Do you have any gear that was outright given to you?

I inherit music.  As a few friends and neighbors know of my interest in music, and either wisher to shed their physical media or pass on their deceased loved ones media.  I had a neighbor whom I had only recently begun to become friends with who developed pancreatic cancer.  He had been a prominent advertising executive in Chicago and had written a few jingles himself.  He had learned of my taste in music and gear and a few weeks before he passed showed up at my house with a trunk full of complete opera boxes of LPs.  Opera isn’t my main interest and I didn’t have room the LPs, but I didn’t have the heart to turn him away.  These LPs were the most immaculate that I hade ever seen and I did play through them .  After he died I discreetly enquired of his daughter at the memorial service as to whether he had left a system behind, but it turned out that yes he had a high end system and had sold it off as soon as he was diagnosed because he didn’t want his family to have to deal with it.

  A family friend sold her home and moved to a Nursing Home before she passed.  She was a hoarder and the house was filled with stuff that she had inherited from others.  There were multiple refrigerators, sets of silver, etc.  Her kids insisted I take a reel to reel which I really didn’t want.  It wasn’t one of the prestige R2R brands.  So I tried to restore it, and bought a pre recorded tape from a resale shop.  The machine at the tape which became hopelessly twisted and broke off when I attempted to extract 

@tksteingraber 

If you restore 1 thing, and think of him every time you see or touch it, that's a gift.

@gkelly 

That's a great story. Well done.

@buellrider97 

Might as well have given you an invoice for 3K.

I inherited a 47 ft Yacht, like the saying goes, a boat is a hole in the water that you throw money into. There's more to the story, but you get the drift.

@jasonbourne71 

Your father had good sense. When going to college in Brooklyn, NY, the general rule was: if on or next to the trash can, good chance it's ok; in the trash can, forget it.

My 1st wife made me carry home 3 legged chairs, must have had 30 of them in the basement of the brownstone basement where we rented. I swapped parts, got many on all 4s, what I remember most was how quickly they would disappear when I put them out near the sidewalk. Gone in minutes.