Day 33: Childhood Card reconnect
Today is Day 33 of #mybuffetyear. Did you collect sports cards as a kid? Most people I have come across collect some kind of cards whether it’s baseball, football, Pokemon, etc. My youngest son asked me why I had so many baseball and basketball cards. I told him it was because when I was in elementary school those were the sports I played. I also had a deck of CMA country music cards. I don’t recall how or when I received those, but it was cool to see some 90’s country stars like Joe Diffie and Diamond Rio. I also had a Willie Nelson card. Tonight was a sports memorabilia or nostalgia night.
My oldest son is really into collecting football cards. My youngest son is also starting to get into collecting football cards. He is asking for football cards for his birthday. In fact, he got 2 sets of football cards yesterday from Uncle Chad as an early birthday present. My boys have been interested in my sports memorabilia for a long time. It’s one of those things I haven’t been comfortable taking out because I don’t want the corners of the cards to get bent. I tried really hard to let that go tonight and I think I did a fairly decent job.
We looked through the cards for an hour or so. I found 5 Dikembe Mutombo cards, which I thought was pretty cool because I remember liking him as a kid and the Denver Nuggets are in the NBA Finals right now against the Miami Heat. I looked him up on Wikipedia his story is incredible. The 7-foot-2-inch giant moved to the United States when he was 21 to attend Georgetown University on a USAID scholarship. He originally attended to become a doctor but was recruited by the basketball coach to play basketball. He spoke almost no English when he arrived at Georgetown and in the 1991 NBA draft the Denver Nuggets selected him as the fourth overall pick.
Buffet Year is breathing new life into my thoughts and actions. It is interrupting thought patterns and changing the identity of how I think and act. Nostalgia night made me realize I have always been too concerned or focused on the future and not living fully present. Before my thoughts and actions were just on autopilot and perhaps sometimes my consciousness reverts back. However, it’s interesting to walk away from this night with a new perspective. My old identity clung on tight to those sports cards. I didn’t really want my kids looking through them because I wanted them to be kept in good shape. I wanted them to potentially be worth a lot of money for my kids in the future. I had this idealistic picture of giving the boys my cards in the future. However, they are interested in the cards right now and they probably won’t give a shit about them when they are my age. So it was fun to share that moment with them. They also took a few things to add to their own collection, which the old me would have never agreed to that. I just had to let go. I hope they take care of what I gave them, but quite frankly I can’t control the outcome and what is to say they would have taken care of them at age 38?
