Last week we spent most of a day thinking I had lost my wallet. We took our house apart piece by piece. We combed through every inch of our car. We searched my parents house and even went to the last place that I knew for certain I was in possession of my wallet. Nothing. It was gone, and it really wasn’t a big deal, mostly just an inconvenience. I think I had two dollars cash in my wallet and no credit cards, and my debit card has a feature where I can disable its use remotely so that it cannot be used. It was going to be an inconvenience to replace my insurance cards and drivers license, but all in all, this worn our piece of cheap leather I’d been carrying around for well over a decade was not a big loss, but there was one thing in it that was going to be.
I kept repeating to Honey, or perhaps to the universe, “I'm 50 years old and I’ve never lost a wallet.” To the best of my knowledge, this is the fifth wallet I have carried since I was twelve years old. The first one was not made of leather, it was bright, 80’s neon red and velcro. This would be my wallet until my chain wallet faze in high school, which would eventually get replaced by a more traditional, pleather tri-fold that didn’t take many years to begin falling apart and get replaced by a real leather Christmas gift wallet from my children, until I finally settled on the thin bifold leather wallet that I’ve carried for close to twenty years.
How is it that I can remember so vividly all the wallets I’ve carried since I was a preteen? Ask any man and you will likely get a similar chronology. Getting your first wallet, and pocketknife, is a sort of right of passage for a boy, an important step on your journey to being a man and most men go through a few before they find one that they really like, and then they never want to change from it. Chances are, if you know a man, you realize the same is true of his haircut, vehicle, easy chair, wardrobe, and underwear. Once we “get it like we like it” we don’t see any reason to change it, wear and tear or fashion shifts be damned.
In my case, my recollection goes one step further. Shortly after I got my first wallet (it was made by Body Glove by the way), I read an article in a sports magazine about a man who kept a baseball card of his favorite player in his wallet for good luck, and he attributed that to his never having lost his wallet. Something about that resonated with me and I decided I was going to do the same thing. At this stage in my life I was in my baseball card collecting prime and certainly did not want to put a valuable card in my wallet, knowing the daily wear and tear would ruin the condition of the card, so I decided on one that was not considered valuable in any market: a 1989 Ryne Sandberg Topps All Star card. 38 years, and five wallets, later, that, now fragile and frayed piece of card board still resides in my wallet, and I’ve never lost one…until now. Well, actually, not until now, I actually found it later that night and was overjoyed, not at the recovery of my wallet, but in knowing that I hadn’t lost my Ryne Sandberg good luck charm. A week later, I’m writing these words under a dark cloud as I just found out I lost my Ryne Sandberg hero.
I started playing second base in tee ball, at the age of five and I played that position until my junior year of high school (that is another story for another day). I even had a full page article written about me and my teammate in our local paper, highlighting our years at the same positions (short stop and second base) as teammates. If you were a second baseman in the 80’s and 90’s there was one man at the top of the mountain: Ryne Sandberg, who went into the Hall of Fame as the greatest second baseman of all time by any metric.
In those days the only way to watch Major League Baseball everyday was on TBS or WGN. WGN was the home broadcast station for the Chicago Cubs. For years, if a Cubs game was on television that day, I was watching and studying Ryne Sandberg’s every move. He was my idol. I wore a Cubs hat everyday of my life, I had a Ryne Sandberg signature series Rawlings baseball glove, I had Sandberg tee shirts and posters and jerseys and I owned literally every baseball card in existence that bore his image. Somewhere along the line my teammates even took to calling me “Ryno”, which was his nickname. An airbrushed “Ryno” tag adorned the front of my first car when I turned 16. For Cubs fans Ryno is on the Cubs 'Mt. Rushmore' with his jersey being retired (a rarity in the organization) and a statue outside the stadium. He was what is known as a 'five tool' player, meaning he excelled in every phase of the game (hitting for average, hitting for power, speed on the base path, strong arm, and fielding ability). As fate would have it, his Major League Baseball career perfectly overlapped with my prime baseball loving years in childhood.
In the years between, my dad and I took regular trips to Atlanta Fulton County Stadium whenever my beloved Cubs were in town to play the Braves. We would always show up early to watch the visiting team take batting practice and hang out at the dugout so I could stand just a few feet from the ball player I idolized. He was always such a nice, humble guy and to a little boy there just isn’t anything greater than standing next to your hero. As a graduation present, my parents took me, and my soon to be wife Honey, to Chicago so that I could see Ryno on the field in his natural habitat, the iconic Wrigley Field. This place, this team, this player, was such an integral part of my identity that I even wanted to name our first born son Wrigley (an idea that Honey wisely nixed).
I could go on forever, but frankly, I just don’t feel like it. I’m sad and I’m in a bad mood and these memories aren’t yet a comfort, but just a painful and cruel reminder of what is lost. Much like when my other childhood hero Jimmy Buffett died a couple of years ago, I just feel like the wind has been knocked out of me. Another piece of my childhood is gone and it just sucks. Ryne Sandberg was everything that was good and pure and beautiful about baseball and my childhood. So much of that good seems to be gone now and I’m feeling the weight of these words from an Alan Jackson song:
Cowboys don't cry and heroes don't die
Good always wins again and again
And love is a sweet dream that always comes true
Oh, if life were like the movies, I'd never be blue
But here in the real world, it's not that easy at all
'Cause when hearts get broken, it's real tears that fall
And with all due respect to Tom Hanks and his character Jimmy Dugan from A League of Their Own, today, there is crying in baseball.
Comments
Post a Comment