When I strolled into a sports card shop in Portland over Spring Break on nothing more than a nostalgic whim, I had all but forgotten what it was like being a kid.
I got a reminder though and, by no surprise, there’s a 9-year-old to thank for it.
He had just started his basketball card collection that day. The kid was lobbing questions to the stout employee behind the counter.
“Can people sell cards here?” the kid asked.
“Yeah, we buy cards here,” said the employee, whose thin T-shirt revealed his belly if he reached for anything.
“Do you sell cards online?”
“Yep,” the man said.
“Do you guys buy cards with cash or checks?” the kid asked, now becoming more of an annoyance than a potential customer to the employee.
“Depends.”
I was casually roaming around, looking at the cards, jerseys and new unopened products, when I realized I had just encountered a younger version of myself. And I mean an exact copy.
There I was, or, rather, there he was. We were both kids in a candy shop, me yet again and him perhaps for the very first time. Glued to the glass showcases displaying the superstars from both our eras, he occasionally tilted his head upward to examine the shop in its entirety. It was a world of wonder and excitement for him, and it brought me back.
I asked what got him interested in collecting. He shrugged his shoulders, looked down in contemplation and then said, “I love basketball.”
“Me, too,” I said.
His folder, with a generic photo of a basketball player shooting a ball, was filled with plastic nine-sleeve holders, but only his first page had cards. A moment of relief passed over me – none of the cards was a Digimon or Dragon Ball Z.
“What are you going after?” I asked.
“Rookie cards and all-stars,” he said. “Who is good to collect now? I have a Jarrett Jack rookie and a Kobe rookie,” he said.
“Kobe is a safe bet,” I responded with more certainty than I’d like to admit to.
Funny – he also had an Anfernee Hardaway rookie card from 1993.
“Oh, you like Penny?”
“No, I got this card free,” he said. “Is he good?”
“He was.”
What the kid doesn’t know is that the 30 minutes I spent in the card shop were just as fun for me as for him. We just walked around and talked about cards. At one point in our brief encounter, someone called the card shop. It was Mom.
“Mom, I DID eat something good today already!” he said, flipping one of his cards around in his hand.
“You’ve got to take better care of that,” I told him.
“I like to hold them before I put them in a case,” he said.
Before I could nicely tell him that he was hurting the value of his card, it occurred to me that he was right – again. Childhood comes and goes so fast. Why seal off the possessions that make it so special when their significance means less if you haven’t pulled them out and held on to them? One thing I can say with certainty after meeting him is that in childhood, you don’t worry about things like card sensitivity. You do what’s fun.
In the end, I never got the kid’s name, but we shared our love for the hobby that day – his budding, and mine freshly rejuvenated.