ill-gotten baseballs

When my father-in-law moved to Chicago from Connecticut, he came with about 30 large packing boxes that ended up in our living room. On her end of the move, my sister-in-law showed him every piece of paper in his apartment and got his ok to throw it away or mail it to Chicago. Most of it got mailed. He came in September and I asked that the boxes be dealt with by Thanksgiving. Every day he would tackle part of a box, again keeping nearly every piece of paper and repacking it, but in the midst of all the paper were baseballs. Each box had at least 5; some had a dozen. It turned out that Ed's apartment was across the street from the high school baseball field and he would go for a walk after their practices and pick up the baseballs and take them home. Ed was a true baseball lover, and I'm not sure what his motivation was, but those baseballs endeared him to me. I collected a bunch of them and put them in this egg basket I used to collect eggs as a child. Andy has given away a lot of the baseballs over the years since Ed's death, but I said these are mine.