Feb. 18 - Retrophile in Posso's Prompts

Retrophile (n:) a lover of past eras and objects.

I love my dad, I really do. Sometimes I speak ill of him, but we have almost never seen eye to eye other than his staunch liberal political views. Some people would describe his starter business skills as an epic failure - but they definitely created a lot of memories that I have been thinking of a lot recently.

When I was in middle school, my old man had the ingenious idea of opening a memorabilia and sports card shop. My god, it was amazing - I had full access to every goddamn sports card pack and autograph around. My friends and I would trade cards back and forth and I’d bring whole boxes of cards to school to pass around (as long as I got to keep the cards I wanted, I knew which ones were worth the big bucks.) Convinced as ever that I’d have a million dollars thanks to the popularity of sports cards at the time, I collected everything, put them in protective sleeves, boxed them up. My most prized possessions were a gaggle of Ken Griffey Jr Upper Deck rookie cards. I sat on them thinking the value of them would keep going up - it was like a paper version of bitcoin for me - I wasn’t going to sell until the money was ridiculous - and some of these cards were going on the market at almost a thousand dollars if it was protected and flawless. I had 24 of them. I was convinced that this was going to be my new car in high school and maybe even tuition to any fucking school I wanted. I was on cloud nine.
Then the grading and authenticity system came out.
The saturating of the sports card market with hundreds of different brands, types and issues of cards.
Forgeries.
The collectible card market crashed and the money disappeared almost instantaneously. My pops definitely took a large hit and soon enough it wasn’t feasible to have such a unique shop in such a small town and he had to close.
I never sold those Griffeys. Last time I looked, if you had one in pristine condition, it was worth maybe $40. Whoops.