Cleaning House
Photo credit: Telstar Logistics (Flickr.com)
“You’re supposed to be cleaning,” my wife said.
I looked up from the binder of baseball cards I’d found. “I know,” I said. “I just wanted to look through this stuff for a minute.”
She sat down next to me and started rummaging through the box I’d found. She pulled out one of my little league trophies. “I didn’t know you were into baseball,” she said, and read the plate on the base. “Most Improved Player,” she said. “Huh.”
“I’m not into baseball,” I said. “I mean, I was when I was a kid, but I outgrew it, I guess.”
“What position did you play?” she asked.
“Outfield,” I said. “It was the safest place to put me. Most of the kids couldn’t hit very far.”
She laughed. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you play a sport that wasn’t a video game,” she said. “I’ve never thought of you as an athlete.” She pulled out my old glove. “No offense, of course.”
“No, it’s fine,” I said. “It was one of those things I did because my parents made me. I wouldn’t have chosen to do it.”
“They made you?” she asked. “Did they make you buy all those baseball cards, too?”
I grinned. “My mom said I was wasting my money,” I said. “I tried to convince her that these were an investment.”
“Are they worth anything?” my wife asked.
“These? Nah. Probably not,” I said. “Every kid in the country was collecting baseball cards at the time, hoping to strike it rich one day. And they probably kept theirs in better condition than I’ve kept mine.”
I flipped a page as my wife continued looking through the box. “You know,” I said. “There was a time when I spent hours organizing these cards in this book. I probably switched them around five or six times until I was happy with the way they were arranged. It was all a huge waste of time, of course, because I lost interest and never touched these again. But what makes us do that? Why do we spend so much time interested in things that don’t matter in the long run?”
“Well, I don’t know,” said my wife. “But maybe sometimes, what seems like a waste of time is good practice for something else in life.” She stood up, and threw a dustrag at me. I caught it. “See?” she said. “Your baseball skills came in handy. And your organization skills are about to.”
I closed the binder of cards and shook my head with a smile.
Writing Scraps | SeanJJordan | 
January 5, 2010 12:37 am
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