There was a time when I was a kid when, for some reason, I couldn’t seem to get my fill of playing marbles. Anytime I could round up a couple of marble players, we’d grab a sharp stick, draw a ring in the middle of the road, and have at it. Of course, we played for keeps.
The irony of it all was that I couldn’t play marbles worth a dime and was constantly losing. I couldn’t prove it, of course, but I feel confident in saying that about 75 percent of the marbles that were circulating throughout the neighborhood in somebody else’s pockets, had originally been mine. It was pretty much understood by everybody that when I’d enter the game, I’d end up losing every marble I had, right down to my taw. I remember that on a couple of occasions while the game was still in progress and I was still in it, Mom yelled for me to come home and I had to quit. Before I went to the house, I just went ahead and gave the other boys what few I had left.
But as bad as I was at marbles, there was one individual that was just the opposite and constantly broke every kid in the neighborhood. Matter of fact, this young lady was so good at marbles that I gave her a couple of paragraphs in my first book, “Muddy Branch.”
She was, by the way, the only student in fifth grade that was taller than the teacher, was the class bully, and could cuss like a sailor. But she could sure play marbles. I stood through many a recess and watched her take every marble that the other boys had. Even those big eighth graders didn’t stand a chance against her. Her daddy, or somebody in her family, must have worked at the Northeast machine shop, because she always seemed to have an ample supply of steely taws. They were nothing but ball bearings, you know.
And even though she had rusty knuckles and crusty knees, I had to admire her skill at marbles.
Then one day, much to the delight of my mother I’m sure, for some reason, I decided I’d had enough dirt on the knees of my britches, so I decided to just quit playing marbles. I don’t know who became the chief contributor to the marble collection of those in the neighborhood who still played the game, but it wasn’t me anymore.
It wasn’t like I was through with marbles altogether, though. Every one I could get my hands on became ammo for my slingshot and there for a while, there wasn’t a discarded big brown Clorox bottle anywhere that was safe. Jul 28, 2010, 08:00
