I have a bunch of sad stories from when I was a boy, but nothing as sad as seeing all those Eevees together up for adoption.
Probably my saddest story was how I got out of the hobby as a kid. I was only 8 when Pokémania took off and the youngest kid in my grade. I had a lot of trouble making friends and communicating with other kids, but Pokémon proved a versatile medium and I formed a lot of relationships at that time I couldn’t have made otherwise. Any two kids who liked Pokémon could be friends. They always had something to talk about. That was powerful for a kid like me who didn’t have much else to connect with other kids over.
Pokémon was popular and lots of kids liked Pokémon, but I LOVED Pokémon. I thought about it every minute of every day, something my parents strongly discouraged and despised. My mother and father thought I was victim of a machine that forced addiction on to kids and they did not like that I liked Pokémon, so there was a lot of pressure at home for me to disconnect from the hobby or at least keep my interest a secret. I had the tendency to bring my collection with me every time I went out to see friends, even if they didn’t ask me to, because it meant I could just sit and look at my cards somewhere without judgment.
But like all youth trends, it pretty quickly became lame to still like Pokémon. By 2000 a lot of kids had already stopped collecting cards. They stopped talking and thinking about Pokémon every day. Some friends and I drifted apart because without Pokémon we didn’t have anything in common. I could feel the changing temperature on the hobby as it became less and less the basis for all social interaction and something that was kind of embarrassing. Stickers came off of school binders, keychains and charms came off of backpacks, people stopped wearing shirts and hats, and eventually I felt like I was the only one left.
I struggled with this a lot because I still LOVED Pokémon. Nobody else even liked it anymore, but my enthusiasm for it was at an all time high. We were right in Generation 2. The scope of the Pokémon world had just doubled. There was so much I wanted to talk about and share with other fans but there weren’t any. Not wanting to be bullied as one of the last remaining Pokémon kids, I kept my interest more closely guarded.
I did have one friend who predated Pokémon. She was one of my consistent friends for most of my youth and generally our friendship existed independent from any popular trends or changing interests. She still liked Pokémon a little bit and would still occasionally get new cards, so that was a rare opportunity for me to still share Pokémon with another kid. One afternoon my parents dropped me off there and she had asked me to bring my Pokémon cards. I was excited because I thought we were going to look at each other’s binders and do some trades.
To my surprise, the reason she asked me to bring my cards was so we could burn them. Her family had a big stone fireplace right in their living room which gave her and her older brothers a slightly controlled environment to play with fire. Their fascination with throwing things in the fire had inspired them to burn their Pokémon cards. I have reflected on this a lot and wondered why this was. Why Pokémon. Why burn their cards. And I think that it’s just because Pokémon were for kids and they all saw themselves as more grown up now and burning their old cards was a symbolic indication they had left that kind of thing behind. They were eager to do it. They were grateful to do it. So taken with the idea of destroying their vestiges of childhood it was assumed I, too, would embrace the ritual.
I didn’t know what to do. This was my best friend and my last remaining Pokémon partner. If she was over it and was never looking back, I was definitively going to be alone. I didn’t have long to think about it, but I decided that this was it. It was over. My parents hated Pokémon. My friends thought Pokémon was lame. I had nobody to share Pokémon with. It had become a liability. I was already a loser. So I said fine, let’s do it, and we burned all my cards.
I look back on this with tremendous heartache.
When I returned home empty-handed I just went to my room and found my last remaining Pokémon card - a Japanese Venusaur. This was the luckiest pull I’d ever had, my rarest card, and the one that was most special to me. I never took it out of the house because I was afraid to lose it or have someone steal it. I did not like Venusaur, I was a Blastoise kid, and I wanted a Base Set Blastoise more than anything else and now it didn’t matter at all. Now it was all that I had left. Spitefully, and resentfully, I cut it up with scissors. That was it. No more Pokémon.
Several years later during the era of the e-Reader, I really liked the e-Reader itself. I thought it was cool. I also liked that I could convince my parents to buy e-Reader packs for me more easily than a new video game because they were a lot cheaper. This was a short lived fascination, but I did amass a stack of e-Reader cards that ended up wrapped in a rubber band in my closet for several years. They survived a couple of moves, numerous yard sales, plenty of purges, and eventually I decided to open them up and see what they were so I could sell them on eBay.
