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.

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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.