The Saga of '77

School had just started again in the fall in Texas. My friend, Chris, and I were a week apart in age and lived a block apart. For some reason, our parents never, ever talked to each other so we had a lot of unsupervised free reign throughout our neighborhood, which we availed ourselves of regularly, taking walks, playing in thrown-together tackle football games, and riding our bikes to a place called "the trails", a scary crossroads of dirt bike paths located just on the outskirts of the neighborhood on the other side of the railroad tracks. Big kids, and even teenagers with girlfriends would sometimes hang out there, too. Rumors circulated that The Trails was a place where people would go to fight, smoke cigarettes, or kiss girls (all of which I had done by age 7 anyway...but I was still scared.)

It was on one of these walks that Chris and I started the "can collection", as we called it. We spotted a pristine Coca Cola can tossed alongside a busy road, and Chris mentioned to me that if you take it to a recycling center they would give you money for it--I don't remember, but it was 2 cents or 5 cents, but to me it seemed a lot like finding money on the side of the road. I was intrigued.

Why did I want money? Because of 7-11 and baseball cards.

A seven year old is generally given everything he needs to live, but this was a point in my life where I started to realize that there were things beyond my grasp. Some things were just barely beyond. I was with my aunt at 7-11 and I saw rows and rows of colorfully wrapped wax-paper packets along the candy aisle--they were priced at a quarter apiece--I asked her what they were.

"Oh, those are bubble-gum cards." (sometimes, members of my family coined terms for things that weren't mainstream. These were really baseball cards with a stick of gum stuck on top).

"Can I get one, please?"

"Michael, get a different candy."

"No! I want a bubble gum card!" (Insisting, though, of course, having no idea what it was).

She gave in. I remember that waxy paper that it came wrapped in and the permeating smell of the disgusting gum that came with the cards--powdery on the outside, probably so it wouldn't stick to the cards. I remember getting confused and wondering if the cards themselves were bubble gum--I licked one of them just to make sure. The cards would keep that sickly sweet smell for weeks after you got them, and they were just laminated on one side. The other side had a bunch of numbers which meant very little to me--statistics about the players which I didn't quite understand. I know some kids really picked up on stuff like that, but I was happy just to know what position they played and what team they were on, and just to have them--brightly colored pictures, action shots, players, managers. If I got too many of the same guy, I would sacrfice or two by clipping them to the spokes of my bike, making it sound like a motorcycle while I rode it.

I don't know why, but I loved having these baseball cards, even though I knew nothing about baseball, the people, or the teams. I remember clearly that one of the teams, the Cubs, was written in a relatively illegible script that made the team name look like the "Owls". I called them the Owls for at least a year before slyly discerning that some of my friends had players from the Cubs--then I figured out my error. To me it was just fun. I would "play" baseball with them, making a ball out of wadded-up paper and placing all the players in their respective positions on the floor, then putting the ball in play and moving the players in the field.

I was hooked on Baseball cards without a means to get them other than begging family members to buy them for me, which quickly became pretty tiresome to them.

So on the day when I figured out a way to make money, I started thinking in terms of how many cans I needed to get for each pack of baseball cards, and we started our collection. We kept it going throughout the whole year, piling bag after bag in Chris' garage to be "cashed in" some day. His parents thought it was hilarious that we stuck with it. My parents had no idea of what I was up to--I believe the general impression was that Chris and I hung out at his house watching reruns of Godzilla movies and playing "Sorry" with his mom--we did sometimes, but mostly we just kept piling up cans.

Some houses were being built nearby, and Chris and I would routinely patrol the neighborhood, scouring the place for abandoned beer cans. I remember sipping warm Coors out of a can that was propped on a sawhorse inside a house--I still remember the house, because when I was in high school a friend of mine lived in it--but this experience probably soured me on beer for the rest of my life, because it was the most awful taste I've ever experienced. In retrospect, I hope it was actually beer after all...

If we found a deposit bottle, we would make a trip to 7-11. This was like getting a Christmas bonus--we would usually find a few bottles a week, so Chris and I would take our trip together. We would get the coins--quarters so thick and round that I wanted to sink my teeth into them--I loved the way they clinked together...We would turn them over and over again in our moist fingers, inevitably buying a grape Nehi, and maybe a pack of baseball cards. We felt so rich and powerful that we couldn't resist surveying the kingdom and deciding upon our purchases--it would take at least 20 minutes. And we must have seemed so small to the clerks--I remember one or two of them asking if we had permission to go to the store.

Then one day, Chris appeared at my front door unexpectedly--with $18! His mom and dad had found the 10 bags of cans we had collected and cashed them all in--$18 was my half, and I remember stashing the money under my bed until I could get to 7-11, buy 2 grape Nehi's and 20 packs of baseball cards. I opened them one after the other, stuffing at least six pieces of the stale gum into my mouth so I could hardly chew it.

All summer, I played and played with the cards until the edges became worn. I enjoyed them so much--I didn't even want to trade my "extras" with my friends. I kept them stored in an old empty tissue box under my bed.

At the end of the summer, my mom and dad found the box and accused me of stealing the cards. I can't remember if they thought I took them from a store, or from a friend, but I remember being terrified that they might found out I had been working on my can collection without them knowing--that's all that mattered to me, even though Chris and I had essentially dissolved our partnership already. I told them that I got them from a friend.

They told me to give them back to him.

So I took the tissue box full of cards over to the home of my friend, Alex. His family was pretty poor, but he was a nice guy that I didn't know very well. Something told me to give the cards to Alex, so I did. I just told him that my parents wouldn't let me keep them anymore, so I wanted him to have them. He seemed surprised, but happy, and we never talked about them again--Alex moved out of town the next year, and I never saw him or my baseball cards again.

Times have changed, baseball cards have really changed--it cracks me up that some people see them as an "investment"--like a Certificate of Deposit they can cash in to pay for their kid's education. Instead of a quarter, they cost over two dollars a pack, and they don't come with bubble gum anymore. They are not only laminated, but they are hologram-embedded and require you to store them in a museum quality holder so they don't lose their value. You would have to be insane to clip one to your bike tire. I never had a desire to own baseball cards after having to box up my collection and give them to another kid, but I sprung for the $5 for a couple of packs for my little boy this year when he learned about baseball--I taught him the rules of the game by placing cards on a makeshift baseball field on our kitchen table and "playing" baseball just like I did when I was seven. It just seemed natural to me to do it that way--I wonder if anybody else ever did that...I wonder if he enjoyed it.

My son turns seven next month, and it's surreal to me that he is at this same point in his life that I was. I can relate to the confusion about the adult world and the unseen values that influence kids. I remember the awareness that I had at that time, and that adults seemed oblivious to the fact that I understood the things that I understood. Simple pleasures, like a waxy pack of cards for a quarter, would make me happy. Maybe there are things for me to learn from those memories that will make me a better dad to Ryan---not to make all the decisions behind the scenes, but to listen closer to him and to share my rationale for decisions and get his input. But in those days, I learned to rely on myself to get the things I want, and to be ashamed of breaking rules. And, in my own way, I guess I made things right, and dealt with the consequences and regret of unfairly losing what I had worked for. The cards had to go.

But the memories are priceless.