Regrets

Contributor: John McTaggart

Several years ago, my wife had a garage sale.

In my years of being married, I have learned a few things along the way. Among these things, is when my wife decides to have a garage sale — just nod in agreement and stay out of the way.

So that’s what I did.

After all was said and done, the sale was over after a few days, people stopped loitering around my house, and there was less stuff headed back to the basement than there was heading out to the garage.

Plus, my wife was happy with how it went and had a little extra spending money (which she was likely going to spend at other garage sales in the coming weeks).

So, all-in-all, I considered the weekend a success.

Fast-forward a few years.

My wife and I are sitting around the kitchen table, sorting through a recent submission to SGC, droning on about how much I love trading cards.

Somehow, over the course of the conversation, we land on Garbage Pail Kids cards.

We scour sold listings on Ebay, and I notice my wife’s face drop. Her eyes widened, and I could almost sense the doom wash over her.

As we browsed through sold prices, in shock at what some of the figures are (currently, a 1985 Garbage Pail Kids Adam Bomb PSA 10 sits at $8,800) I see a tear stream down my wife’s face.

“Oh my God,” she cries.

Being the attentive husband I am, I ask her what’s wrong.

“I sold an entire binder filled with these at my garage sale,” she said. “There were at least three complete sets and tons of extra cards.”

If you have ever met my wife, or know her at all, to say she takes care of things is an understatement.

The OCD in her means everything is kept in meticulous condition — always.

I remember seeing this binder years and years ago.

Pages and pages of these Garbage Pail Kids cards, each one placed neatly in the pages of the binder, and left undisturbed for decades.

She remembered each one as I started scrolling through the names and artwork on each card.

“Were they the 1985 set?” I asked. “There was more than one set made.”

“I organized them by year, too, and card number. You know me. All of it was 1985. That’s when I started collecting them.”

And now, I was crying.

Thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars — gone.

How many PSA 10s?

Dozens perhaps, who knows?

My wife quickly left the table, returning a few minutes later with a notebook in her hand.

She leafed through the pages quickly, scanning each one up and down until she landed on the spot she was searching for. She turned it toward me and pointed at a line about halfway down the page.

Garbage Pail Kids….. $7.

She sold the binder to some kid down the street — for $7.

In fairness, she had no idea what they were worth, and I did my best to reassure her that it happens.

“Welcome to the trading card game,” I explained. “Where this kind of crap happens all the time.”

And it does.

Back in the day, I probably sold a hundred (most of them pack-pulled) raw 1993 Upper Deck Sp Derek Jeter RCs for $25-$40 each. Hard to believe there wouldn’t have been a PSA 10 somewhere in the mix (PSA 10s of that card are worth about $470,000).

I sold raw LeBron James Topps Chromes’ for less than $150 for what seemed like years back then, and also moved along many raw 1986 Fleer Michael Jordan rookie’s for around $400.

And in many cases I bought a lot of these cards from dealers who have a similar story.

Regret and armchair quarterbacking is part of the game, anyone who does this seriously knows this very well.

It also works in reverse, doesn’t it?

How many of us remember selling Robert Griffin III cards for ridiculous amounts of money, or even more recently, players such as Bol Bol or Sekou Doumbouya?

This is the game, but like a lottery player who tells you they were only two numbers away from the big jackpot —the story is also part of the experience. In fact, it’s a rite of passage.

In truth, I actually relish these heartbreaking stories of regret as much or more as I relish the uplifting tales of success and fortune.

The ebb-and-flow of the hobby is what makes it great, it’s what makes you constantly have to be on your toes, be thinking, be gutsy and brave.

Don’t be afraid to share some of these moments with the rest of us in the comments.

I think you’ll find a beautiful acceptance within the community for this kind of thing, and I also believe you’ll find that all of us have at least one story similar to yours.