Jose Cardenal

"‘I was six when I saw that everything was God, and my hair stood up, and all that,’ Teddy said. ‘It was on a Sunday, I remember. My sister was only a very tiny child then, and she was drinking her milk, and all of a sudden I saw that she was God and the milk was God. I mean all she was doing was pouring God into God, if you know what I mean.’"
– J.D. Salinger, "Teddy"

Who better to honor the St. Louis Cardinals for winning the 2006 World Series championship than Jose Cardenal? One of my Cardboard God fugue states—episodes in which I sat on the floor of my room and handled the cards like rosary beads, eventually drifting into a glaze-eyed trance—involved envisioning the brief, magical sliver of the past in which journeyman Jose Cardenal had actually been a Cardinal. It had happened before I was old enough to pay attention and had lasted only a year and a half, from 1970 to midway through 1971, right around the time that my parents began experimenting with a new kind of family structure, three adults instead of two, inspired in part by the ecstatic mandate of Woodstock and the Whole Earth Catalog, etc., to invent brand new modes of living. Though it didn’t end up lasting that long, many believed a new era was at hand, a golden time in which milk would pour into milk, God into God, Cardenal into Cardinal.