The other weekend Rachelle and I went to Little India, a six block stretch on Gerrard Street in the east end of Toronto. Improbably, at the end of the strip of restaurants, grocery and clothing stores sat a sports memorabilia shop.
A middle-aged Indian guy with a heavy beard and mustache was running the place, and he sat alone in the fading light of the day with a few candles burning nearby. Seemingly surprised to see customers, he jumped up and apologized to us, explaining that for some complicated reason that was most certainly not his fault, his power had been shut off.
The store was disorganized and chaotic, almost accidental in appearance, and it was clear that it would never see a profit. He had about ten baseball bats there, and as is the wont and need of many men, I picked them all up one by one, set into my stance and took a few swings. One of the bats was a Don Mattingly signature model.
You should know that I carry Don Mattingly’s rookie baseball card in my wallet.
In 1984 he hit .343 with 23 HR’s and 110 RBI’s.
I loved Don Mattingly. He was my hero and favourite player and I saw in him, just as I saw in myself, an unlimited and beautiful future.
(I am rather ashamed to admit that I actually had this poster on my wall)
The man who ran the store wanted $350 for the bat, and tried hard to convince me that Mattingly had actually used it in practice. I’m pretty sure that the man, who offered no documentation of his claim, was either lying or mistaken, but it didn’t matter to me. There was no way I was going to spend that kind of money on a bat.
I’d never seen myself as a memorabilia guy. Autographs make no sense to me and I certainly don’t consider a piece of wood that Don Mattingly may have touched to be a holy relic. And so I declined to purchase the thing, in spite of the more and more desperate supplications and price reductions he made. How long must he have waited for somebody like me to walk into his dark store, a man who had actually kept his baseball hero’s card in his wallet—the dream customer– only to have him walk out without making a buy?
I imagined him talking to his family back in India– maybe on Skype– trying to make the best of things. “Yes, business is about to pick up, just today I had a customer who was very interested in much of my merchandise. He said he would be back soon!”
About a week later, Rachelle and I went to the St. Lawrence Antique Market, and although I think of myself as somebody that’s above the purchase of sport’s memorabilia, the truth is that I am not. I bought a glass with the image of Johnny Bench (another one of my boyhood sports heroes) on it, and overpaid for it, too.
The older I get, the more I find myself buying nostalgic, little reminders of the past. It’s a beautiful and sad thing to do, I think, and I did not expect that it would ever happen to me, but there you have it. We do strange and unexpected things just to feel our hearts young one more time.