Chris Sabo

The little boy flipped through his baseball card binder. Everything organized by team, then manufacturer. These pages were the Reds, his favorite, and Topps was his favorite manufacturer. He loved the stick of gum.

The next pages were Cardinals. He hated the Cardinals. They beat the Reds too much. Still, Fleer made some pretty cards and he didn’t mind looking at them.

He was missing one card from his Topps Reds: Chris Sabo. Today he was going to fix that.

Binder in his backpack, backpack on his back, he hopped on his Huffy and rode down Walnut Street. The boys were under the old tree where they always met on Saturday mornings. But there were no binders. Just little round pieces of cardboard scattered on the ground.

“What are you guys doing?”

“Playing pogs.”

“What’s pogs?”

They explained. You stack them up, slam the big plastic piece on top, keep whatever flips over. Skulls and tie-dye and comic characters.

“Can we trade some cards today?”

Nobody was interested in cards anymore. They spent the rest of the morning comparing slammers. The little boy didn’t have any pogs. He still didn’t have Chris Sabo.

Over the next few weeks the whole sixth grade lost their minds over pogs. Baseball cards were for little kids and old men. The boy held out as long as he could, then begged his dad. His dad said no. Silly things, and the drawings were creepy besides.

So the boy took his binder to the local comic book shop. He tried to sell his Cardinals collection first. No one wanted them. He didn’t blame them. He sold everything else, all his Topps, everything except the gap where Chris Sabo should have been, and took the money to the drugstore and bought a pile of pogs.

The next Saturday he came to the tree with his pogs. The other kids had baseball mitts and bats.

“Hey, I got pogs.”

“Cool. We’re going to play baseball.”

He tried to trade his pogs back at the shop. The owner said he couldn’t do that. When he saw the boy’s eyes go wet, he said, “Tell you what, I’ve got a Chris Sabo card. I’ll trade you for the pogs.”

It wasn’t an even deal. Pogs were turning up in trash bins and attic corners all over the neighborhood. But he was a good man.

The boy went home with his Chris Sabo and started over.

Let the reader understand.