What things of purely sentimental value from your childhood do you now regret losing? Or maybe you were wise enough (wiser than I) to save them? Perhaps your mom surprised you with one a day after she cleaned out all the junk in her attic?
Me, I mainly regret losing a toy I had as a toddler. “Doggie” was a stuffed dog which I carried everywhere (a la Hobbes). My mom must have sewed and repaired the poor thing far too many times to count, until I finally outgrew him and he got lost in the woods or thrown out or something.
I still have my stuffed dog, George. He’s not exactly in the condition he was in when he first appeared under the Christmas tree when I was 3. For example, he had eyes back then. When you squeeze his nose sharply, the squeaker sounds like a bark…though his nose is somewhat threadbare, he can still bark. He’ll be 50 years old this December.
I wish I still had my old pedal car. Not because of what they’re worth, but just because of the stories around that thing. I can’t believe my parents ever took their eyes off me when I was loose in it; they once chased me down about four or five blocks from our house. It was blue, with a red steering wheel and it had fake portholes painted along the sides of the hood, like a Buick.
I kept some of my first cabbage patch dolls I played with and a Rainbow Brite doll (along with her horse). I pulled these out of the closet for our 18 month old daughter a couple weeks ago for her to play with.
I miss all the Smurfs, Strawberry Shortcake and other 80s toys I used to play with, cause now all I see those in the store for outrageous prices!
This is going to sound weird, but when I was four or five years old my aunt gave me one of her old college textbooks from a Children’s Lit class. It had traditional stories from pretty much every region of the world, plus excerpts from many classic children’s books. I loved it so much that I took it to preschool with me every day and read stories during naptime instead of sleeping. This book has stayed with me through every college move, and I wouldn’t give it up for the world, even though I haven’t opened it in years.
I lived in Oregon until I was 4. Just before I moved, my surrogate grandmother gave me a small glass squirrel. I never saw her again. I barely remember her giving it to me; in fact, for a long time I thought it was a different lady that had given it to me. I just put it on display again after my last move. I’m 49 now. The squirrel isn’t all that well made, but I’ve had it almost all my life.
When my dad was just a boy, his father gave him a G.I. Joe; it had just come out. When I was 4 or 5, my dad gave it to me, and I still have it to this day. He’s got all the original clothes and hats that came with him, as well as a sleeping bag and some guns. My favorite feature - even better than the Kung-Fu Grip - is the “battle scar” that runs down his left cheek…that my dad carved with a dart.
My mum still has my beloved stuffed bear Mary stashed away, as well as a lot of my old kids’ books, but I miss my pair of purple-and-pink sandals (which mysteriously went missing one day on the playground, while I was climbing up the slide).
My two first stuffed toys, a Teddy bear I got when I was born, and a donkey recieved my first Christmas, when almost a year old, are sitting on top of my bookcase. Teddy is small and white, in decent shape. The donkey isn’t white plush anymore. it’s all worn off and he is gray. There’s a scar on his tummy where I cut him open to try and restuff him. His filling had compacted, and he was limp. His tail is shorter, having been resewn a couple times. And I would give up either of them.
There were books my sister and I had as kids that got lost, so we’ve collected most of them again. The Mad Scientist’s Club, The Great Pyramid Mystery, The Enormous Egg, The Chronicles of Prydain, Follow My Leader, The Forgotten Door, Homer Price, Katie John, several others. I love the internet, it made it a whole lot easier to find these books.
I still have my tattered old Floppy dog who is barely held together. But the toy I miss the most, and constantly search for, is a hard plastic, pink whale tub toy with a funnel-shaped area on the underside that lead to the spout…when you made the whale dive, water would squirt out of the spout. It resided in the bathroom closet for ever, and was my constant tub-time friend. When I had babies, I introduced them to Whale, but my daughter dropped him on the hard tile floor and he shattered. I never thought to save the pieces. Someday I will find another one…I never saw one just like it, ever, anywhere, but I’m not going to lose hope.
