window.

It was perfect.

The Stamp King himself was also perfect. He sported a white mustache waxed into curls and a mostly-bald head, short along the sides like my dad used to wear it. He was kind without ever being particularly friendly, approaching this transaction with a generous series of sighs. He did not need to buy another stamp for the rest of his life.

And yet you knew he would from the very start.

He cleared a space on the counter, shifting pile after pile, and explained that he was planning on leaving early today, after he was done with his "computer stuff." I said I could come back a better day and he sighed and motioned to put the box in the newly-cleared space.

He asked a little about the history of the collection and then started looking at it, breezing through books in fast-forward, opening every few envelopes, carefully tweezering stamps to get a closer look. A couple books you could tell were sort of interesting to him, until his tweezer-led inspection revealed that the stamps were "hinged," a heretofor unknown term to me, but apparently not the way stamps should be kept. Who knew?

The Stamp King knew.

He was through it all in 10 minutes, probably less. Most of the time was him sighing and me wandering around the store. It really was all boxes. The adjoining storefront where he'd been doing his computer work was also all boxes. Floor to ceiling. In a fire the place would go up in a millisecond.

Affixed to the filing cabinets were stickers and clippings. "The only difference between this place and the Titanic: The Titanic had a band."

The Stamp King laid it all out for me: two books were interesting, but all the stamps were stuck in wrong. He'd do $10 for those. Another book was $2. A couple envelopes were $5. Piles of stamps that had been lovingly de-adhered from envelopes were garbage. All this, he said gesturing to stamps collected from a lifetime of travels, are "fun but worthless." Eventually he delivered the total with another sigh: $25.

It was a pity $25, I know, fished from his wallet. The Stamp King needs another box of stamps like Lake Michigan needs a glass of water. But I think probably everyone that comes through is like me now, someone with a box of someone else's stamps, a box that would end up in the garbage if The Stamp King didn't step up.

So the Stamp King steps up. Stepping up is his life's work now. He's probably pushing 80, saving the thing he loves well beyond the point of sensibility. The piles are huge and threaten to engulf him and maybe me if today happens to be the day.

I said $25 sounded good, and would he take the leftovers too. He sighed. Of course he would. Today there's another banker's box touching the ceiling of the Stamp King, that one was my dad's.

Ever since I left that box behind, I've been thinking about the things each of us has piled in unsteady stacks, stacked all the way up to the ceiling of our own lives.

We all accumulate a life the way the Stamp King accumulates stamps: sometimes with a thought-out plan, sometimes in the hopes of making a buck, but most of the time because you step up. The boxes stack up whatever way.

Living is hard. That's not a revelation, just an acknowledgement. But we live it as best we can. We fill our boxes and we stack them up. Not every box is filled with good memories. Most of them, if we're lucky, I think fall into the best category the Stamp King offered: fun, but worthless.

Fun, but worthless. Not everything has to make a profit, despite the grind mindset that's forced on us. Not everything has to have meaning beyond being joyful to you, now. Maybe it's some stamps, put in an envelope and kept in a box. A box that now sits among hundreds at The Stamp King. Maybe it's something else.

Whatever it is, I hope it's fun but worthless to you and that you fill your boxes with it, every day, until they tower over you. And I hope you take a moment to look at those fun but worthless towers of your life and you sigh the content, exasperated sigh of the Stamp King. A sigh that says it's all a little bit mad and more than a little tiring and even so you know you would not do it any differently because someone has to step up and save the things that are fun, but worthless.

As I left, I smiled at the Stamp King and said, "The good news is now you have some stamps to sell."

He laughed a little and sighed a lot.