Yesterday my dentist and I ended up talking about Pokémon cards.
He had started playing the Pokémon card game in ninth grade, and collected quite a stash of them, which he was still very proud of, though a few years ago he had given the bulk of it to two of his nephews. “I found out they traded them for some snacks at school.” he told me. His voice didn’t quaver, but it wasn’t steady. He changed the direction of the conversation.
“Did you ever collect them?”
“Just a few.” I replied (my mouth was still a bit sore) “I never played the game because I didn’t want to lose any of them. I passed them to my kid but she didn’t want to lose them either, so they’re still in the house.”
“Did you have any hologram cards?”
Now, I don’t know how much you know about Pokémon cards, but here he had upped the conversational ante.
“…just a couple.”
“I kept all my really important ones. Which do you have?”
Well. Now it was on.
He had finished the procedure, so there wouldn’t be any physical challenge, all this was being said in the spirit of community fellowship, yet there was a warmth in the air that had not been there before…an imaginary breeze blew between us. (Was that a… tumbleweed off in the distance?)
“Well, I do have a blue eyed dragon one, not the really rare one or anything, but my favorite of all time is my Jigglypuff.”
“Oh. Very good.”
He stepped back. My pedestrian response meant that no blood would be shed here today; well, no more blood than I had already lost down the spit sink.
It is time for Spring Cleaning, and if you ever knew me, well, I’m even more like that now. The sheer density of books alone is a challenge to the eye, but then when you push the books back you have SHELF SPACE in front of them, handy for useful items like mason jars filled with pencils. Also useful as a home for a super detailed action figure of Ben Grimm from the Fantastic Four.
I only have stuff displayed that makes me happy or I need. I’m a simple guy, I don’t need much, but apparently many things make me happy. A vintage radio, another radio that’s supposed to look like a vintage radio, a LEGO version of AntMan’s van from Avenger’s Endgame, a working Polaroid camera (also vintage) and a Tardis (I think there’s one of those in every room now).
I have a personally autographed black and white headshot of Honor Blackman from the old tv show “The Avengers”, as well as one from Dee Wallace who played the mom in “E.T.” (she’s from Kansas City - I got that one when I was a kid). My favorite headshot of all time is from a woman I knew in high school, an awesome alternative artist kid who somehow got the chance to do a bit of local newspaper modeling for Macy’s. Hers is cheekily signed, “I hope you’re as famous as I’m going to be.” which, in fact, has come to pass.
I’ve won a couple of awards for things, and my wife said I should put them behind me on ZOOM business calls and job interviews because she thought they’d give a clearer message than the sewing machine and pictures of her playing roller derby. I said I’d try it, and swung my chair around placing them on a shelf behind me, nestled amongst the flotsam. The interviewer was indeed intrigued with the cornucopia of objects, asking enthusiastically about my microphone and guitar, but before they got to the awards noticed the (vintage) Ginger Spice doll and stopped small talking with me, and then shortly after stopped all sizes of talking.
Look, if you can’t take that, I probably shouldn’t be working for you. It’s not like I’m likely to bring it to work and put it on my desk, but I am gonna do that, definitely, so yeah. Things worked out.
The most prized objects I used to have were CDs. Albums were so large and heavy, and tapes were just weird, they never stacked well without the cases and always had that exposed part at the bottom that made me nervous. Now music is ethereal, and most often borrowed on some digital rental plan. I still purchase music I love, but there’s no physical place to put it, just hard drives.
Which is actually great: no CD cases where one of the little hinge ends cracks off and then can’t be repaired so you settle the front cover where it would go in a kind of act of faith but it never stays on and somehow scotch tape doesn’t help either.
And what I can do with music now… just call out a song and a genie plays it for me. Magical. I stood in the kitchen last night doing the dishes and sang a series of 80’s rock songs, those really dramatic ones where the guitars were like strings in an orchestra and the singer with huge well-conditioned hair was spotlit alone on a stage. Most of those tunes were impossible to dance to at a prom or homecoming because they all had little “dream ballet” music breaks after the second chorus (see: “Come Sail Away” by Styx). For some reason there were a lot of songs about outlaws on the run, bandits who’d finally been captured, pining about their fate in perfect 4 part harmony.
I played about ten of those songs, using the new lyric function on my phone to sing along with an accuracy even liner notes couldn’t deliver. My family, in either solidarity or deeply embarrassed pity, stayed away from the kitchen until the last chuck-a-chung power chord died down, and it was dinnertime.
I did win the conversation with the dentist. I was telling him about my comic books, how I had collected them forever but then, in a classic American tale, went to college, and how my mother had found them when she moved that fall to a new house, and…
Here I paused. I’m not confrontational, by nature, but here was a man in a power position who had offered kind of challenge when I was unable to fully respond, suspended in a reclinable chair with a mouth filled with utensils. I stood up to my full height, which, y’know, didn’t really take long.
“…when I got back home at Thanksgiving, she had bagged and boarded all of them, even got long boxes.”
Let me explain: this is not how the story goes, typically.
Typically, a mom sees comic books as clutter, useless; but my mom had watched me read these for almost a decade, and heard something about how they could be valuable someday, so she went to the comic book store alone (I would have paid to see their faces) to get individual polystyrene bags and support cardboard inserts, then spent a day preserving them.
I am, by every account, very lucky; some of them are worth something now.
“But you can’t sell them.” my dentist said.
“I mean sure, I could...” I replied. His eyes were wide with wonder at my story. “Maybe if the new X-Men movies are really popular they’ll be valuable… get my daughter some money for college.”
Heh. Yeah.
I’d rather work nights than do that.
Shelf Space.