My dad and I were pretty different people, though we
certainly had much in common as well. We both loved sports, mostly baseball and
football, but I also enjoy hockey (including skating myself), skiing, tennis,
racquetball, lacrosse, and during the World Cup, soccer. Pops called soccer “a
communist sport” while we were growing up and ironically one of my sisters
played on the first women’s high school team at my high school. Communist sport
or not, he was proud of her.
Pops collected knives, watches and guns. He also
really liked antique cars from the ‘50’s. I collected baseball cards….and that
was about it. Oh, stamps for a little while. Not that I didn’t like guns, but
it never seemed all that necessary to own one much less a dozen. Now I do own
one though and will probably get a second. Knives just seemed a bit odd to me
to collect and I was never a big fan of watches, though my dad collected pocket
watches which seem to have some redeeming quality about them. Grandpa Sutton worked on
the trains and I think that’s where my dad got an affinity for pocket watches. Some
of the pocket watches he collected were actually pretty cool.
The Fox network received most of my dad’s attention,
while I prefer actual news. Regardless of how much I loved him, he was always
able to fall prey to the tripe they peddle and how they peddle it. I guess
that’s the point (as to why they exist) and why they make money hand over fist.
Nothing irritated him more than when I would send him a Snopes link that would
completely dismiss a “fact” he heard on Fox as complete hokum. Though I took
some joy in it, I really just wanted him to find another news source so we
could have intelligent conversations about current events. But you weren’t
going to change dad’s mind….on pretty much anything!
We both had great senses of humor though, enjoyed
Seinfeld WAYYY too much, loved watching football, enjoyed a good baseball game,
loved my kids and a good bowl of chili. Loved getting the family together at the
holidays and giving gifts. Neither of us were too good at receiving gifts.
Speaking of which, I’m reminded of probably the best
gift I ever gave someone and certainly the best I ever gave my dad. It was a
Christmas gift and involved baseball. My dad was 13 in 1949 and he was
collecting baseball cars, despite not having much money. Cards were not very
expensive, but if you’re poor, everything is expensive. Pops collected just
about half the set of 1949 Bowman’s, the second year of baseball cards printed
in color. Fast forward to the mid 1970’s and my dad has a wife working the
second shift, he has two jobs himself while taking college classes and oh yeah,
they have three kids. Those roughly 100 baseball cards from his childhood fetched
$100, which would make a wonderful Christmas for his family or buy food for
nearly a month. There was no decision to be made and he sold the cards.
Fast forward again, this time to 30 years or so.
While going through some papers, we came across a list of those baseball cards
typed up by my mom. I asked what it was and they relayed the story to me. I was
crushed, especially knowing how I felt about the cards I collected as a child.
So over the next few years, given a list of the cards that my mom had saved, I
bought every card he had sold, and then some.
I like to think that at least one of them was actually one of the cards
that he owned. Until the day he died, it was the only gift I saw him open that
made him tear up.
