Renewed interests as an adult are directly related to toys lost as a child.  Treasured items that you could not imagine parting with have somehow been lost completely.  Weathered and battered, these toys did not disappear without first having been used and over and over again.

A green vinyl hard sided suitcase.  The inner pockets ripped out to better accommodate the King of all toys.  LEGOS.  Mounds of legos of all shapes, sizes, and colors.  Platforms for buildings, wheels, body parts, beautiful squares and rectangles all coming together to be whatever is wanted.  Thousands of individual pieces played with over the years and added to as needs presented themselves.  These LEGOS were clearly mobile and were taken everywhere as a whole and in smaller individual groups.  Kindergarten until 4th grade, not a day passed when LEGOS were not on board and readily available.  In pockets, in pencil boxes, traded with friends, and always ready for the imagination.  This epic pile of plastic magic somehow just disappeared.  One day they were ever present and the next they had vanished into thin air.  Asking the question of how this happens is not worth the effort.  Somewhere out there these plastic beauties still live on and are hopefully part of someone’s grand project.

Hot Wheels and Matchbox cars.  No one brand was better than the next.  They each offered something different and had enough accessories available that made it necessary to not choose sides.  The number still sticks in my head.  From an age when I did not know what a car was until and age when I should have moved on, 229 individual die-cast cars and trucks were accumulated, played with, organized, and cared for at all costs.  Plastic sided cases with individual slots for cars were stacked 4 deep.  Race tracks with 360 degree loops were put together, taken apart, and put together again for epic battles between cars.  The front porch of the house where I grew up was the scene of some of the most involved and thought out play involving these cars.  My best buddy Ricky Heidorn and I were simply obsessed with these small toys.  We would line then up, park them, choose different cars for different purposes, roll them, crash them, and then park them once again.  Like the LEGOS they one day simply vanished.  Related?  I don’t know.  Tragic and sad?  Of course.

Science toys.  Microscopes, chemistry sets, erector sets, mini labs, electronics kits, and physics based toys.  All taken out and setup at once to create a mad scientist laboratory in the garage.  A table neatly arranged from left to right according to the interest of the day.  Notebooks, pencils, calculators available as useful tools and really cool props.  Being the son of a Doctor, I had easy access to a white lab coat.  Beyond fun and world where a kid could use his imagination to explore endless possibilities.  Yep, all of this, including the lab coat (personalized with a marker)….gone gone gone.

Imagine finding all of these things all at once at the same time.  The thought of this is almost too much to stand.  The happiness would be beyond words.