After my first marriage broke up, I moved my stuff in my car to a house across town. Everything was jumbled together in boxes, so for a while I couldn't find anything. Then, I moved again a month later, this time into the house where I would spend most of the next year.Slowly, as I unpacked my boxes, I sorted through old letters and books, some reaching back to my childhood. My son Peter, then about 8, had just become a big baseball fan, rooting for the Giants, playing little league, and collecting baseball cards. I told him about my big collection back in the Fifties, when I was a kid.
He came over to spend the night one Saturday and I dug through my boxes, just to see whether any baseball-related stuff had survived the many moves I'd made since childhood. Out tumbled this old scrapbook, circa 1958, with prime baseball cards of Willy Mays, Jackie Robinson, Mickey Mantle and Ted Williams, among others, glued inside.
This turned out to be pretty much all that was left of my boyhood collections (I once had collections of virtually everything -- stamps, bottle caps, stones, shells, seaglass, driftwood, bullet shells, bones, you name it). One battered scrapbook with boyish scribbles and notes throughout.
For some reason I had carefully retyped the 1958 baseball season stats; an indication of how much I was into baseball at that time.
Baseball and numbers, real and imagined, these were the elements dominating my fantasy life when I was little. Only one thing has changed over the decades, and that is the addition of one additional passion -- the opposite sex. Add it all up and --presto! -- you get the outlines of one man's simple life story.
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