I did this once as an adult. We created a moveable paper stream with ducks and a bridge. It was a barrel of laughs. My friend kept it.
For several years in the early 1980s I corresponded with Isaac Asimov. I treasure the cards and letters I received from him. Unfortunately, I cannot find a letter in which he wrote me a funny little birthday verse. I never even thought to make a copy, and now I fear that my Asimovian ditty is lost forever.
When my wife and I started dating, one of the first gifts she bought me was an enamel on gold-colored metal tie-tack-like pin of The Tick. On a trip to San Francisco, I bought her a similar style pin that was an Alcatraz souvenier (bought in the airport gift shop, but depicting a cartoon cat as a prisoner and the word alCATraz). Both of us wore the pins on our jackets, and both of us lost our pins sometime that summer. Neither of us have been able to find an exact replacement. We like to think the pins found each other and are living happily ever after.
My dad’s dog tags from Vietnam.
He’s still alive, and he’s actually the one who lost them (recently) but I am really saddened that if they don’t turn up I’ll never get them.
I am all depressed now thinking about all this awesome stuff you guys have lost.
A videotape of a trip to North Carolina that my mother took me and my brother on when we were 18 or 19. It was the first time we had seen any kind of snow. I had to run around to gather enough for a snowball, which I promptly threw at my brother, hitting him in the nuts. Then there was the unidentified creature we saw on the side of the road. Then there was the waltzing in the hotel room to the Looney Tunes music coming from the TV. Then there was the little cabin we stayed in on the mountain. It was just one of the happiest times any of us can remember.
The videotape was in the VCR years later when some assholes broke in to my mother’s apartment and stole everything that wasn’t nailed down. Ended up in a trashcan, I’m sure.
A couple of things come to mind. When I graduated from high school I was given a Snap On toolbox full of Snap On tools. It was not a cheap set of tools, my mother paid a quite a bit for everything. A few months later while I was in Navy bootcamp, my wonderful brother pawned the tools for drug money. Then in 1991 a cousin and I went to a Winston Cup race at Sears Point Raceway. I bought a program and was able to get it signed by every driver that was there to race. The ironic part is the 3 signatures on the cover belonged to Dale Earnhardt, Davey Allison, and Alan Kulwicki. I sat it down for only a minute to get something out of my backpack and some dickhead walked off with it. I bought another program but by then it was too late to get many of the autographs again.
Photos I took when I was in the Navy with a buch of friends overseas were taken to be devoloped and never seen again by the photo lab.
There’s one object I’m sad about. I’m a machinist by trade. I took it up after my dad died. He was trained as a journyman before I was born. He made a tap handle that I used the crap out of. I think I left it on my bench at a shop I worked at. I loved using a tool that he made. It took a while before I noticed it was gone. I still think about it whenever I use the replacement I bought.
A small hand-hooked rug that looked like a tigerskin on a green background, done by my Aunt just for me when I was a kid. I have no idea how I lost it but it’s been gone for years.
My great-grandmother’s rolling pin. I think I left it in a drawer when moving from one apartment to another.
A silver pentacle charm on a silver chain. A guy that I had a huge crush on bought it for me at a car boot sale in Cornwall after I admired it. Somehow it didn’t make the overseas trip from Britain back to the states.
My Canon AE1 camera, handed down to me by my mother. It was stolen from a motel room while I was at a concert. I found out later that the “friend” I was sharing the room with left the concert early and sold the camera for drug money.
My original National Park Passport book, which was the record of my NPS visits dating back to the early 80’s. I suspect that I left it in a map pocket when I sold my 4Runner in 1998. Although I’ve replaced it with another Passport Book and re-visited most of the Parks that I had in the original, it’s really not the same.
A white gold necklace with a pendant set with heirloom diamonds…
Last week, my husband and I went on a cruise with some members of his family including his parents. Our second wedding anniversary was the day we sailed. As a gift to me on our anniversary, my mother-in-law presented me with this pendant and chain. The one-carat, nearly flawless diamond and the two equally precious quarter-carat baguettes were perfect matches to the diamonds that are set in my engagement ring that she gave to my husband to give to me. I cried when I opened the little black box at the dinner table. I couldn’t believe she had been so generous.
The diamonds came from a pair of earrings that my father-in-law bought for her from Tiffany & Co. in New York decades ago.
I was keeping the necklace in the safe in our cabin. When we packed to leave the ship, it was missed. I didn’t notice it was missing until we were waiting in the Houston airport for our flight home. We contacted the cruise line’s lost and found division…no luck. We’ve offered a reward for its return…no luck. A friend of ours owns a company that works closely with several cruise lines, and he tried his best to use his contacts. We just found out today that the necklace is gone forever. Our hopes that the jewelry fell into honest hands were dashed.
I owned it for exactly four days before I lost it forever. My mother-in-law will be heartbroken when my husband and I tell her tonight that her generosity and her trust in me were horribly misplaced.
A silver cross on a silver ball chain that my skater boyfriend gave to me back in high school. It was a really cool thing and I kept it for a long time, but eventually I lost it in a move or something. Sucks. 
Oooo. Good luck, butterfly.
I lost a really wonderful sweater recently, and I miss it surprisingly much. I try to only buy second-hand, so it’s not like I can just go replace it. It was the perfect sweater.
My most valuable lost possession was my digital camera that I foolishly, foolishly put in my checked baggage en route to Italy via Heathrow. Why did I not put it with my carry-on? Because people could steal it that way! :smack: :rolleyes:
Nonetheless, I hope that my answer to this questions remains the same.
A darling (sentimental value only) tapestry my Aunt bought in France in the 1950s. My ex husband left it at his girlfriend’s house and it somehow mysteriously disappeared. :rolleyes: Guess it wasn’t enough to sleep with my husband. This 25 years ago. He was no great loss, but I’m still sad about losing that little tapestry.
It was shades of blue and cream and depicted kittens playing with a ball of yarn. I’ve looked and looked trying to find a replacement on ebay and the like. Sadly, no luck.
A dollhouse, no matter how it brings my masculinity into question. You see, my grandfather had Alzheimer’s pretty bad from the time I was five or so. This, coupled with the fact that he lived in Dallas (I was in Kentucky) meant that I hardly knew him. But in his day, he was quite the craftsman. There’s very little in his home that he didn’t make himself, and it’s all fantastically done. And the last thing he ever made was a dollhouse.
He gave my older sister that dollhouse for Christmas when I was about seven. She wasn’t into dolls, so it somehow ended up in a corner in my room for a few years. Fast forward to circa age 11: my family’s having a yardsale, and I can sell some of my stuff and keep the money. So the dollhouse goes. For $8. I’ll never forgive myself for that one. One of my only real memories of my grandfather sold for a dozen candy bars.
In a similar vein, my grandmother (wife of above) has recently gotten dementia herself, so she’s moved to Kentucky and my dad sold her house in Texas, and all the contents of it. It never even occurred to me that he’d sell my grandfather’s not-quite-finished Model T that he’d been assembling piece by piece for a solid three decades. I never actually owned that, so i don’t think it counts as far as the OP is concerned. But I’m pretty sure I’ll be missing that car 50 years from now.