Who Wants to be A Millionaire?

I have been collecting baseball cards since I was a kid. I am in no way a serious collector. I buy a pack of cards a few times a year, mostly looking for Arizona Diamondbacks players. Today I happened to see that the Upper Deck 2000 Series I Baseball Cards were now available as I stood in line at the grocery store. Being the perfect impulse buyer that I am, I grabbed a couple of packs and put them in my cart. When I got home, I opened the packs and found that I had a Luis Gonzalez card. I was pretty jazzed. Getting this card reminded me of collecting cards as a child. I bought the cards mostly for the gum but I was also interested in getting cards of my favorite players. Because these were cards of my baseball heroes, I didn't think of them as an investment. Those players who I could care less about, their cards became perfect accessories for my bicycle as I would clothes pin them to make noise in the spokes. When the cards became sufficiently bent, they would be discarded. I think back to the number of Nolan Ryan rookie cards that must have gone through my spokes or the limited Mickey Mantle cards that were destroyed and I now think about the thousands of dollars that are gone. Even the cards I held dear to my heart have been lost or thrown away by a ruthless mother who was more interested in a clean sock drawer than saving for my retirement. I sit and watch as Regis Philbin asks insane questions to socially deliquent geeks who used to be pummeled for their lunch money and I think that maybe I used to be a millionaire. But I traded the fame and fortune so that my bike would sound like a motorcycle.