Things Your Parents Stealth-Confiscated
I get the sense this was WAY more common with our generation. There were some toys that my parents quietly “made disappear.” The lawn-mower/like toy with the plastic dome and the balls inside that would loudly pop incessantly as it was pushed. My plastic “Giant Horn” which I owned many decades before I heard the word “vuvuzela.” Both vanished mysteriously without a trace.
The most interesting one was a book. When I was aged 6-8, I had a five-tier bookshelf, loaded with books. Most were inherited from older cousins and neighbors. I wasn’t fond of all of them - but I KNEW all of them. And if I was asked to find any of them on my bookshelf, I knew precisely where they would be.
And that is why, even at that young age, I found it odd that a book was missing. And it wasn’t one of my favorites, so I knew I hadn’t removed and misplaced it. My mother went through the motions of helping me look for it, without success. Finally, she offered to take me to a bookstore to buy a new book that I would actually like. Good enough for me.
So my new book was “The Berenstain Bears’ Science Fair.” Which was a far better book than the missing copy of “Little Black Sambo.” Yeah, my parents made the right call.