By the age of 10, my belief in Santa was waning. I still believed, but my 13 year older brother was a non-believer and pointing out all of the flaws with the story. Logistcally speaking, he said, there’s no way that guy can fit into our chimney.
“Besides,” he said. “Our chimney goes into the wood stove.”
He made good points, but I nonetheless sat on Santa’s lap at the annual Ebensburg Moose Christmas party and parlayed my only request for that year.
"I’d like a Pete Rose baseball card,” I said.
When asked if I wanted anything else, anything at all, I said no. There was honestly nothing else I wanted more than to add Pete Rose to my healthy and growing baseball card collection. I had Ricky Henderson and Roger Clemens and some guy named Cal Ripken Jr, but it was Pete I most admired. (And yes, it was Pete who broke my heart a few years later when he was kicked out of baseball forever).
In the mid-1980’s Pete Rose was everything to me. Despite living in Western Pennsylvania and carrying a healthy allegiance to my home town Pittsburgh Pirates, it was Pete who was on my Wheaties' box and the Wheaties poster on my wall (the one I sent in box tops to acquire and that I still have).
It was Pete I pretended to be when we played backyard baseball.
Pete Rose was more than the all-time hits leader when I was a kid growing up in the 80’s. He was the definition of the way you played the game. When you slid into home, you did a Pete Rose slide, which meant sacrificing your body to take out the catcher on the way into home plate.
His nickname was Charlie Hustle. If you watch clips of Pete playing baseball, he was not a graceful athlete. He lumbered when he ran, and hunched and poked out hits at the plate, offering more of a chop than the beautiful swing of a Ken Griffey Jr. He was the walking definition of “hard work beats talent when talent doesn’t work hard.”
He hustled his way into being a super star.
And so that’s what my Dad taught me to do. (Hustle, not become a super star…)
Last week in my resilience workshop, we did an exercise that was designed to help people connect to their childhood - specifically the types of activities and games that attracted and fascinated us when we were kids. I’ve thought a lot about that particular Christmas this past week in reflecting on my childhood interests.
The holidays feel tough for many of us this year, as we cancel family gatherings and stay home instead of traveling. I won’t pretend that the past few weeks haven’t felt incredibly sad when I think about all of the moments that I won’t be having with my parents and cousins and niece and nephew.
I’ve spent a lot of time trying to figure out what I’m going to do - what Sheila and I are going to do - to help cope with the loss we are feeling. And it was in doing this exercise with my group that I realized one activity that I used to do as a kid that I haven’t done in years.
Flip through my baseball card collection.
I didn’t actually get a Pete Rose baseball card that year. Sports card shops had not yet blown up in our part of the country. In a few years you could walk into a store and pick out a Pete Rose rookie card or something else from his early years. But not in rural Western Pennsylvania in the mid 1980’s.
So my parents did what they could do.
On Christmas morning, I woke up and shuffled through the presents under the tree. There were several packs of baseball cards - Topps and Donruss - and I ripped through them all - finding Nolan Ryan and Andy Van Slyke and other stars that I admired.
But there was no Pete Rose.
I was disappointed, but I also remember spending the day going through my new cards, checking off the cards in the set, putting my doubles (cards I already had) in a shoe box, and doing what I loved to do best - read through all of the stats and facts on the back of the cards. Birthdays, milestones, fun facts - there was always plenty of information on the back of those cards and I’d pass hours at a time reading them.
Which is also why I know so many useless baseball trivia facts…
A few years ago when we bought our first house, I finally took my card collection from my parents house. All 15,000 or more cards, in albums and boxes. I haven’t looked through them in ages.
The holidays certainly are not what we want them to be this year.
But they may also be an opportunity to find some joy in unexpected places.
Wishing you and your family a warm, peaceful holiday.