When I was a pre-schooler about 35 years ago, my father had put his deceased father’s shiny construction worker’s hard hat in the pile to go to Goodwill. I liberated it and wrote my name underneath the brim at least five times in orange crayon to keep any one of my brothers from claiming it. I played with it for years, it made a great soldier’s helmet, knight’s armor, etc. It is in my son’s closet now.
The one I miss the most is a small rug that my Aunt hand hooked just for me. She knew not to put any silly flowers or girly stuff on it so it had an orange tiger on a green background. I lost is somewhere around college or shortly thereafter but I don’t know exactly when or how.
One I still have is a small ceramic cat that was my favorite grandmother’s. She had all kinds of figurines but I liked the cats the best. I have old black and white photos from way before I was born and you can see the cat sitting on the coffee table.
When I was a little Lacha, I had a Steiff hand puppet of a crow & his name was Johnny Crow, after the children’s book Johnny Crow’s Garden.
Mom found him in the attic the other day and mailed him down to me, and now he’s “perched” above my computer. Of course, sophisticate that I am, I now think of him as Johnny Crow the psychopomp.
I still have my BlueBird uniform, cap and pin from when I was six/seven years old. I don’t really know why I have kept it all these years but every once in a while when I decide to go through my cedar chest there it is.
At the Cleveland Zoo in the '60s, you used to be able to buy a green plastic key shaped like an elephant. You’d put the trunk part in a little box in front of various animal exhibits and turn it, and a speaker would tell you about the animal in the exhibit.
My mother moved from the house where I grew up to an apartment about 9 years ago, and my sisters and I spent the better part of a Saturday going through boxes of stuff in her basement.
I found my ancient stuffed panda bear, Bear, and still have him. I also found a bunch of books that I now have on my bookshelves. I had a collection of the Raggedy Ann books, plus a pile of books I’d read in elementary school. They’re nice, too; good-quality hardback books with a color picture on the cover (no dust jacket, just a colored cover). They’re all Scholastic books, the ones you ordered in school.
I still have little lion somewhere in the house. A small stuffed lion that will play “You are my sunshine” when it’s wound up. It was mine as a baby and still works 36 years later.
What I don’t have are most of my books from childhood. I’m slowly collecting them so that my kids can enjoy them when they’re a bit older.
My sister had a red and white stuffed monkey, I had a black one. We played with them all the time and even wrote a book of “monkey tails.”
Image my surprise when we were cleaning out my mother’s house after she died and I found out my monkey was a naked, earless, tailless Mickey Mouse doll!
I don’t have anything, and that’s okay, really. My mother was an antique dealer, and we got used to things like furniture and dishes and some toys that we played with just being gone. That and the fact that we moved several times during my childhood meant that personal possessions were kept to a minimum. It pretty taught me that stuff is just stuff.
I have a couple of treasures that are worse for wear but are in my one big memento box. The first is the Cross felt-tip pen I got at the end of seventh grade. I was going to skip eighth grade and go directly to high school, and The Administration didn’t like that. So they said I couldn’t take part in the eighth grade graduation festivities. My father got me that pen as a “graduation” gift. I thought I had lost it for some years but then it reappeared and I used it to take notes in job interviews and to write wise words in journal books. During my latest interview I somehow managed to logde the end of it in the cap and it broke off. So it is now symbolic and safely tucked away.
The other item is a hand-painted pin my mom got me at a craft fair. Since you can never find anything with my whole name on it, she was delighted to have them personalize it on the spot with Gwendolen. I’m not sure what it was made of, but eventually the painted part separated from the pin part. It also got wet and weakened. So I glued it to a piece of balsa wood and preserved it in glue. It’s special because my father controls the money and it was one of the few times mom bought something for me.
Being a native Clevelander you just sparked a very vague memory of this! Yeah, I must have used the key during either a class trip or two or when my parents took me. Wow.
So it is now symbolic and safely tucked away.