Hard copies

Peter Funt:

For more than a century, baseball fans in Chicago have saved ticket stubs to preserve memories, both fond and frustrating, of their beloved Cubbies. . . .

That’s over. This season the Cubs have joined more than a dozen other Major League teams in eliminating paper tickets in favor of digital versions, downloaded to apps and displayed on phones.

And so ticket stubs join theater playbills, picture postcards, handwritten letters and framed photos as fading forms of preserving our memories. It raises the question, Is our view of the past, of our own personal history, somehow different without hard copies?

Of course it is.

I’m down to one ticket stub, Brian Wilson performing SMiLE, Auditorium Theatre, Chicago, October 2, 2004. I have the dates from other stubs in a text file. But I keep every letter.

[Peter Funt: son of Allen.]