Covid in the cards

Euince Tiptree

By June of the 20th year 21st Century, store shelves, after fluctuating cycles from bare to barely filled, appeared fully restocked, worries of shortages past, hopes pinned on reopening the economy.  One shelf in the back of Target appeared empty:  A blank space that once held rack packs and boxes of baseball cards.  Even in the early weeks of the pandemic when toilet paper and paper towels ran empty, suppliers kept the new Topps cards in good supply. Now the pandemic appeared to have caught up with trading cards.  In such small things, no less than the rising death totals, we mark time. I stared at the empty shelf as if I could will it to fill.  

I live in Chardon, Ohio, in the snow belt of Lake Erie. A solitary sort, I cross-country ski along a bike path near my house, groomed for skiing in winter, a season that began in innocence, no portents in the changing light, gliding through the shifts and drifts in snow, the song of a single bird on a cold morning. I mark the season in the number of days I've skied, the number of weeks since the end of football and the time until baseball begins spring training.

Before I turned away from the bare shelf, my eye caught on something glittering in shrink wrap.  There, in the shadows at the back, an orphan box of something . . .  I pulled it out, a box the size of a bird's nest.  And saw something from an age that vanished months before. Printed around a large "X," the box proclaimed itself, "2020 XFL Football Trading Cards."  The label said the box contained ten packs of ten cards each.

The XFL?  I stared at the league logo as if a hieroglyphic. The XFL, the league created by WWE (World Wrestling Entertainment) executive Vince McMahon, seemed a creature of the distant past, Covid-19 having slowed and warped the flow of time. In just a few months I'd forgotten it ever existed. The pandemic swept the XFL out of existence after only five games in February and March, as the Old Era quickly crumbled.   

I hefted the box, not heavy but substantial for mere cards. I judged its look -- the short-lived teams, the nicknames that never became familiar, the lost promise of a season, the futility of it all, a league in the making for two years swept away in the space of a week in March. I felt as if I was holding something broken, no longer functional.  Yet they still wanted full price for it.  I would not buy it.  

I reached age 65 half a year before Covid reached our shores, yet I still buy what once were called bubblegum cards, a simple pleasure in my solitary life. My Hungarian aunt, now long dead, observed, "You're an ivory-tower type."  I was now living in my ivory tower: books, bubblegum cards and a bit of writing.  

I am a woman, but only for the past ten years, after a demanding transition now free to be true to myself, yet still mostly keeping to myself. I've always been a solitary person, perhaps imposed by gender confusion, yet also deep in my nature. If any life should remain untouched by a self-quarantine, it's mine.

Bubblegum cards are not about the past, despite the statistic on the back. Statistics are there only as predictors of the future. The cards are about the coming season, dreams of a pennant or football championship. Cards of a defunct league hold no dreams. Who would buy these?

I am a woman and once was a boy, one who collected baseball cards beginning with the 1960 season. I claim to have learned to read from looking at the back of baseball cards. I buy at least a sample of anything the card companies put out.

  The XFL?  The inaugural weekend of play, I'd watched a bit of the games out of curiosity, intrigued by the rule changes, such as the options for extra points. The rules were supposed to lead to higher scoring games. But by the first week of March, I’d lost interest.  

That was the week I endured my annual physical. My GP came into the examining room and extended his hand. I joked, "Still shaking hands?"  

The virus isn't here, he said. "No reason to worry until it hits Ohio -- except if you're traveling.  Either it'll cross the country like a wave or sputter out."

  That was the last time I've shaken anyone's hand.

The new Topps Heritage baseball cards went on sale that day.  Spring training underway, the season due to begin early, in the last week of the month. The racks were in full supply at Wal-Mart -- until I depleted them. These were the cards I prefer, dressed in the exact designs of the cards of my youth.  Exact, except for the vanished bubblegum. Opening the first pack, I swore I could smell the gum. 

Not a week after my physical, driving to the drug store for a new prescription of Lipitor, I turned on the sports radio, puzzled at what I heard. Ohio banned spectators at the basketball tournaments that were just beginning. In the next days, a cascade of cancellations quickly followed, including spring training.

And the XFL. A few weeks later, the league declared itself defunct and entered bankruptcy.

Bubblegum cards were once something organic, in wax paper wrappers, packed with sticks of bubble gun that scented the cards. Topps stopped including bubblegum in 1992, coinciding with a turn towards more expensive cards printed on high-quality card stock. I didn't have to see inside this box to know the cards, while printed on high-gloss stock, would be sterile, odorless and tasteless.  

The XFL? -- a bunch of unknown players. Even without a pandemic, who would have bought this box? Twenty bucks? Not worth it in the best of times.

