Way Things Used To Be 1

Marble Season
Part 1
Nobody set the day it started, but the Saturday after Halloween we dug last year’s cigar box-full out of the bottom of a closet or ran up to Woolworth’s and bought new ones at a nickel per red mesh bag of twenty plus a ‘boulder’, then raced over to 88th and West End for the opening of Marble Season.

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, with the sun dropping behind the Palisades, a quarter the length and all the width of 88th Street would be choked with boys sitting, bending, crouching, kneeling in the darkling 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, 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 marbles into the center of the circle. But he’d 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. When the season started, in order to fit in, I had to give up shooting marbles the way he’d taught me. And over the years, I had to give up obeying many of the rules he’d taught me too.
(Continues in Way Things Used To Be 2)