Hmm... well... first make sure you removed all sharp and/or blunt motile objects from the room, make sure there's a back door for the exit strategy, make sure your passport is in order, and make sure the ticket to Argentina has been purchased through an agency with a good policy for anonymizing traveler destinations.

Next get him fed with his favorite meal, and then get him settled in his favorite chair, and put on the cloths that are his favorite to see you in.

Put on his favorite mellow music, and snuggle up to him and...

Start crying.

Real, honest to goodness full real tear-streaming crying.

That's your only defense. Guys can handle anything except the tears.

Bawl like a baby while you explain what happened, and the tears, if they are real tears, will collide with the emotion he's going to be feeling about loosing his sacred memorabilia which is equivalent to chopping off one of his tentacles with a meat cleaver if it is his box of real special memorabilia.

That will stun him, and he's going to feel sick, and he's not going to know what to do, so at the very least you'll have him in a state of paralysis while he tries to sort out the gravity of what has happened.

Then hit him with something on the scale of symbolically representing a beginning to a virtual new box of memorabilia to rival the original, with something on the scale of... tell him you're pregnant and that you're going to deliver and that there's going to be a new child...

If all that fails and he still can't reconcile, then have the divorce papers ready, leave them on the table, and go stay with your family for awhile as he comes to terms.

Eventually he'll realize it was just a box of stuff that was in that box because he never used it anyway and hardly ever looked at it, but he's going to want something equally significant and *permanent* to replace it... like his relationship to *you* - the only thing more important than his memories - so when he calls and asks you to come back... don't wait a second!

But... just as a cautionary tale so that people will know to be careful...

It happened to my dad, who was an avid hobby photographer who wore his camera like a necktie. He had an incredible library of wildlife shots (he could have, and should have, published a coffee-table book) and one day my step-mother, his second wife, was cleaning out what she presumed to be the detritus of his previous marriage, and she tossed a box of his most valued photographs.

I remember that it seemed to take him six weeks to get over it... he was in a constant state of moroseness... always coming up with stories about adventures that had happened around each and every lost picture.

Finally, one day, he stopped talking about it, but he *never* picked up that camera again, after it having been a third appendage for 25 years...

And a year later they were separated... and then divorced.

I think part of the problem was the way she brushed it off with her trademark little cutesy smile, saying, "Well... now he has good reason to take lots more pictures (hee hee)".