What to do when you lose your marbles
And you expect it to make sense? Come now. “This,” you say, “makes no sense?” I’ve just told you that two kids are inhaling dust into everything that will hold it to shoot little round glass balls with their fingers at other little glass balls for the prize of taking home more little glass balls than they started with. On a good day, one left a game of marbles excreting dust from one’s sneakers, pant cuffs, knees if wearing shorts, hands and forearms. Depending on the play, one “cunny-thumbed it,” hitting it gently, or one “let-it-rip,” propelling it far across the field of play. If they were not, you were cheating and could forfeit the match. The rest of the fingers had to be held tight and parallel, seated flat, resting on the field. To “flick” a marble, one balanced it on the first digit of the forefinger and propelled it with a-yes-flick of the thumb. The girls, even then, weren’t often about to kneel down in the dust and then compound the idiocy by putting their hands into it.Īnd that you had to do. The winner “took the pot.” That meant winning all the marbles from the other guy-and for some reason it was always a guy. At the end, it was winner take all, a game of strategy to place your marble where it couldn’t be hit but in a place where it might be more likely to be used to hit the other. The object? Hitting one’s opponents’ marbles on the way to sinking one’s own marble into the pot. Replacing the cues or sticks were one’s thumb and fore-finger. Instead of six pockets there was one “pot,” a concave space at one end of the field. The table was this dry, silt covered rectangle. The game itself was a ground-level cross between shuffle board, poker and pool. They had a name-like many things it is long gone from the memory bank. Most prized were cat’s eyes but more than those were those that had a thin line that ran straight through the middle.
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Like baseball cards, they were usually not bought for quantity, but for the hopes of finding the unusual, the odd, or the rare. These round pieces of glass came in solid colors, clear, and swirling patterns. They came in plastic packs and cost about a quarter. They were so popular you could buy them at the candy store-that ubiquitous neighborhood institution that sold a zillion more things than candy. Here is a game that has gone the way of many that take time, strategy, and patience to play. Mud when it was wet but when dry, it made for a perfect place to shoot marbles.
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Instead of grass it had dirt–dry, dusty, fine silt dirt. And it had no grass in that space that had no name. It had an enclosed front room added to it. Number 23 didn’t look like most all the other Victorian style homes. That is except for a house across the street. These held the aforementioned tree and grass. The other was a rectangle of space roughly the length of the houses’ front yards. One was the sidewalk, used as previously described, for a lot more than walking. Between the house and the street were two things.
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On my dead-end street, Waldorf Court, Flatbush, Brooklyn, each house had a front yard, a back yard, and at least one tree that grew in Brooklyn.