The Childhood Obsession That Never Went Away

Recently, I was watching my youngest nephew play with his dinosaurs and talk about King Kong movies, and it made me realize something funny about childhood.

Kids go through these intense little phases where they become completely obsessed with something. And I mean obsessed. My nephew knows more about dinosaurs than most adults probably ever will. He’ll start rattling off facts about them like it’s the most normal thing in the world, and he’s genuinely perplexed (maybe even borderline appalled) when the rest of us don’t already know all this stuff.

And the funny part is, watching him brought all those old memories flooding back for me, because I was exactly the same way.

I had a dinosaur phase too.

I had a solar system phase where I memorized ridiculous facts about the planets, distances from the sun, how long days and years were on each planet, all of that stuff. I loved drawing — usually Scooby-Doo characters, skyscrapers (another obsession I had forgotten about), and cars, most of which still looked VERY cool when I was a kid. I was into model cars. I was obsessed with sports statistics. I could tell you batting averages, standings, and random baseball trivia like it was my full-time job.

Some of those interests lasted a few months. Some lasted years. Some evolved into something else entirely.

And now, watching my nephews grow up, it’s interesting to see the same thing happening all over again. Every kid seems to latch onto certain fascinations for a while. Some stick. Some don’t. Some completely disappear.

I still enjoy sports, for example, but I’m definitely not waking up every morning memorizing batting averages anymore.

But one obsession never really went away.

Music.

And specifically, it started with Elvis Presley… although exactly when that happened is a little unclear.

My first conscious recollection is pretty clear, though.

A neighborhood friend of mine wandered into my yard one summer carrying a stack of bubblegum cards in his hand. He was kind of staring down at them while he walked and casually asked me:

“Hey Geoff, you want some Elvis cards?”

I said sure, mostly because I was a little kid and free stuff sounded good.

I had absolutely no idea that tiny moment was about to shape the rest of my life.

Those Elvis cards became a full-blown obsession almost immediately. My brother and I basically cleaned out the local deli buying packs of them. Back then, people bought sodas and beer in returnable glass bottles, and every empty bottle was worth ten cents when you brought it back to the store.

So during the summers, we’d go through the garbage cans at the park across the street looking for discarded bottles because every bottle meant another pack of bubblegum cards.

That was our economy.

And honestly, thinking back on it now, it was kind of glorious.

Around the same time, Elvis was everywhere again because he had recently died. Even though I was too young to fully understand it at the time, his death magnified everything. He was already larger than life, but suddenly there was this enormous cultural spotlight on him again.

Then there was my grandma’s record player.

And this is where the chronology of my obsession gets a little muddy.

She had several Elvis albums, but there was one in particular that completely hooked me. It was this double-album greatest hits collection with a blue cover and a famous silhouette photo from his Hawaii concert special.

Every time we went to my grandparents’ house, the first thing I wanted to do was go straight to that record player and put that album on.

Well… assuming one of my aunts or uncles didn’t stop me first to ask me some Elvis trivia question.

Because apparently I had become that kid.

And honestly, they probably got a huge kick out of it because I knew everything. Song titles, movie names, historic dates, random facts — I absorbed all of it.

What’s funny is that after I became a consciously obsessed Elvis fan, my mom told me something that made the whole thing even stranger. Apparently when I was an infant, whenever I cried or fussed, my grandma would put Elvis records on, and I’d immediately calm down.

Maybe the obsession started earlier than I realized.

That fascination with music never faded the way some of the others did.

My tastes evolved over time, of course. Eventually I discovered the Beatles. Then later came the harder rock bands of my era. And eventually that path led me to Van Halen and the guitar itself.

But when I look back now, I can see the thread connecting all of it.

It started with fascination.

That deep feeling of wanting to know everything about something.

And it’s funny because when you’re a kid, nobody really knows which interests are just temporary phases and which ones are quietly becoming part of who you are.

Some childhood obsessions disappear almost completely.

But every once in a while, one of them becomes foundational.

One of mine became my life.