I was three years old when I got my chubby little hands on my first coin and I haven"t looked back since. It"s now longer than I care to admit since the day when fate threw the round and the shiny across my path, and waited with bated breath to see if I would pick up her lure.
As is evidenced from this article, pick it up I did, and the rest, as they say, is history. Well, not quite. There"s a little more to this story that needs telling.
The fact of the matter was that since I was only three, and wouldn"t part with my shiny new friend for all the tea in China, I was given my first piggy bank in the form of a plastic jar and allowed to place my precious coin inside it.
On my part, I allowed the coin to be parted from me only on the understanding that the jar be placed next to my bed. A standoff, but a good one, and one that worked through the succeeding years when I collected as many of my shiny round friends as I could.
And then came that one day that every piggy bank must face: eventual annihilation by a hammer, a large rock, or just by dropping on the floor from a good height. The time had come to unveil all the riches I had accumulated and to add up all of my meager wealth into a tidy little pile.
By this time my plastic jar had progressed to a ceramic replica of the quintessential piggy bank, and my aesthetic appreciation of my shiny round friends had turned to a monetary appreciation.
However, I wish I could say that it was for normal eight year old reasons of running out of pocket money that I cashed in my piggy bank, but it wasn"t. Just the night before my dad had brought home a book that was manna to my little coin collecting soul, and I was hooked from the moment I started the first page.
And that dear friends, is the point at which I can truthfully say the rest is history.