Hi, this is Dustin Naud. I'm originally from California. I was born in San Diego, lived a few places in the years before my memory was very keen, and ended up spending my life from ages 8-19 in Palm Springs. Right now I'm in my third year here at Brigham Young University, studying English and Spanish. I'm loving life. Especially right now, as the snow begins to cover the mountains. I can feel ski season approaching and I can hardly wait to hit the slopes and do some snowboarding. But, enough about me. Let me tell you about one of my earliest memories.
One of my earliest memories is of baseball cards. I used to love to collect baseball cards. My uncle was an avid collector and encouraged me all along the way. I loved to play little league baseball and couldn't think of a more useful way to occupy my time when I wasn't slugging away on the diamond than sort through my baseball cards. I amassed hundreds, thousands, and then some. I still have all of them, too. Tens of thousands of baseball cards still fill boxes and boxes in my closet back home. I remember having a subscription to the baseball card pricing guide, Beckett, and filtering through it, trying to find out just how much every one of my cards was worth.
Though this is one of my earliest and best memories, I admit that it's probably not the earliest memory which I have stored in the vault of my fragmented past. It is however, one of the most complete. Many of my memories, unlike my memory of baseball cards, are utterly incomplete. It's like Josh Billings said, "There are lots of people who mistake their imagination for their memory." Sometimes I wonder if my memory is memory or imagination. I used to laugh at my Dad because he would claim that he couldn't remember his childhood at all, yet now I'm beginning to feel the same way (though my childhood isn't nearly so distant as his).