abandoned treasures

this week there is a post secret card about finding picture frames in thrift stores that still have photos of children in them. the artist who submitted the card becomes sad and angry when s/he sees this. i do too and i can't help but try to imagine what has to happen for them to get there. is it possible that a parent who bothered to put the photo in the frame in the first place could just throw the whole thing into a box and mark it "donations"? what kind of thought process accompanies that? "well, we have so many pictures of (enter child's name), don't bother to take that one out." is it because the photos are cut to size for that frame and would no longer fit in with the other full-size photos? (admittedly, this is an issue for me, so i leave them in the frames behind the next photo. they just pile up in there) is it because someone other than the framer was emptying the home and discarding decorations? did these parents go to prison? are they dead? did they die with hundreds of framed photos in their homes that the busy mourners just didn't deem worthy of the tedious task of separation?
this card reminded me of a time that a friend of mine bought a video camera at a thrift store and it still had a tape with someone's graduation party on it. it was so weird. it also had some very intoxicated/strange (not sure which of those) people doing some impressive lip sync performances for the camera. naturally being the voyeurs that most of us are, we couldn't help ourselves but to watch the graduation party. it felt so strange. like peeking in someone's windows. i couldn't shake the feeling that we were going to get caught at any moment secretly observing the private lives of strangers. the strangest element of the whole experience was that our hometown is relatively small so occasionally a party guest would pass in front of the camera and surprise us by being someone one or both of us knew. this initially seemed like a convenient way to figure out how to return the tape to its rightful owners, assuming that its surrender was accidental. but to return it is to admit to having watched it. and this carried the potential for nervous stammering. what if the rightful owner is the kind of person who is not afraid to point out when something is weird. "you knew it wasn't yours and you could tell it was personal and you watched it anyway?" how does one justify that? i didn't want to. but i didn't have to, i didn't buy the camera. i wonder where that tape is now?