During my first divorce, as I moved my stuff in my car to a friend’s house across town, everything got jumbled together in boxes, so it was hard to sort out. A month later, I moved again, this time to another house where I would spend most of the coming year.
Slowly, as I settled in, I unpacked the boxes and sorted through old letters and books, some reaching back to my childhood. My son, then about eight, had just become a big baseball fan, rooting for the Giants, playing little league, and collecting baseball cards. I told him about my own card collection back in the Fifties, when I was around his age.
He came over to spend the night one Saturday and I dug through my boxes to see whether any baseball-related stuff had survived the many moves I'd made since childhood. Out tumbled an old scrapbook, circa 1958, with prime baseball cards of legendary stars including Willy Mays, Jackie Robinson, Mickey Mantle and Ted Williams, among others, glued inside.
We both gasped. Collectively, these old cards might be worth a small fortune! We were both looking for positive signs that our future might turn out to be brighter than it appeared to be at that time, so this was potentially good news.
This was long before the likes of eBay, so I checked directly with collectors, who explained the cards might be valuable assuming they could be removed from the scrapbook without damaging them.
Alas, upon further investigation it turned out that removing them would destroy them. So we just left them in the place where had I pasted them all those decades ago.
We still loved having them and he would show them to friends when they came over. Eventually, I realized the only real value they had was they helped us create a memory of one moment together. And over time, I’ve come to treasure that memory much more than money anyway.
(I first published this story last year.)
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