Had I known then what I know now, I might have been more careful with my baseball cards when I was young. In the 1960s, my childhood friends and I didn't collect them, we played with them. We attached them to the spokes of our bicycles on July 4th, "flipped" them in the schoolyard, tucked them into the front of our baseball caps to hold the shape of the crown, and used them in a variety of simulated games. Consequently, none of the hundreds, perhaps thousands, of cards I stored in cardboard boxes was in mint condition. Sometime in high school, all my cards mysteriously disappeared. To this day, my 93-year-old mother insists that it wasn't she who threw them in the trash. When I visited the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown as an adult, I was struck by how many cards, all well-preserved and securely displayed under glass, I recognized from my stash. I had no regrets. On those spokes, the ones fresh out of the pack made the best snapping sounds. I never did become a collector of things--coins, stamps, Elvis memorabilia, or baseball cards. As the years have passed, though, for better or worse, I have become a collector of memories, a few of which I have put into words and am sharing here in Anecdotes.
