I often wonder.....

[JollyElm]

For me, collecting cards in nice shape as an adult is just the continuation of the 'reliving your childhood' metaphor. As a kid, five minutes after they were removed from packs, all of our cards were on the road to Rough Shapeville with stops is Crumpled Junction, due to the aforementioned rubber bands, cardboard boxes, continual sorting and resorting, stuffing them in our pockets, flipping them, studying the backs to glean information on our favorite players, trading them and everything else that rounds the corners and creates more creases than what's found on an 80 year old fat lady. But our childhoods had rough situations as well. Perhaps troubled home lives, or bad days in school, broken bones, getting in trouble from your mom, pet loss...and on and on it goes. When we look back on our youthful days, we skip as much of the nasty stuff as possible and just think about the 'good ole days,' so I see cards the same way. When recapturing my childhood, I skip thinking about the traumatic time a car plowed into our house (true story), and instead think about how great it looked after reconstruction. With cards, I don't want to buy a 1972 Willie Mays that's in the shape mine was actually in - AWFUL - but instead I seek out a beautiful version of that fantastically memorable card. I guess it's just another way of glamorizing the past.