This, That, and the Other

Warning: I’ve written about this topic several times before so if you’ve already suffered through my tragic story about my collections of baseball cards and comic books, feel free to move on.

To answer the daily prompt question directly, I do not currently have any collections. However, when I was a lad, I used to collect comic books, baseball cards, and my two favorite humor magazines, MAD and National Lampoon.

The comic books, mostly superhero-type comics from DC Comics and Marvel, cost ten cents each back then. MAD and National Lampoon were a quarter each. The packs of baseball cards, sold by Topps and Fleet, cost a nickel each and included seven baseball cards and a flat, square piece of pink bubblegum.

Each month when the new editions were published, I would ride my bike to the newsstand in town, where I’d buy five comic books and two packages of baseball cards. I’d ride my bike back home and take the wrappers off of the packages of baseball cards and sort them out. And after reading the comic books, I’d stack them in piles based upon the characters.

I continued to buy baseball cards and comic books for years until I got distracted when I was about 17 by girls. But in the meantime, I had built up a significant collection of both comic books and baseball cards.

I kept the more recent comic book issues in my bedroom and the older issues in the basement of my parents’ home, along with my cherished baseball cards.

What became of my prized collections of comic books and baseball cards? It’s a sad story, actually. After high school I headed off to college for four years. When I returned home after graduating, I discovered that my vast — and priceless — collections of both comic books and baseball cards were missing.

I asked my father about them and he told me that he had thrown them away, explaining that he needed the space in the basement for some other purpose. “Besides,” he said, “that was kid stuff. You’re an adult now.”

More recently…

I also had a large collection of classic rock LPs. And by “LP” I don’t mean liquid propane. You remember what LPs are right. They are “long-playing” analog vinyl phonograph records recorded at a speed of 33+1⁄3 rpm on a 12-inch disk.

Anyway, I had hundreds of these classic rock albums that I had collected over the years until vinyl albums were replaced by music CDs and, ultimately by MP3 recordings and music streaming services.

But when we moved from Massachusetts to a condo in San Francisco, I knew I had to downsize, so I had a garage sale where I sold for fifty cents each (or gave away the leftovers) all of the albums, since I had most of them represented in MP3 format on my iPod and iPhone.