Thursday afternoon I strode into Druck & Stempel.
"Now where did I put that ugly stamp?" said Herr Loescher.
"Ugly!?" I cried.
He handed me a white paper bag, stapled shut. "That's what it looks like." He had stamped it once, in red, on the outside of the bag.
"Perfect!" I cried. I tore the bag open, spun the soft wooden handle in my palm, caressed the rubber text with my pointer finger. "Exactly as I imagined."
Sometimes one-and-three-quarter hours of obsessive-compulsive attention to detail does pay off.
Loescher appeared to bear no ill-will for the freebie time spent. Though he did say: "If you'd gone to a Graphiker, it would have cost one, maybe two hundred." Then he demonstrated how I must slide the face of the stamp along the ruby ink pad to ink the rubber, rather than slam it down, as commonly thought. And how, when I am done, I must always stamp stamp stamp the Stempel on a scrap of paper until it no longer bleeds red.
I proceeded to stamp every square inch of the small white bag: Buyer Beware Buyer Beware Buyer Beware Buyer Beware...
I also learned that Herr Loescher: Speaks no English. Has never been to America. Once made it to Vancouver. Nurses dreams of L.A. beach houses. Comes from Thüringen. Commutes two hours there and back every weekend. Dislikes Berlin. Finds it all too stressful ("You might not want to visit New York," I suggested). Runs his shop in Mitte only for want of business back home (not that I witnessed a throng of Stempel-süchtig customers on Veteranen Strasse).
Funny how I managed to gather more info about the man in the five minutes it took to pick up the stamp than in the two hours it took to make it. I think they call that: Single-mindedness of Purpose.
Herr Loescher might have kept chatting. But I was done. I thanked him profusely, swore to return for all future stamp business and to refer him to my friends, then ambled out the door, sky already stained by dusk.
Here is the thing I did not tell him: In the day between the ordering of the stamp and the picking up of it, I had discovered, through the reading of old journals, that I had remembered the sequence of events in the year 2000 quite out-of-order and that my entire first chapter would therefore have to be re-shaped re-stacked re-written, perhaps altogether precluding the need for a drawing cum stamp stating "Buyer Beware" in Algerian D font boxed in by shadowed double-lines of matching lengths, 7 pt diamonds set lovingly in each corner, slightly above and beyond the box's outer edge, mind you, as this makes all the difference.
Go figure.
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