I REMEMBER...marbles & tops

.........MARBLES & TOPS. I have been struggling of late to not get left too far behind in the social networking/technology era.

Ah, the simpler days of yore when I was consumed with the desire to only master the playground skills involving marbles and tops.

TOPS: I did pretty well at that game and soon became the king of the blacktop at lunch time. As I recall (which is a task in itself...but since this is my blog, I will naturally assume I am correct in my remembrances), the initial game was just one of skill and luck. The tops were about the size of a large lemon, wrapped in string and spun with a flick of the wrist. We would draw a circle on the black top with chalk and the game was to throw your top and have it land in the circle and stay there without wandering off, or to draw an X on the ground (blacktop or cement) and try to hit the X.

Somewhere, in probably the first grade (about 1953) someone must have gotten anxious to throw their top into the circle and succeeded in bumping the first top out. OKLAHOMA SCHOOL YARD TOP WARS was created. The next evolution was when the steel point of someone's top hit the other top and took a chuck out of it (it was wood after all). My Top Reputation was made when my top hit the competitor's top dead center of the top's top and split it right down the middle. There was a hush and reverence for what everyone had just witnessed. I was Michael Jordon...except for my era I was Mickey Mantle and Babe Ruth rolled into one. I had done the impossible (quite accidentally, but I took it). The blacktop boys spread my fame, far and wide (all the way to the third graders, as I recall). All the top guys revered me (except for the kid whose top I split - who never spoke to me again). It was fabulous...except for one down side. No one would play tops with me anymore. Sometimes you lose when you win. However, with only a slight nod to the obvious pun...it was good to go out on top.

MARBLES: I also had awesome skills with marbles (not so much with baseball, football, basketball ...there was no such thing as soccer in 1950's Oklahoma). The goal of the game was to knock your opponent's marble out of the circle (and you got to keep it). Soon, I had a sizable empire of marbles and had a difficult time finding an opponent, as I had taken most of their marbles. The Heavens have an uncanny way of evening up lopsided situations, however. My downfall was that there was an unfairly strict rule about having your marbles out during class time. I dropped my pencil one day and as I reached down to pick it up, the unthinkable happened. My marble dynasty was over in an instant as my year's winners swag of marbles spilled out of my coat and covered the classroom floor as Miss (Evil to the Core) Billingsly, stepping around the few hundred marbles scattered before her, gingerly approached my desk, snapping that old wood ruler into the palm of her hand. I can see it as clearly as if it was yesterday (which is interesting, as I can't remember much that happened last week- which I guess only proves that you can always recall the true turning points of your life). The inflexible rule was that you forfeited ALL your marbles to the principal for the rest of the year if they hit the floor. I went from 1st Grade Marble King to Marble Pauper in an instant. My lasting memory is of all my classmate slain opponents grinning from ear to ear as I had to pick up my treasured marbles and deliver them to the principal's office.

Expecting life to treat you well because you are a good person is like expecting an angry bull not to charge because you are a vegetarian.-- Shari R. Barr

You Can't Always Get What You Want. But If You Try Some Time, You Just Might Find, You Get What You Need....Mick Jagger

I REMEMBER...Nintendo and the Broken Window

....when my three sons were small and we were living in a small apartment in mid-town Sacramento. This is before I met Lise and we were saved from fraternity house Hell. I never had a soft spot for video games and thought they were a great distraction, a waste of time, as well as way too expensive. There were four of us in a small two bedroom apartment, and we weren't the best housekeepers.

I often would rant about them leaving their belongings lying around and especially was upset with things on the floor getting stepped on. I was in fine form one evening when I went into their room and stepped on Nintendo game controllers in the middle of the room. I picked them up and raged about them not cleaning up, not listening to me about leaving breakables on the floor, and just about any unresolved issue any parent has with pre-teen boys.

To accent my inspired rant, I was swinging the controllers around my head, perhaps as a visual aid about my threat to throw them in the trash, when they slipped out of my hands and smashed right through the bedroom window. The boys were attentive when I was just yelling, but they were outright frozen when the glass shattered. Nobody moved. It was a moment frozen in time.

The absurdity was even too much for me. I started to laugh, but the boys still wouldn't move...they probably thought I had snapped and gone insane. It was an embarrassing and expensive way to make a point.

Now it is just a good story.