In a beautiful house, the goofy office has its fans

We have been living in Georgia for more than three years and tonight we did something we hadn't done here before.

We entertained.

The last three years have been a long haul for us, health-wise, but it's beginning to look as if we're coming out the other side. We had seven friends over tonight for a dinner party -- appetizers, salad, wine, lasagna and dessert.

The food was a mixture of purchased and prepared. I made the lasagna from scratch, and it was a 50 percent success. It didn't look good aesthetically, but it tasted just fine. At least I got the right 50 percent right.

One funny thing happened. Our house is beautiful. My wife and her decorator Kate Dague created a beautiful ambience in our home, but as I have written before, I was given the privilege of decorating one room -- my office.

My wall of fame.

While the rest of the house is elegant and almost empty-looking in places, my office might be compared to the old saying about 100 pounds of manure in a 50-pound bag. There is nowhere on any of the walls where there is a square foot of open space. Almost every shelf of the wall of bookcases is double-lined. I've got hundreds of books and hundreds upon hundreds of movies on DVD.

And I've got sports memorabilia -- jerseys, bats and more than a hundred autographed baseballs.

I've got one case of 30 balls -- right under the Elway jersey -- in which every ball in the case represents a player in the Hall of Fame. The upper row is names like Koufax, Bench, Mantle, Williams, DiMaggio, Banks and Seaver. The bottom has only one -- faded but legible, Babe Ruth.

Me at 20?

I've got memories of Texas, of the days I wrote a column, pictures of Walt Masterson and of me interviewing Chris Evert Lloyd in 1981, a picture from my grandparents' wedding in 1920 and a picture of me on my 20th birthday.

The thing that was so goofy about that picture was that the first time I saw it again, about 35 years later, I honestly had a hard time figuring out who it was.

For one thing, I don't remember having a black shirt. For another, I really was never that good looking.

Anyway, that's my office, and what was funny about it was that the guests we had tonight who had never been in our home before were absolutely enthralled by my office -- the baseballs, the pictures, the movies.

Maybe I did a pretty good job after all.