baseball cards

One Man’s Treasure…

Fandango9 Comments

I was shocked when I came home from college after my graduation to find that my father had tossed out my extensive comic book collection along with all of my baseball cards that I had stored in a closet in the basement.

I was so angry I was practically foaming at the mouth. I screamed at my father, “Dad, why the hell did you trash all of my comics and toss out my baseball cards?”

“That’s kid stuff,” he said. “You’re not a kid anymore. Besides, I needed room to store your mother’s knitting stuff, so I made room by throwing out all that crap.”

My jaw tightened and my teeth were grinding. “Kid stuff, are you kidding me. “Those comic books and baseball cards are collectors’ items. They are going to be very valuable one day. Or were going to be valuable.”

“Well, sorry son,” my father said, “I didn’t think they had any value and I thought the prudent thing to do in order to make room for your mother’s knitting stuff was to throw away what I thought was useless crap.”

“Prudent?” I said. “The prudent thing to do, Dad, would have been to pick up the phone and ask me.”

To this day, I will periodically Google the value of the comic books and baseball cards I had stored in the basement of my parents’ house and it brings tears to my eyes.

Written for these daily prompts: Fandango’s One-Word Challenge (foam), The Daily Spur (trash), My Vivid Blog (comics), Ragtag Daily Prompt (grind), and Your Daily Word Prompt (prudent).

I must confess that this is actually a bit of a retelling of this post from May 2018, reworked to leverage today’s prompts.

Friday Fictioneers — Collectibles

Fandango21 Comments

94247FB4-713F-427D-9241-422285E99667“They’re oil squirt cans, Kenny,” Sam said. “I worked as a machinist back in the day and I had to keep those machines well lubricated by squirting oil from cans just like these into the moving parts on the equipment.”

“But why do you have them on the shelf?” the boy asked.

“I just started to collect them, is all,” Sam said.

“Why?”

“Everyone has something they collect, Kenny,” Sam said. “When I was a kid I collected baseball cards and comic books. Don’t you have anything you collect?”

“Yeah.”

“What?”

“Money,” Kenny said. “Got a dollar for my collection?”

(100 words)

Written for the Friday Fictioneers prompt from Rochelle Wisoff-Fields. Photo credit: Nick Allen.

Unexpected and Costly

Fandango17 Comments

The comic books, mostly superhero-type comics from DC Comics and Marvel, cost ten cents each back then. 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.

I’d buy five comic books and two packages of baseball cards each week. I’d ride my bike back home and take the wrapper 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.

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, which I had stored in the basement of my parents’ house, were missing.

I asked my father about my collections 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.”

That was unexpected. And costly.

Written for the new three-word challenge from Teresa over at The Haunted Wordsmith. Today’s three words are “boy,” “wrapper,” and “unexpected.”