On childhood treasures, questionable purchases, and the never-ending hunt for things I don’t need.
This is a Gen X inventory of the 80s and 90s stuff I lost, the stuff I bought back, and the oddballs that somehow survived. It covers WWF/WWE rubber wrestlers, He-Man, Battle Beasts, Galoob’s The Animal, the Fisher-Price PXL-2000 I’m still hunting for, a bag of vanished concert shirts, and a pair of green elephant socks. Somewhere along the way, it turned into a question I didn’t expect: who am I actually collecting all this for?
Somewhere beneath the basement floor of my childhood home in Queens, there was buried treasure. At least that’s what I hoped.
There was a small utility closet with a drain cover on the floor. Beneath the cover were rocks and dirt, which, for reasons I still can’t explain, I decided to start chiseling away at. Maybe I thought I could tunnel my way to China. Maybe I imagined discovering gold. Or maybe I was just a bored kid with too much time on his hands and an unhealthy curiosity about what might be hiding beneath his feet.
But then something happened. I found a baseball card.
Not a whole card, mind you. A filthy, deteriorating fragment of cardboard that looked like it had survived a war. But a baseball card nonetheless.
A 1951 Bowman Pete Suder card, number 154, featuring an infielder for the Philadelphia Athletics.
It’s not worth anything in its current condition. I keep it in a little plastic baggie alongside the other baseball cards I’ve collected through the years, and every time I see it, I smile. Because for one brief moment, digging through the rocks beneath my house actually paid off.
More than forty years later, I’m still digging. Just in different places.
[Read more…] about The Things I Wish I Still Had (and a Few I’m Glad I Kept)