Half and half

 

I didn't grow up in a coffee family. My dad would have a cup once in a great while, usually when company was over.

 

I associated coffee-drinking with the older generation. My grandmother, especially, drank coffee with just about every meal and two of her many quirks included dunking pizza in her coffee and stating "they're trained not to look at you" when she couldn't get a waitress' attention for a second cup of coffee.

 

That's who drank coffee as far as I knew -- my grandmother, the women she played cards with, and others from her generation.

 

I never drank coffee and only recently have picked up a cold coffee habit (I dislike hot drinks). And for decades, all those things that went hand-in-hand with the drink -- mugs, stirrers, sugar cubes, little milk pitchers and, often, cigarettes, were foreign to me.

 

At the top of the list was something called "half and half". For years I didn't know what that was. Even when I worked as a bus boy in a chain restaurant and one of my jobs was to fill the containers of jelly, and tiny cups of half-and-half, I didn't know. It sure seemed weird though. It was a liquid people were pouring in drinks but it didn't need to be refrigerated? Those coffee drinkers are zany!

 

In the last 30 or 40 years coffee has become a regular drink for people in their 20s and younger, something I didn't know back in the '70s. I still have never been in a Starbucks but I know all about coffee because it is everywhere among everybody.

 

But half and half is still weird.

 

Anyway I thought about all of this after receiving an envelope from Johnny's Trading Spot recently. It contained exactly 18 cards.

 

And I needed exactly nine of them. Exactly half. I needed half and didn't need half. Half and half!

 

Here are the cards I needed. I can't believe Johnny still has a Gavin Lux card for me that fills a spot. Also the Bowman's Best '90s cards were a surprise need.

 

 

 

Here's the other half that I did not need. How a Cardinal sneaked into the envelope I don't know.

 

I'm fairly certain some of the Bowman cards are dupes from earlier Johnny sends, because I definitely haven't bought or picked up Bowman cards in the last several years.

 

But, as always, 50 percent from a blind send is always welcome for this very, very veteran collector who has accumulated an unhealthy number of Dodgers cards over multiple decades.

 

Cards are something I've understood since I was a little kid. It took me much longer to understand coffee. I won't be collecting half-and-half cups.

 

--------------------------------------------------

 

As you may have read on other blogs, a good way to keep up on the latest posts of your favorite card blogs, now that Blogger is being uncooperative, is to go to the Trading Card Database blog list, which is still updating. So much easier than clicking blindly on every blog!