Baseball Memories

I was sitting at the kitchen table, cutting up carrots for the stew I planned to make for Saturday's dinner when my daughter's youngest came into the kitchen, something clutched in her small hands. She laid her prizes out carefully on the table and looked up at me. "Gramma," she said, "what are these?"

I set my knife down, as far away from her as I could and wiped my hands on the towel in my lap. I picked up my glasses from where they hung around my neck and peered at what she had found. I was surprised to see that they were baseball cards from my youth. "Where did you find these, Cindy?" I asked as I picked them up and looked at them. She had found some of my more expensive ones, ones that I knew I had tucked away. I looked at the cards, remembering the memory that went with each one. The Derek Jeter rookie cards that I had found in New Jersey after I moved there when I was in college. Don Mattingly ones from his last season in the majors. The Jim Palmer one from the 1970s that I had bought at the very first card auction I had attended, so proud of myself at fourteen for my smart bidding. I smiled when I saw the Mark McGwire Olympics card. I had searched through five or six card shops and a few garage sales for that one before I had found it. Each one of the cards held a special memory. Finally I put them down and looked at my granddaughter. "These are baseball cards, honey. They were made by card companies in the nineteen hundreds for kids and eventually for collectors to promote baseball players and teams."

"What's baseball?"

I sighed. Baseball had faded away when I was still young, although I had been married and Cindy's mother had already been born so I couldn't have been all that young. Too many years of strikes and players demanding more and more money had finally ended the game. Yankee Stadium, where I had spent many pleasant afternoons, had been demolished although the huge bat still stood in the courtyard of the apartment building that had been erected in place of the stadium. I tried to decide how I wanted to explain things to Cindy. I suddenly remembered the game of corner ball I had watched her play with her brothers a few days ago. "You know how you play corner ball?" I asked. She nodded. "Well, it's kinda like that. There were teams of twenty-five men that played other teams to determine who the best was. The season lasted from April to early October and then the best two teams of either league, there were two leagues, played the World Series which was also called the Fall Classic. This was to determine which team was the absolute best. At the end of the series, which could be anywhere from four games to seven, the team that won the most games was declared the World Champions. The New York Yankees, my favorite team, won a lot of Series in the early days, but they weren't very good by the time I was born. Around the time baseball died out though, they were quite good again." I looked down into her shining eyes, the excitement of baseball bringing a gleam to her. "Baseball was always for the kids. The adults were so disillusioned by the way the men who played were acting that many didn't want to go to the games anymore. And tickets were so expensive that it was hard for the average person to afford to go. The players were called the 'Boys of Summer' so I guess we really can't blame then for acting childish. Maybe if some of them had acted a little less childish, you and I could be planning to go to a game tomorrow."

She smiled in response to that and gathered up the cards, preparing to put them away. "Can I keep the cards, Gramma?" she asked.

"May I?" I corrected automatically. "No, not now. I think I'd like to keep them for a few more years. Maybe someday you can have them though."

She hopped off her seat and came around the table, kissing me swiftly on the cheek. "Okay, Gramma. I'm gonna go play now."

She skipped out the back door, leaving me alone at the table with my memories of happy summer days and my cardboard reminders.


Author's Note: I wrote this back in 1994 during the baseball strike when it looked like the season was going to end and never start again. I did change it slightly from the original version because some of the phrasing was awkward and some of the sentences were a bit off, but the main portion of it is intact. Yes, I freely admit to being a Yankees fan and I do actually own all of the cards mentioned in this story or I did at the time. I also acquired them in the ways described. This accurately described my feelings at the time and when I found this a few days ago, I decided I wanted to share it...if for no other reason than to prove I could write something short. Word count: 754