Stick with us, this is bound to get interesting.

A wee bit of papyrus, homemade glue, and sticky fingers, someone in ancient Egypt decided to dream what we now call “stickers”.  Stick with us.  This is bound to get interesting, even if you’re not the sort of person who becomes unglued at the sight of little pink butterflies with neon ribbons on your manly leather planner.  You may not realize it, but though you’re not stuck on stickers, they’re stuck on you and won’t let go.  The passage of civilization, and a hundred inventions later, they just seem to be everywhere. They have a significance we tend to overlook. 

Thanks to Mr. Gutenberg and to the ingenious purveyors of nontoxic adhesives they seem to procreate undeterred in printeries, born from the genius renditions of pomegranate juice-drinking creatives and their color schemes.  Shops will cover them up in little plastic bags and guard them in displays high enough to be seen and not touched, just high enough from non-currency bearing little fingers.  Women will buy stickers as rewards or as gifts, preceded by a “these are soo cute” statement.  Men will purchase them with an indifferent air, and while the cashier rings them up she quips, “these are soo cute”.      

With a few dollars and a bunch of stickers you can have your kids redecorate the expensive cedar bed frame you bought them just because.  I saw a sticker in the shape of a rose with thorns latched on to a guitar case on the shoulders of a pear-shaped mariachi guitar player on his way to a fiesta.   And it will probably hear both wails and falsettos.  A little girl was once tempted to stick little pink hearts on the nose of a grouchy terrier, and she succeeded to the dog’s delight.  They became best friends.  A young pretender used to declare love in superbly articulated love letters, and he’d add many flowery stickers doused with perfume for guaranteed success.  To his mother’s delight, he never succeeded.  Wanting to recapture their frolicking days of courtship, a husband once stuck a sticker on his wife’s forehead, accidentally plucking a few eyebrows on her ‘good side’.  They never grew back and instead became a permanent argument each time she was in front of the mirror.  

And from time to time, little stickman stickers on the back of a 4x4 describe a household’s statistics and the pets that may be in tow.  The bumpers speak of their trips to the Appalachians and the restaurants where they ate.  It is quite revealing how much one can learn about a family from a car’s behind when stuck in traffic. 

And yet today, I visit my grandmother, and she tells me that she is getting rid of old memories by ridding her boxes of old photos, her shaky hands cover up the face of an old love interest with the sticker of a donkey face.  She breaks into tears of laughter.  But as I laugh, some of my tears are not from laughter.  And it makes me wonder if someday when I’m old I’ll be able to place teardrop-shaped stickers on the photos of my grandmother as she is laughing.  Time will pass, but stickers will probably still be around.    

These and other things stickers can do.  They are the clingy and colorful reminders of what we would perhaps love to liven up, befriend, announce, adorn, or maybe just cover up.