I had better things to do with my money: make another donation to the local food bank.  Pictures of the long lines of cars waiting for food, as if filling a stadium parking lot, moved me to give an amount which seemed not nearly enough, a small enough thing in a world that for me remained basically unchanged. I'd been exposed to nothing of the virus or its effects beyond a few bare store shelves and in April, training myself to wear a mask. My solitary life went on as normal. Yet felt completely changed, a dissonance that made me dizzy. And -- I didn't notice at first -- a constant low-level buzz of anxiety, like background radiation. Perhaps that's why I was buying more cards than ever, until the supply ended, a kind of non-fattening comfort food.

I turned the box over in my hands. The side displayed the names and logos of the league's eight teams.  Meaning flows backwards. In retrospect, they can appear as portents of the plague of Covid. 

Seattle Dragons, where the dragon appeared to strike first.

New York Guardians, who couldn't guard against the virus.

DE Defenders, who couldn't develop a nation-wide program to stop the spread.

LA Wildcats, where the epidemic appeared contained until it went wild.

Dallas Renegades, as if named after those who refused to wear masks.

Houston Roughnecks, rough days ahead in summer, a burning hot spot.

St. Louis BattleHawks, at least through July not on the list of hot spots, but soon I would learn the battle had just begun. The virus was everywhere. 

I was shocked when everything changed even for me during those days of March in ways I still can't explain. I began to appreciate the small encounters that provided the scaffolding, which had been invisible, of my life. I enjoyed talking to the cashiers at the super market, quick exchanges on the weather, on what I was doing, or asking what they were doing for holidays or on vacation. Soon that ended, even before masks were required -- the social distancing and the plastic guards making it impossible to carry on a conversation. I realized how connected I was to society, my stance as a loner just an illusion.

On Easter, I visited an elderly former neighbor, a widow who lived next to the house where I grew up, the last person who has known me since the day I was born. I stood outside the breezeway of her home and talked at a distance through the open door. It marked the first time I'd had an in-person conversation in two weeks. At that awkward distance, not a long conversation, yet I could feel myself relax, my mood warm. At least briefly.

I've been prone to mild depression in the past, occasionally deeper than mild. I've learned the ways of my moods, how the waves crest and recede. I've learned to recognize that the waters will recede, currents of resiliency rise. But this pandemic created a different kind of miasma that failed to crest. 

The reopening in May only heightened my miasma. I felt as if the world was hurtling forward heedlessly, leaving me by the road, shouting feeble warnings, so many states reopening before the curve had begun to decrease, before adequate testing and contact tracing was in place. My miasma spiked into anger, a boiling cloud when I contemplated the numbers:  Projections of deaths by August, which had fallen to as low as 60,000 where jumping with the reopening, as high as double that number.  I reasoned the jump was due to the reopening, therefore we were sacrificing, say, 50,000 lives in order to reopen early.

In March when sports suddenly shutdown, I thought it an overreaction. People were panicking, I told myself. That was before I learned of "flattening the curve," the need for precautions before the infection spread.  

For a brief moment as the nation, with unified purpose, locked down, I felt a surge of unity, all of us in this together. That feeling quickly shattered as every aspect of the pandemic became politicized. I felt more alone than ever, behind the curve, dealing with the uncertainty, slowly gaining the understanding that the pandemic would not magically disappear on some date in June, July, August, like World War II ending with crowds in Time Square.

I wondered if anything like the old era would return. The box of XFL cards appeared as quaint as the creased and worn 1960 baseball cards I preserved in an album. I knew what I was going to do, perhaps knew from the second I saw the box. I turned and carried them to the self-checkout station, and waited for an employee to disinfect the station. 

In the July 28 edition of The New York Times I read an article by Danielle Campoamor, "Pining for Simpler Days During a Pandemic."  It said that trauma "divides our timeline into a before and after."   Despite my solitary life, I must not have been immune to the trauma created by the pandemic.  These XFL cards have become symbols to me of that dividing line, of innocence lost.

I still feel behind the curve -- as summer reaches to touch the long shadows of autumn, as schools struggle with reopening. I realize the pandemic won't magically disappear on the beachhead of the first vaccine. It'll write the story of 2021, too.

The Times article spoke of "transitional objects" and uses nostalgia as an example, that can help people transition from one stage of life to the next. Perhaps these cards can do that also. If so, twenty bucks wasn't too steep a price. I will not open the box, leave it preserved in their shrink wrap sitting on my desk, a monument to the past. And perhaps the future. 

In early August, a group of investors including former WWE wrestler Dwayne Johnson purchased the XFL out of bankruptcy with the intention of reviving it. Play might begin sometime in 2021. Perhaps not until 2022. No one knows.

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