When I was younger, I read this kid’s book – not a children’s book, with lovely imaginative pictures and one simple, yet stimulating, sentence per page, but a novel for kids – about a boy who discovers of an original 1909 Honus Wagner baseball card in his grandmother’s attic. When he touches the card, he feels “a tingle”, and the long-dead MLB legend comes to life in the present day. I don’t remember what Wagner said about it, but I’m sure he wasn’t too concerned about how fucking crazy that is. After all, the boy was probably pretty excited, and not at all scared shitless, as would be the norm for any young man who meets someone (who died over fifty years ago) through to the black voodoo magic of an ultra-rare baseball card. In addition to Wagner being able to come to the present, the card grants several other wishes: the boy is given the ability to travel through time to glorious 1909 Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to Game 7 of that year’s World Series, where — as an adult, because he wished to be one because some wack-as-shit grown-ups were pushing him around — he hits a grand slam in Wagner’s place because Ty Cobb spiked Wagner’s hand in a slide. It’s some wild shit.
ANYWAY what I’m really getting at here is the part when the boy, finally showing a bit of anxiety over the whole situation, asks Honus, “Is it in black-and-white?”
“Is what in black-and-white?” Wagner replies.
“The past.” The phantom shortstop laughs it off, just a silly boy’s irrational fear, some wild thought. But so many years later — the book was published in 1997, I’m sure I read it either that year or the next — the question resonates so much deeper than the wonderful Dan Gutman ever intended it to. Wasn’t the past in black-and-white? Hell, isn’t the present?
1 Comment
January 16, 2008 at 8:47 pm
More posts like this mon ami. Oui. Is beautiful, leave-a me breathless. Oui!