Anyway, I'm too old and mature to do certain things that I used to enjoy very much as a child.

I'm too old for toys, and too mature for the Three Stooges. And collecting baseball cards is a hobby I dropped when I left the campus of the junior high for high school.

So gone are the joys and events of childhood for a grown man too mature to take part in such childish activities.

But that's the great thing about having children and grandchildren of your own. You can relive your childhood, and no one will be the wiser!

I have two sons, so that meant every Christmas there were twice as many toys in the house as there were when I was a kid. When no one was around, I could play with all of their new gadgets, then leave them all out in the middle of the room and blame the mess on the boys. Worked every time. It still works, in fact. Why do you think we have a playroom in the house that's filled with toys? For the grandkids? Right.

Then there were the Sundays when I'd be sitting on the couch studying the important events of the world in the morning newspaper and the kids would be watching the Stooges on TV; I could let the paper droop just a bit to catch the antics of Moe, Larry and Curly over the top of Bush and Cheney. I'd be careful not to laugh aloud, but if I did I could just blurt out something obvious like, "That Dick Cheney is such a funny guy." Fooled my wife every time.

But baseball cards ... now that's another story all together. My oldest son had thousands of cards in his collection, and I think he still has them all neatly packed away somewhere. But despite the renewed interest in the hobby, I never could get into it as an adult.

As a youngster, though, the story was different. I was quite the collector in my pre-teen years. From about 1958 to 1963, I put together quite a collection, with an obvious emphasis on the San Francisco Giants.

There were no card shops in those days, and packs were difficult to find. In fact, the only place in town I could find them was at Eddie's Northside Market on N. Santa Cruz Avenue where America's Best Karate is today. I'll never forget buying a handful of packs of cards at Eddie's and opening each one carefully ... the appealing aroma of bubble gum, the white powder from the gum that dusted the top card in the pack and the snap of that rock-hard slab of gum at first bite that sounded more like breaking teeth than chewing gum.

But in the mid-1960s I lost interest in looking at the faces of guys on cardboard when I realized that the girl with the long blond hair across the street had a face, too--and her's was much cuter than Felipe Alou's.

So since I was obviously too old and mature for some childish activity like collecting baseball cards, I gave my "worthless" collection to a kid down the street. Where's that kid now? Oh, I don't know ... but he probably retired at 30 after selling off my baseball cards!

You can imagine my chagrin years later when I discovered just how valuable those little slabs of cardboard had become. Like comic books and Google stock, baseball cards had experienced a giant leap in value. And being the shrewd businessman that I am, I'd given all of mine away to a kid in the neighborhood.

You see, I had 'em all. There was Williams, Aaron, Mays, Musial. There probably weren't any Mantles, though ... I no doubt traded Mick away for a Jose Pagan or a Jim Davenport (quite the shrewd dealer, huh ... those Mantles are worth thousands today!). But what can I say--I loved my Giants.

The bottom drawer of my desk was loaded with cards dating back as far as 1954 (those cards given to me by some other neighborhood kid when he decided he was too old for such things).

I had Al Kaline, Duke Snider, Carl Yastrzemski's rookie card and about a dozen Bob Ueckers, just to name a few. Now that was before Kaline, Snider and Yaz joined the honored rolls of Baseball's Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, and before Uecker marketed himself into a self-made superstar.

At the time, those cards weren't worth much more than the paper they were printed on. But if I had that desk drawer full of cardboard today, I could reach in and grab a handful to send one of my grandkids to college or put a new car in the driveway.

There are many things I miss about my childhood years--the toys, the Stooges, the blonde across the street. But most of all, I miss my baseball cards ... and I hope that neighborhood kid choked on the bubble gum!

Want to talk? Give me a call at 408.354.3110, or write to dsparrer@community-newspapers.com.

El Camino Hospital