Elobey, Annobón, and Corisco. These form a group of small islands off the west coast of Africa, in the Gulf of Guinea, and I pondered them over and over again when we returned to Saipan, where I would lie in my tent and think with intense longing of the recent past—that is to say, my early years.

During the philatelic period of my late childhood only a few years before, a phase that followed my obsession with raising pigeons, I had somehow come to own a moderately rare stamp from ‘Elobey, Annobón, and Corisco.’ By moderately rare I mean that the Scott catalog priced the