MARBLES

Had the oddest conversation with my boy Joey yesterday while sitting at dinner at a local pizza place. Joey asked me what games I played when I was young (I have told him that I didn’t have video games when I was a kid, like their mother did). "Well," I said, "as far as it goes with playing with other kids, when I was your age I liked marbles." He looked at me with a blank face and asked me what marbles were. Of course, he knows what a marble is, having played a game called Marbleous, with is one of those contraptions in which the marbles fall down series of slides and tubes, but clearly he understood my answer to mean there was some other game. So, over the next half hour I explained to him about competitive marble games, picking shooter marbles, why marbles were banned from school, things like that. Iexplained how in one game the object was to knock your opponent's marbles out of the ring in order to win them. I showed him how we shot the shooters with out knuckles on the dirt. How the better shooters took the lesser skilled players. He seemed intrigued. I wonder how much our children lose, to a certain extent, in that they don’t have some of the simple, but very pleasurable, games we used to play.