Night Owl Cards

  Somewhere around 30 years ago, I went to my parents' house while on summer break from college.   My dad and one of my brothers took a trip to nearby Owego where my grandmother lived. She was in her 80s at the time and we were there to do some house chores for her. One day we drove over to the small downtown area for some shopping and ducked into a second-hand bookstore, which was easily the highlight of the trip for me.   There were some oversized discount books for sale and one of them was the 35-year picture history of Topps cards in which every Topps card issued between 1951 and 1985 was displayed. This book was fascinating since the day I heard about it (I imagine any collector would be fascinated). I always wanted to own it.   The book was 15 or 20 dollars, a good deal even then. But either I didn't have the money or didn't want to spend the money and so I walked away without it, even though the book was destined for me.   As the years went on, that book ...

Earlier today, I conducted an interview with someone in the professional sports industry for a story I'll be writing for my job. As story interviews tend to do these days, talk turned to COVID and how strange our worlds have become, and she was talking about walking onto an airplane for the first time in three months. Flying is something she does a lot for her job but it seemed bizarre to her at that moment. "The normal has become abnormal," she said. What a perfect way, I thought, to describe opening a box of cards. I have not opened a box of current cards in almost five months, since a blaster of Heritage in late February. What was a monthly, sometimes weekly, occurrence for more than a decade has become a strange animal over the last 150 days. So that's why when I was opening some 2020 Big League cards for my birthday yesterday, the first Big League I've opened even though the product has been out for more than a month, it seemed so odd to me. ...