Cards and the loss of youth

It's hard for me to remember when I first started collecting cards, but it's easy for me to remember that summer when I started saying goodbye. I kept my cards, which were in the thousands, in a large chest. The sort of thing that a pirate would store booty in. And, at some point during my childhood we got two cats, Caspar and Midnight. Beautiful cats. Indoor outdoor, big barn cats that I remembered cradling in the palm of my hand. However, the thing about cats is that they like to poop and pee. And, guess what? A large chest of cards that move handily when you scrape at them with your claws winds up feeling an awful lot like litter or dirt, or other things to poop on. Queue Triumph.

After a few months I'd hear the pitter patter of paws on my cards and run into the room shrieking at them to leave. That's how about half of my cards ended up urine stained or worse. It was time to say goodbye. We parted ways at a garage sale, my childhood and I. I spent a few nights scraping cat feces from cards or attempting to pry apart cards conjoined by dried urine. I put 100 of them in a bag, being careful to take out anything, crap stained or no, that might be worth more than a couple bucks. I hadn't changed that much.

They sold for one dollar a piece, and I made twenty four dollars that day, a killing more than anyone else trying to sell old tables and chairs. I watched as kids younger than I hopped down the sun baked street with a bag of unknown in their hands, watched shadows distort and elongate, watched grandfathers large hairy knuckled hands pull out a dollar or two for these bubbling boys, not willing to pass up on a reminder of their own youth, or tired mothers too harried to mind the loss of a dollar if it meant receiving a bit of piece.

And as I watched this strange tableaux, commerce once again flooding through my veins I did not realize that it was one of those rare definable moments that you say goodbye to childhood, goodbye to the sweet unknown of cards, to the mystery of a card soaring in value, to sitting in my room for hours, having races between my cards to see which team had the most as if they were cars. What I'm trying to say is that I miss them? Or that miss that time? I miss sitting on the beige carpet moving cards along the floor, the sun a fiery bulb hanging from the window. I miss it all, the sweet roughness of a mint condition card, the deals, all those birthday parties full of Benito Santiago's. I miss them so much.

But I realize that I cannot chase down those young boys and tell them to treasure the youth that I'd only just lost without knowing. Time, that old bi-ch keeps passing whether we notice it or not. The last time I went home I remember moving a heavy box to get at some old books, hearing the soft thud of card edges being creased, taken away from near mint. Inside I can tell you is a Griffey Jr. Upper Deck rookie in a hard case with screws, a Scottie Pippen rookie that I traded for from my best friend. But that's the strange part about going home, hell, about anything in life, how we can just move aside a box of cards that once held the secret to our happiness. It's effing strange.