baseball seems to make people reflect and i am guilty of that too. i've never played, but i always dreamed of what it was like to be immersed in baseball more than i ever thought about hockey or football or tennis or any of the other sports i had actually tried. i think what i dreamed of was a sense of place, because in my nine year old brain there was a kind of ossified, canonized status to baseball that felt like it could moor me when everything felt unmoored, and if i didn't play it then i wouldn't know i couldn't be a part of it. it felt refined and it felt like history and it felt like the jazz of sports, and when something becomes a standard it becomes impossible not to idealize.
this story feels like the last gasp of an ideal. everything gets contextualized and complicated and reclassified as you grow. the most ordinary moments become larger than life. sometimes you get weary and cynical about it but sometimes that is just the only way to protect what you have left, because sometimes to look back is nostalgic and disorienting and it's hard to do that earnestly without falling apart. i have never played baseball but i am so fond of robin havier. what this story reminds me of is the feeling of losing your sense of place, of losing your mind at home, of having a ritual that cannot be sacred anymore. you break down a structure you loved earnestly, once, before you could fully process what it was asking of you, and then you continue to embody that structure anyway because you're still sitting there waiting at home even when you'd rather be swept up by the tide. and incredibly, you have managed to fit all of this on a baseball card.