A friend of mine had a brown shopping bag half full of baseball cards his father had given him (they were father’s growing up). Being young and not into baseball, we figured the best use of baseball cards was “Spoke rippers”. You know, when you use a clothespin to hook the card in your bike spokes so when you ride around it makes a cool sound. Anyway, we weren’t stupid about it, we only used the “yucky” black and white cards for spoke rippers and kept the color ones. :rolleyes: I don’t want to know the value of the cards we bent up and destroyed.
About half my books. “But I thought you read them already” :rolleyes:
My tonsils.
When I was seven, I had my tonsils taken out. Somewhere, I had heard that, if you asked, the doctor would save them for you in a jar of formaldehyde, which I did. For some time after my surgery, my tonsils were kept in a glass jar with a black screw top on the top shelf of the cupboard over the refrigerator. When ever I had new friends over, or anybody I wanted to impress, I would climb up on the kitchen counters and retrieve this souvenir of a childhood passage, which always got ooh’s and aah’s from my friends.
Then one day, with expectant onlookers awaiting, I opened the cupboard to display my treasured tonsils, AND THEY WERE GONE!!! After years of denial, I finally got a confession out of Mom, who said she was sick of looking at my shrivelled little tonsils everytime she opened the cupboard, and she threw them in the trash.
I can’t imagine why.
Comic books, oh god all my comic books. Gone, gone, gone. Giant Sized X-Men #1 - Gone. Crisis on Infinite Earths #1-12 - Gone. My complete collection of Peter Porker, The Spectacular Spider-Ham - All Gone.
My mom has kept every single thing I ever had. My room is exactly the same as it was when she kicked me out. Oh wait…
Two framed Frank Frazetta prints: this one, and one entitled “The Barbarian” for which I leave no link due to minor boobage. Also every love letter I ever received from my first girlfriend. The young lady’s parents were on welfare, don’t you see; which made anything from her worthless.
Or something. :rolleyes: Thanks, Mom. Really appreciate the thoughtfulness.
My mom never told me what she really thought of my husband, but I left my wedding dress at her house after the wedding, and when I tried to reclaim it a year later, she had given it to the Salvation Army. 
<peers into closets and cellar> My mother has not thrown away a damn thing her entire life. The only reason the house doesn’t explode is we’ve lost stuff every time we moved.
My complete set of Voltron Lions!! They transformed and everything!! She said she had to get rid of them because the company that made them was saying that they could cause lead poisoning or something like that. I still think I’d rather be poisoned than let go of those things. They were really, really cool
My packrat mother–who saved everything, including empty thread spools and boxfuls of old margarine tubs–nonetheless pitched my years-long collections of Batman comic books, Mad magazine and The National Lampoon.
I was just sick. So was she, when she later learned how much some of them would have sold for. (Her motivation was frugality; I just loved 'em.)
Sigh.
Veb
My Isaac Asimov books. sob
My Terry Pratchett books. wail
I really loved those… I had most of the Lucky Starr books, an anthology of Black Widower stories, the ENTIRE FIRST SET OF DISCWORLD NOVELS… I’m not traumatised twitch why do you ask? twitchconvulse
They sell them again, sans lead paint, at Toys R’ Us. My brother asked for them two Christmases ago (his originals just got broken) and that’s where I got them…
Half of my baseball card collection…the better half. One day I calculated how much she threw away in only my 10 most valuable cards. Well over $5,000. But I would’ve never sold them anyway…unless I needed to pay the astronomical late charge for a porn movie that I RENTED and she threw out. That’s one more rental place that I can never go back to.
Thankfully my mom knew better than to throw out my toys without my permission. Thanks to that I still have the original teddy ribskin and gruby dolls that read along with the books (I have them all), the complete She-Ra collection including the owl thing, the evil cat lady adn all the horses and all the little pieces, and finally all my rainbow brite even the house and horses and villians. I was a very picky child and kept everything nice, I might even have some boxes for my toys somewhere. I was at a hobby show the other day and saw thepanther lady from She-Ra for sale, she was $60 and missing her tale and she didn’t have the panther companion…I was amazed, since I have her along with the tale and the panther companion.
Toys are great!