The day i started my coin collection was the day my parents accepted an invitation for brunch at my neighbors house. We ate squid on stale crackers, mixed with the cranberry sauce from last thanksgiving. While our parents talked about the latest political issues and why they couldn't afford to send us to private schooling, we entertained ourselves by tossing peanuts into eachothers mouths. The ones we missed, we left on the ground. Some of them fell between the tiles. After a while of peanut tossing, just when I thought I'd conquered all that's to be conquered in the game, I missed...terribly. My peanut landed in the corner where my neighbors keep a very questionable African artifact collection. Their masks scare me. But I felt bad leaving that peanut over in the corner with all that old stuff, so I went over to find it. Or maybe I went out of curiousity. I don't know. Just as I was standing face to face with the most frightening masks I've ever seen, then again...those are the only masks I've ever seen, I found a plastic bag full of little pieces of shiny metal. They were all oddly shaped and each one had a different picture that popped out at me. I put a couple of those metal things in my pocket and showed them to my dad later. He told me they were coins, from a very long time ago. He asked me where I found them. "Oh...around." was my reply. I didn't feel like explaining that I stole them from our stale cracker neighbors. Later that day, I went for a walk, up and down my street. I was looking for coins. Mostly, I found dirty pennies, some of them dated back to the 1970's! After that, I often spent my lunch hour under my school playground, looking through the stones, searching for old coins. I kept trying to beat my last record. My dream was to, one day, have the largest coin collection in the world, maybe I'd even go to Africa.