August 5, 2009


Steps for Attaining Baseball Happiness

Josh Wilker over at Rob Neyer’s blog on the never-ending pursuit of happiness:

1. Buy a pack of baseball cards. For best results, pay no more than a quarter and make sure the pack has a hard stick of gum sliding around loose inside. If packs long ago stopped costing a quarter or less and no longer include flour-flecked sticks of hard gum sliding around loose inside, the attainment of happiness may be impossible.

When I was ten or eleven, my parents and I went to Woods Hole for a vacation, and once or twice a day my dad would give me a buck or two to get me out of their hair. It was supposed to be to play video games or get a MAD magazine or some taffy or, ya know, a super ball to break someone’s window with or something like that. But I just kept taking those dollar bills and going down to the drugstore and getting individual packs of TOPPS baseball cards.

I came home from that vacation with something like seven hundred new baseball cards and an awful lot of very pink gum stuck in the treads of my sneakers. I don’t remember Woods Hole very well. Great vacation, though.

posted by Jonathan McNicol in anecdotes, family, parenting, sports 

comments

2 Responses to “Steps for Attaining Baseball Happiness”

  1. Deron Bauman on August 5th, 2009 at 1:03 pm

    I did this with Star Wars trading cards. I understand the happiness though.

  2. Sheila Ryan on August 5th, 2009 at 1:56 pm

    How did you get the gum in your sneaker treads? Jeez, TOPPS gum was always so stale. It broke into rigid shards.

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