No. 862 – Most High

Performer: Page & Plant

Songwriters: Jimmy Page, Robert Plant, Charlie Jones, Michael Lee

Original Release: Walking into Clarksdale

Year: 1998

Definitive Version: None

One of the things I was most looking forward to when Debbie and I bought our home in 1997 was that I was finally going to be able to have to a proper baseball room.

Dave had introduced me to the concept that displaying all of your cool baseball memorabilia was the right thing to do. He bought his first house in Grand Blanc just before I moved to Columbus, and I remember how awesome his baseball room looked.

When Debbie and I moved into our apartment in Gahanna, I tried to make the guest bedroom something of a baseball room as much as I could given the restraints she put on me in that she didn’t the room to be overwhelmed with it. So, I started with just one wall, which was acceptable to her. I bought and made a few Sauder bookshelves—one for my library and one to display stuff. I bought another one that was shorter, so I could display cool posters and items on top.

But anything set free must have room to grow, and so it was with my baseball wall, although I might have had a hand in it—just a little here and there. It would be just another picture on the wall or another foamy for the bed. Where am I supposed to put this stuff? It grew insidiously until just before we moved, the guest room was on the verge of becoming a baseball room.

But now with a house, space would no longer be an issue. We would have a separate and decoration-neutral guest room, and after some negotiation, Debbie turned over control of the second-largest bedroom. It was all mine to decide what I wanted to do—no compromises.

When you have an entire room, you feel a strong obligation to fill it as best you can, and it took me a year to accumulate all of the infrastructure that I needed to make the baseball room of my dreams (along with more stuff for proper display, of course) … well, that and my laziness. What I really needed was a deadline to complete my tinkering.

I missed Opening Day 1998, which was about when this album came out, but I then set the date: June 18. It would mark the first weekend after our one-year anniversary of moving into the house, and it seemed like a good excuse to have a party anyway. So, no more dawdling. It was time to get serious, and the clock was ticking …

(Don’t you just hate cliffhangers?)