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Sunday, April 5, 2020

Dreaming of.. cards?

Last night I was compiling my Frankenset wantlist when I fell into a bit of a wormhole.


I've got a bunch of these Galasso Glossy Greats cards from a random flat-rate box I bought on eBay. As I was cataloging the Chicago White Sox All-Time Team I lingered on the back of the cards:


I read a Wikipedia page and a couple of forum postings about Galasso and the mail-order business she and her husband once had. Then I decided to type the address into Google Maps and see what's there today.

It appears to be a house (I'm not certain; 75th St. comes up as Bay Ridge Pkwy.)  But in my dream it's something different...



I climb up the stairs of the nearest subway stop on a bright, sunny day. The streets are humming with people. I cross a wide intersection to a rounded curb. I check my notes. 

That's it!

A grand building appears before me. This is the Renata Galasso store, it has to be! 

The excitement pours through me as I swing open the door and step into...


..a convenience store. I'm disappointed for about five seconds. Maybe the card store is upstairs?  It's at that moment that I spy a few packs of 2019 Topps hanging on a rack. 

I pull off a pack and discreetly open it (why would I do this?!) There are only four cards inside, but one of them is a Legends variation of Pee Wee Reese. And it's autographed


In my dream, the Reese SP has the photo from the Galasso card, not the actual photo from the 2019 Topps card. Also, Reese has been dead for over 20 years. Pretty sure he didn't sign any 2019 cards.

I re-seal the pack.Then I grab a bottle of Mountain Dew and some food stuffs. I pay for my purchases and mention something about the Galasso store. Honestly I don't recall who gave me access to the building but the indication was that no one knew if the store was there but I was welcomed to look around. 


Once upstairs I'm at the foot of a long hallway covered in burgundy carpeting. Closed doors on either side. It's a Saturday; no one is here. The doors are unmarked. 

I open a door, nothing interesting. I open another. And another. Offices. They're all offices. Very basic - a phone here, a computer there. No brand names, no corporate logos - and no cards. 


It's getting dark. I'm getting frantic, opening drawers left and right. Surely there has to be some cards around here..



Have you ever had a dream about buying (or searching for) sports cards?


Thanks for reading!


~

8 comments:

  1. I awoke this morning with a dream about baseball, but not cards. What is odd, is that I hardly ever remember any of my dreams, unless it is a deja vu kind of thing.

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  2. The only dreams I usually remember involve me finding money or they're work related. I'm sure I've dreamt of baseball cards before though. In fact, it would be cool if I could remember those dreams. That's much more fun than dreaming about walking into an empty classroom.

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  3. I have dreamt about cards. Usually don't remember them that well (a good thing for the most part- my dreams are generally not something I want to remember) but one sticks out in my memory, perhaps because I can actually remember it. In that dream, I was walking through my town, and went down a street I had never been down before. That street had a card/diecast store and I specifically remember getting the 1996 David Green Busch car from Racing Champions (which came with a card). Of course, when I woke up, I realized very quickly that Racing Champions never produced that car, and the place the street was in my dream is a river in real life. The building, which I remember clearly was an old brick building, never actually existed.

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  4. All my dreams involve work, sharks, or throwing dragonballs. I've never had a card dream, but yours was awesome.

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  5. A. I dream about cards all the time. Last night I actually had a dream I was near Penn Station, which was nearly deserted (in reality I haven't been in the city in almost a month). I found along the street a bunch of cards discarded from what looked like some repack someone had opened up and left on the street the cards they didn't want.

    B. Renata Galasso operated out of space in an industrial building in Brooklyn, she and other local housewives would spend hours opening up packs and sorting the cards to make sets. Found a photo (this is 6305 10th Avenue, a different address) - https://www.flickr.com/photos/beardenb/77733406/in/set-1664748/

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    Replies
    1. That's what I was looking for! Thank you for finding & sharing these photos.

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  6. I wrote about this on my blog recently, but I had my first dream about cards a couple months ago, which is kinda odd considering I've been collecting for over 20 years now. In the dream I was away at college (also odd: haven't actually been away at college in 10 years now) and trying to decide whether or not to cut class and go to a local card shop. I cut class, walked into the shop, saw a dime box...and then I woke up, of course.

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  7. I've only ever had one dream about cards that I know of, and even though it happened over twenty years ago, I still remember it quite vividly. The dream itself was pretty generic, just me going into a card shop and buying a couple of packs of Hoops Decade (I was working on the set at the time), then pulling a David Robinson Autographics out of one of said packs. The dream felt like a premonition more than anything (I was very into that sort of stuff back then), so the morning after the dream, I borrowed ten bucks from my mom (I was broke) and went to the card shop to get some packs of Hoops Decade (4-5 packs). The Admiral ended up eluding me that day, but one of those packs did yield a Tracy McGrady Autographics, which wasn't too bad of a consolation prize -- and it also sort of confirmed (at least in my mind) the premonitory feeling that I had gotten from the dream.

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