It was in 1970. I was just three years old. My grandfather was sixty, which was his retirement age. My parents and grandmother went to work. They came home very late. My mother was studying at university and working at the same time. For the next three years, before I started school, my grandfather took care of me.
My grandfather was a clerk born in 1910. He didn't know how to handle children. He tried to follow the written instructions he got from his parents. But it didn't work very well.
My grandfather used to take long walks with me, take me to playgrounds. Sometimes he'd forget me somewhere. Once he brought another child home instead of me.
Many other family stories come from this period. I remember some of them. Some I only know from stories.
But my grandfather's favorite thing to read. He chose the book History of the Czech Nation in Bohemia and Moravia. It's a five-volume work, about twice the size of the Bible, published between 1848 and 1878. The lexicon and sentence structure of the work were already outdated at the time of its creation. I was three years old when my grandfather started reading.
Grandpa lay down on the couch. I sat down on the carpet and got a box of invalid coins to play with. Grandpa was reading. I rummaged through the coins, looking at the pictures on them, sorting the coins by size by color. I'd put the coins together in patterns. My grandfather regularly fell asleep after about ten pages. I was always playing with coins.
Before I started school, my grandfather read the whole book aloud. It took three years. And when I went to school, he gave me a box of coins. By then I had learned to read the writing on them, even though I didn't understand Latin or abbreviations.
This is the oldest coin that was in the box.
1 Gulden, 1860, diameter 29 mm, weight 12.345 g of silver, purity 900/1000
This is the first coin in my collection. It's priceless to me. Kind of like the first dime for Uncle Scrooge.
And then my collecting passion only grew stronger. I started by harassing visitors, demanding invalid coins from relatives and friends. Those who traveled abroad had to bring me coins as well. I started exchanging coins with my classmates at school. And eventually, I started shopping.
I admit that over the next half century, sometimes coins were not my priority. But I always came back to them after a while.
I don't know if I remember anything my grandfather read to me. But it's true that I later studied history at university.
I had such an interesting discussion under my last article. I thought someone might be interested in how my collection has evolved. What mistakes I made, when and how I fell for scammers, etc.
I should have some days off now. I'll try to write at least one article a week again.
Thank you for reading and for any support.