In this stack of e-Reader cards were Black Star Promos #51 and #52 for Ho-oh and Rapidash. I don’t know where I got them. I did not have a Nintendo Power subscription or know anyone who did. I could remember where all my e-Reader cards came from, but I couldn’t place these, and I didn’t know why I had them or how they ended up in my stack of games. They were not my Pokémon cards, which had burned years before I got an e-Reader, and yet they were in fact Pokémon cards that I owned. They were “my” Pokémon cards, the only ones I had left, and the only ones that had followed me into adulthood. I’d graduated high school now. I was not in to Pokémon cards at all. But seeing these cards and touching them again and being reminded of my boyhood fascination was transportive. It felt so good to touch Pokémon cards again.
I sold all my e-Reader cards but kept those two. I didn’t know what to do with them. I’d played a few Pokémon games on and off in the last ten years, but the idea of returning to collecting cards felt so foreign. Did adults do that? Could you even buy these old cards anymore? I’d never bought anything over the internet before, so I went to a local card store that mostly focused on sports cards. I didn’t know where to start except there.
This was a real old-timey card shop. Floor to ceiling white boxes stuffed with cards and designations of their contents written in permanent marker on the outside. There were open boxes and retail packages all over the place, on every surface, and the only open area in the whole store was the tiny section by the register. I went up to the counter to the owner, who also lived above the shop, and asked if they had old Pokémon cards “from the 90s.” He reached down beneath the counter right where he was standing and dropped stacks and stacks of vintage boosters on the counter. He sold them to me at their original sticker prices - just $4.95 a pack. Over the course of a few weeks I would make trips out there, buy his boosters, then go home and open them.
When I bought the last of his packs, I took them home for the last time and opened them. I pulled a Blastoise from a Base Set booster. I couldn’t believe it. There it was, the card I always wanted, and from a booster pack no less. For as modest as it was, this was a dream come true. Perhaps the only dream I ever had come true. I got extremely emotional. I moved on to the last booster I had, knowing it was the last one the man had and would probably be the last one I opened in a long time. I opened it up and pulled another Blastoise.
This event cemented that I needed to get back in to Pokémon cards. Knowing how they could still make me feel and how emotional they made me got me started on building a binder and learning about all the different prints and all the different cards. Since I familiarized myself with ordering online, and I knew he didn’t have any packs left, I didn’t go back to that card store for years. One day I needed some acrylic cases for something and thought I’d stop in and see the man and thank him for saving all those cards for so long and then selling them to me. I went in and the store was almost empty. All the white boxes that had bricked the walls floor to ceiling were gone. The display cases were empty. The counter was cleared. He did still have some acrylic cases, so I picked them up and rang the bell at the register.
I waited and the man didn’t come. So I rang it one more time before planning to leave and I finally heard him lumbering down the hall. He was so thin. He was carting an oxygen tank. He was dying.
I asked him how much for the acrylic cases and he said to just take them. I asked if he was sure, he said yes. I said “thank you so much for everything” and tried to put some extra emphasis in my voice. But I wish I was more overt and had told him how much of a difference he made to me. That was the last time I saw him. His store closed permanently a few months later. I never even knew the guy’s name. We never had a conversation that wasn’t curt and transactional. I owe him so much, though. I try to remember his face but it’s barely there in my memory now. I might not even recognize a picture. All I remember for sure is he was balding and had a mustache. He’s basically a floating mustache in my memory now.
I often say that my experience with Pokémon feels autobiographical. Despite it being such a brief part of my actual youth, it is the lens through which I view my whole childhood. And despite all the changes I went through right after high school, it’s picking Pokémon back up that defines that period for me the most. I have so many memories about Pokémon cards and how I felt about them at certain key points in my life and I remember all those feelings when I turn through the pages of my sets. Pokémon has always reflected back at me, somehow, and I see and feel myself in my cards even still. I’ll always remember the difficulty of saying goodbye to Pokémon before I was ready as a little kid. I’ll always remember the store owner who facilitated my renewed interest. Those memories are all there in the cards for me.
