1987

We were in the grocery store, and I saw them. A small package, the size of a deck of playing cards, only thinner. The wrapper was green, and on the front was a large baseball and the bold red words TOPPS on the front. I asked my dad if I could have them, and after hearing how his mother has thrown out his baseball cards when he was a kid, he let me get a pack.

We were driving back home, and those days, it took about 30 minutes to get home from the grocery store, as we lived far outside the convience line. I held the waxy paper package in my hand, turning it over and over. It was like a puppy or something. I am not sure why I had such a connection to that package of baseball cards, but it was something I cherished. I pulled the seam apart in the back, and looking up at me, surrounded by yellow and blue statistics was a pink piece of, well I wasn't sure what it was, it was slightly chalky looking, and was stiffer than the cards it was pressed against. The smell that hit me was one of my now favorites, right up there with leather glove oil, playdoh, and my sons shampooed head. It makes my stomach do little butterfly rolls. I took the gum stick from the center of the cards and tried to fold it into my mouth like I did with Juicy Fruit. It shattered like a piece of glass, but dammit, I was going to chew it anyway. I remember wondering if this was the same gum that the big leaguers were chewing in the dugouts.

That first pack of cards was like meeting new friends. As my life got tougher as I grew up, I would escape to my room, and organize my cards in ways that made sense to me. I know now this was the beginnings of my OCD training, as I had stacks organized by team, then broken down by year. I would not think of wrapping them in rubber bands, oh no, they had to be treated nicer than that, so I would wrap them in bits of saran wrap from my mom's kitchen.

The first 100 or so cards fit nicely in a red plastic pencil box. I did not have any friends that collected baseball cards, and did not understand the appeal to me. I did meet a man named Randal, who was really old to me at the time, but looking back was probably 20-22. He and I would go and pour over the baseball cards, and he would try to get me to trade him cards like my Darryl Strawberry allstar, or my Wade Boggs card that showed him walking across the field in such a way that I imagined he had a swagger like John Wayne.

This was long before we got cable, so the games I got to see were limited to what they showed on channel 11. We didn't really get the somewhat local channels very well, so my earliest memories are trying to listen to the game on radios. I did not know how the players depicted on the cards played, but they were my buddies. I did not collect them for the monetary value, only for the value that I found in having so many friends.

In highschool, I had a shop project to build a showbox for the 4H club to use when they showed cattle. I spent days working on that box, and it was perfect. Not for some damn cow, but for my cards.

I still have a lot of those cards, they are in my attic. Probably not in the best boxes, some of them might be a little airtight, and some of them are in plastic binders. Some of my cards were thrown out when I went to the Marines, and some have been bound with rubberbands, hairties, and other things they should not be, mainly because my mother thought it would help. But I still have them, and can point out several of my very first cards, because I spent so much time with them. This is how baseball was born to me