--37 days.

--While I was tooling around eBay a bit, looking at assorted things, I got "nostalgic" for a bit...

Back to the days when Panini was not a sandwich, but a publisher of the sticker books I used to have, when Topps was the shit and Fleer and Donruss were second-rate (until Upper Deck came along), when basically, the fabric of life was very, very different.

You always hear "old folks" talk about how they collected baseball cards in "wax" packs, and all that. Well, we lived through the changeover--most of us anyway. I know I did. I'm just old enough to remember the joy of gently prying open a wax pack and chewing on the rock-hard stale stick of gum that often tasted like the wax they coated the paper in. I'm old enough to have walked down to the corner drugstore, which had everything we needed, once I was old enough to cross busy 51st Street myself (and before that, with my Mom), to pick up a few packs of Topps cards, which were 50 cents by the way, and experience that. Before I really got into cards though, my time and measly, measly allowance was spent on baseball sticker books. Those were even better. They were so cool...I think my Mom still has them somewhere, packed away, waiting for us to find them and reminisce and all that.

Tim and I used to go and buy as many stickers as we could...and the best thing was, we had our own books, and could give each other our doubles. We never even "traded" them...those days were nicer. :) If I had two of one sticker and Tim needed it, he got it. And vice versa. And those books were always so cool...you would see, "hey, Wade Boggs goes here," and wonder, what does his sticker look like? Then, I remember the one year, they basically made the stickers cutouts of the players, so you'd see these blank human outlines and wonder what the actual sticker looked like. It was so cool...and challenging too, monetarily speaking. I believe I finished ONE book all those years. Kind of like my card-collecting. I think I finished one year of Topps baseball cards and one year of Pro Set football cards. I NEVER bought the sets...I bought packs to MAKE sets...it was always more fun. :)

Somewhere in my early teens, that all changed. Wax packs gave way to foil heat-sealed packs. 50 cents Topps packs with fibrous cards were replaced by smooth-stock Upper Deck cards, which came only 10 to a pack for 99 cents and had no gum, but that cool foil hologram on them. Soon, prices were going through the roof. I knew I was done with card collecting when I got a sweet, sweet Shaquille O'Neal rookie card that was worth piddly because it was so readily available. Still, the Ozzie Smith and Warren Moon rookie cards I craved were so far out of reach. Funny how I could probably easily afford those today, but have little interest in purchasing them.

The neighborhood changed, of course, in that time too. The private drugstore closed as the family ran to the suburbs fearing the Mexican boom in the population and the older folks died off. It became a palateria (ice cream shop, of sorts) and a muebleria (furniture store)--there were two sections of the drugstore that became two separate storefronts. Sticker books basically vanished once the popularity in card collecting shot through the roof, and now card collecting is probably more on the down side of things, since the market became so ridiculously oversaturated.

A couple of years ago, I had the opportunity to buy some NEW, unopened Topps wax packs from the 80s/early 90s. It was the best feeling in the world. And yes, the gum smelled the same and was as dry and brittle as a wafer. But it was beautiful.