I received an unexpected quick flyer in the mail last week from reader Grant. Of the variety of items in the envelope, very few were cards. Just two, in fact. One was this 2025 Topps Cosmic Chrome Josh Allen card. I consider it good luck because the package arrived on Thursday, mere hours before Allen and the Bills beat up on the Lions defense. (I know, not difficult to do). This was the other card, a Heritage buyback, a.k.a., someone/something stamped Rick Auerbach's 1976 Topps card. This is just my second '76 Heritage buyback, as only 1975 cards get the collecting treatment in this house. But I certainly will take any stamped Dodgers, no matter the year. And that was it for the cards. But there was more and I consider it the highlight of the envelope. Those are wax pack wrappers -- from my prime collecting time -- and a couple are from sets that I never collected as a kid -- because I never saw them for sale. For informati...
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 bo...