The Tao of Expo
March 5, 2013
For most of my life, when baseball cards came to me, I sorted them into teams. The majority of my baseball cards from my childhood are sorted by teams right now, each team wrapped in a rubber band. The exception to this general rule is in the cards that I’ve written about, which have been removed from their teams and are loose in the shoebox, as if the process of writing about the cards is a way to offer them back into the originating randomness of life. I vowed early on to write about every single card that remains from my childhood, and I still plan to keep that vow, but right now the shoebox with all my old cards is in a closet, out of my immediate reach for the first time in many years. There are a few reasons for this. One is that I’m using whatever small pockets of time I have for writing to work on a new book (that’s not about baseball cards). Another is that I don’t want my 19-month-old son to get his hands on those cards just yet. Finally, after writing about my baseball cards for several years, there’s something appealing to having them go away, get a rest from my exhausting attention, gain strength in silence, like they did all those years when they were in a storage facility.
But baseball cards are still in my life, more actively now than at any time since my childhood. They belong to my son, a heaping pile of loose cards, some new ones from 2012 and 2013 and some older ones that came as a gift to me from my wife’s aunt, who found the cards in a binder at a garage sale. They’re all from the late 1980s and early 1990s. My wife helped me remove them all immediately from the protective plastic of the binder, and we piled them on the living room rug like leaves, where our son Jack started doing something very much like the breaststroke through them. Then, the diaspora: the cards were gradually scattered all over the house. This is how things get sorted now, through play. I find a card in the bathroom, another on the cat scratch pad. A favorite site for cards is my guitar. Jack likes dropping them in there. He can’t say guitar yet, but he makes a sound that approximates the sound of a guitar being strummed. “Dao,” he says when he wants to play with the guitar, the same way you’d pronounce the Chinese philosophy of embracing the randomness and transience of life. He said this the other day, and when we got to the guitar a backup catcher from a defunct team was inside. Oh, to live inside music, holiness itself. Oh to be an Expo forever, free of the sorted world.
Cardboard Gods 
This is exquisite—the writing, the heart, the spiritual vision. The card-in-the guitar reminds me of those Buddhist sand mandalas: transient beauty, everyday art. Putting the cards in the guitar also seems like craving for safekeeping and order, a good kind of sorting. I know you said in your LA review of “Art of Fielding” that these days you are estranged from great beauty, but I have to disagree. This writing is like Melville with baseball cards And in terms of what you said there about taking risks, I have to say one of my favorite parts in “Cardboard Gods” was when that coach told you to bunt on your last at-bat and you smacked a double. Yes! I hope you keep on swinging, taking risks, finding wonder in baseball and your family, taking the measure of great beauty.
http://lareviewofbooks.org/article.php?id=680&fulltext=1
Thanks for the encouraging words, Peter. Much appreciated!