The Things you Keep, the Things you Give Away.

Going through things trying to decide: keep, sell, give away?

I come across a hot wheels container with multiple used…some well used, toy die cast cars. I recognize some of them. They are left overs from pre 1987, when we lived at 35 9th street. They belonged to Teddy and Matthew.

I posted a few weeks ago about finding all my tax returns from way back in the day. In 1982 through 1987 we were a one paycheck family, and it wasn’t anything to brag about dollar wise. But we got by.

However, every payday I’d take the kids to the store for a toy. Most of the time the boys bought hot wheels. More bang for the buck at .99 cents each. I can’t remember exactly what Kisi got…by 1987 it was probably teen magazine, with Menudo, Cyndi Lauper and Madonna pictures.

But the boys pretty much stuck to the hot wheels during that era. I can’t tell you how many times I’d clean up their room and put stuff into their big old basketball shaped toy box, and there would be dozens of hot wheels in the bottom. They buried them, burned them, and blew them up…but some still survived. They made roads in the dirt for them, dropped rocks and bricks on them, and let Junior have some. Some still survived. Ted started wanting the ones with electric motors, and even cleverly wired one of them up to an electrical cord one day, and plugged it into a 110 outlet. That little motor ran 1000 miles an hour til it started smoking like a bomb, and blew the fuse.

Ted and I moved on to baseball cards in 1988, and Matt started wanting spider man comic books, so one day before we moved to Elm street in 1987, I cleaned the bottom of the old toy box out one last time and put what was left in the box I found today.

After a little reflection, I decided to put them in the “keep” pile. What else could I do??