The Way Things Used To Be--Marble Season 1
08/20/2008 - Short Story
We shot all morning, ran home, grabbed lunch and hustled back. It was during the war and gas rationing had cleared away the cars and turned the street into a field for stoop-ball, stick-ball, punch ball, roller hockey, association football, and starting the weekend after Halloween, Marble Season. Late fall afternoons, the sun dropping behind the Palisades, a quarter the length and all the width of 88th would be choked with boys sitting, bending, crouching, kneeling in the darkening shadows, saying “Ha! Ha!” to the evening chill and shooting marbles.
My father had taught me low-stakes, high-skill marble shooting. You curled your first finger to hold your oversized boulder (he called it a reeler), rested your first knuckle on the sidewalk and flicked your cocked thumb hard to knock a regular-sized marble out of a chalked circle. If you knocked it out, you won it; if you failed to knock it out, you forfeited one of your into the center of the circle.
My father had grown up in Hell’s Kitchen during the days of gaslight, cobblestone streets, horse manure and one marble at a time. He’d taught me rules normal people no longer believed in and marble games normal kids no longer played. Since his day, marbles had evolved into a low-skill, high-stakes game, and to fit in, I had to give up shooting marbles the way he’d taught me and, over the years, some of the rules he’d taught me too.
During the season, kids from 79th to 96th, Broadway to Riverside Drive all flocked to 88th street to play. My friend, Blue Book, who kept mental stats on major league baseball and everything else that happened in our neighborhood, claimed that kids who played were either shooters or shopkeepers. Shopkeepers put a marble up against the curb for shooters to shoot at. Shooters shot.
The rules were standard. Hit a marble from a quarter way across 88th, you won five marbles, halfway it was ten, all the way, twenty. Some kids put a penny against the curb for Hit the Penny Keep It. Others had cigar boxes with different-sized holes cut into them. Shoot your marble through the big hole you won five, the middle-sized hole, ten and twenty if you got it through the little hole, which I never saw anyone do.
According to Blue Book, shooters were more adventurous, less serious, had shorter attention spans and when they grew up, would turn into salesmen, whereas kids who put a marble up against the curb would own drug stores, dress shops and liquor stores.
“What about kids who cut holes in the cigar boxes?” I once asked.
“Banking,” Blue Book said. He nodded to himself. “Yup, banking!”
He had a tremendous sense of conviction and his forecasts always interested me, though later, when he started betting football games, I lost faith in their accuracy.
As spontaneously as it began, Marble Season ended the Saturday after Thanksgiving. Nobody set that day either but we all knew when it started, when it ended, and the rules. They weren’t written down either, but we all knew that rebounds didn’t count, that in Hit The Nickel Keep It you shot from all the way across 88th, etc.
You don’t see that unwritten sense of order anymore--the way the rate of exchange was twenty for a nickel at Woolworth’s, the same when you bought four for a penny in a private transaction and that twenty was the average number of shots it took to hit a marble from across 88th. The retail price of marbles, the width of 88th and the average shooter’s marble-shooting skills all fit together in one perfectly balanced system—the invisible hand of Adam Smith extending down a hundred sixty years and across three thousand miles to 88th and West End Avenue.
oldtimewriter.com
