Saturday-Monday was three-day birthday extravaganza. Saturday we celebrated my wife Julie's birthday; Sunday we celebrated our daughter Anabel's first birthday. And Monday, I took the day off and the three of us spent a family day together since Monday was both Julie and Anabel's actual birthday.
It was a great three days, and both of them received a great many gifts. Anabel received a Jeff Skinner Carolina Hurricanes doll that she refers to as "dada," and quite frankly it does look look a lot more like me than it looks like him.
One of the gifts for Julie came from Dana Wessel and his special lady friend, Heather. It was a perfectly lovely and normal gift, but it also came with a special bonus: a pack of football cards.
Julie opened the gift late Saturday, after her party, and I was drawn immediately, of course, to the idea of football cards. She opened the pack, and I blurted out, "Is there gum!?" It was a pack of Topps, that was all I could see for the moment, and yes there was gum.
I grabbed the stick; sports card gum is almost always chalky and firm, so I thought nothing of it when this felt particularly chalky and firm. I immediately popped it in and started to chew, noticing that it strangely began disintegrating in my mouth.
"This will get better in a few seconds," I thought.
And then I started to look through the pack of cards. … Wow, this player can't possibly still be in the league can he? … Whoa, Ronnie Lott? Nice! But he retired forever ago. Then I finally looked at the FRONT of the package.
These weren't your average, everyday football cards that you would pick up at a convenience store. This was a pack of cards from 1989. That meant the cards were awesome … but the gum, which was in fact NOT improving but only getting worse by the second, was 26 years old.
