Video Meliora, proboque; Deteriora sequor

Today's Fiction

Most of Richard Price's early years were predicated on the idea that you could store most anything you needed. Not money, since money was of no interest to the average 9-year old except to the extent it could be converted to real currency: baseball cards. But the storage principle proved a potent and long-lived idea.

Like a farmer filling his grain bins against future famines, he collected rocks, stamps, sports cards, juvenility, plants, letters from far-flung penpals. His rock collection, like all the others, was intended as a safe place to go when life got rocky.

Price's nine-year old joy of getting to stay over night at his best friend’s house was equalled only by the misery of it being over so soon. But experience showed it could be amelieorated by the new sports cards he got (via trades that night), and he'd savor those when you got back home. Souvenirs are this – ways of getting over the pain of loss. The loss of Paris or New York or London or a visit to your best friend’s house.

Baseball cards indirectly led to baser things because the principle was the same if morally different: good feelings via photographic images could be had when times were difficult. If baseball cards comforted during Richard's long visits to Aunt Melba's in Minnesota, then unclad females could provide refuge during lean collegiate times. It seemed the very definition of prudence –storing up against times of loss. Loss always seemed unfair to him despite the rather prominent example of the Savior, as constantly related to him by Aunt M. Toast.

He fancied himself a survivor without questioning the means of survior, like the cheater who crows about the good grade.