Thank You All!!

It wasn’t until the other day that I made the connection.  I was talking to the Lovely Wife about my father passing away 3 years ago.  The anniversary of his passing is in late February. He died from brain cancer. 

It was an extremely painful time for me and my family.  I won’t get into it, but I will tell you I wouldn’t wish his suffering and what cancer... that…that….”evil” is the only word I can think of…what that evil did to him and my family on my worst enemy.

Anyway, the Lovely Wife and I were talking about him and I said as an aside that I couldn’t believe it had been 3 years since he died.  I had a moment of déjà vu when I said those words, but I wasn’t sure why.  Then later in the day I was taking some pictures of cards for a blog post and realized I’d recently said something about not believing it had been 3 years since I started The Adventures of Napkin Doon early in March 2011.

It didn’t make sense to me that something as painful as my Dad’s passing and something as light and fun as starting a blog about baseball cards could have happened exactly a week apart.  I figured I had it wrong- one of the two events must have started a year earlier or a year later than the other, and they couldn’t have happened essentially at the same time because I don't remember being in any sort of mood for fun and games for several months after his passing.  For long time followers of this blog, a mistake in calculations like that would come as no surprise (for example, I said that I would wrap this up today, March 4^th since it was the three year mark of when I started.  I looked the other day and saw that I actually started on March 2^nd . Oops!)

But both events did happen close together.  Now I’m not going to play pop psychologist, and I hope no one else does either on this, but I have to think the timing is not a total coincidence. 

Please don’t make the mistake of concluding that perhaps I’m letting go of the blog because I’m somehow now finally able to let go of my Dad’s death.  I’ll never fully let go of that event, although I can handle it better these days, which I guess is what happens with time and life moving on.    I’m simply shutting down because it feels like the right time to do it.  Nothing more, nothing less. 

But hey, I don’t mean to take this to a dark, sad place.  This blog has been a source of great joy, and it's been a pleasure writing it!  Mostly, that joy stems from getting to know you folks and I’m so appreciative to those who have followed, read, commented, played “words with friends”, traded  and laughed with me these three years.  

It’s the end of the blog, but it's not remotely close to goodbye because I’ll still be around, hopefully chiming in on your blogs more often now and tweeting pics of cards I think people would want to see. 

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“Let’s see if this thing goes anywhere.” 

That was the first sentence of my first post that I think about 4 people read.  I wrote about why I collected and showed my first real card of significance as the first picture of my first post:

 

Look at that.  These are fantastic things, these baseball cards.

This will also be the last picture of my last post, which somehow helps close the door for me.

Where “this thing” went was much different and much more fun than I ever could have guessed, and I one hundred times thank you readers/friends for that.  See you soon and Happy Collecting!