The Puzzle of Stickers

You are so proud the day your teacher gives you a gold star sticker for your brightness. It stays on your clothes all day, but when you try to attach it the next day, it falls, its points curling, onto the floor where it promptly finds your brother's shoe and hangs out on the bottom for a couple of days. Not to worry. The next weekend your grandmother tucks a whole sheet of smiling horse and leaping turtle stickers into your birthday card, and your friend gives you a whole book of global frogs, carefully labeled and realistically colored. They're pretty and shiny and stickable. They're yours. But you discovered when you were three that they rip easily, and by four that they can only be stuck successfully once (most happily on a wall until your collection is discovered and you receive a gentle spanking). By five you sometimes considered the consequences of sticking them, and by six you became stingy, only occassionally sacrificing a whole colony at once. Now you have a whole box of sticker sheets--fuzzy ones, sparkly ones, big ones, small ones--that you are too cautious to use randomly, and not dedicated enough to organize.

Sometimes you decorate your mirror corners, but then you get sick of them and ambitiously try to remove them, only being successful at removing the pretty parts. When you give a friend a card, sometimes you are generously motivated to seal it with a special sticker, but when you get such envelopes yourself, you find that they open funny. So you stick a few on your desk and discover that white remains are no nicer there than on your mirror. You try keeping them in your drawer, but no visitor gets terribly excited over a dusty and yellowing sticker collection. One day you put one on your nose, and then are struck with a creativity of simply throwing them out. Your mom finds them while you are at school and puts them back on your bed. When you get home, you are busy for several hours smothering a poster board with them, and then try to sneak the project into the recycling bin--they have been used their lucky once and they are finished--but someone inevitably cannot bear to see them go. The hideous poster ends up back in your room and you only used one hundredth of your collection to make it.

Finally, you try an extravagant approach: A sticker's life is apparently long, so make the most of it. You start your collection on mom's filing cabinet where she can keep them, where they are not being wasted by lack of usage, and where everyone can gloat about their cheap beauty. Who knows? Maybe your grandbabies will get excited about them, manage to rip a few of them cleanly off, and eat them. And not even a clique of stickers can stick long in a baby's digestive system.