A tub of marbles

The act of descending, getting closer to the earth, is metaphysical; it changes how you speak and think. It is literally profound. — Elisa Gabbert

If I was tasked to conjure my favorite mental images from my childhood, my now long-gone collection of glass marbles may be among them. I only realized this the other day at home in my kitchen, when I found,¹ in one of the many drawers, a small stash of marbles that had belonged to my daughter, now seventeen. We had just gone through a home renovation project and, over the years, had given away or tossed countless old clothes and toys of hers. Yet these nine or ten marbles had somewhat curiously remained.

Holding the marbles in the cup of one hand, I stood there for a moment, deciding whether to rinse and keep or toss them. Then the light from the kitchen window caught the glass in my palm.

My daughter’s marbles, now rinsed and kept further safe

When I was little, nearly every child on our street and in the neighborhood had a marble collection of their own, including my sister, four years older than me, and I. For us, marbles weren’t toys but objects of treasure and devotion. They were a currency of pride, friendship, rivalry, social standing, and love for an object.²

I kept my marbles in a cloth bag of considerable weight. When I shook the bag in my small hands, the marbles rubbing against one another made a faint, crunchy sound. Each of us had a handful of marbles we considered our finest and most precious. I ranked mine by holding them against the sunlight and watching the light move through them. It was as if each marble carried within its own small world and temperament. The light revealed their quality and splendor: color, size (the very small or very large ones were favored), and the way the glass appeared clouded or glinting, clear or opaque.

When the weather was nice—in fact, in my marble-related-memories it is always summer, which is kind of funny considering that all this took place in Germany with its rather short warm seasons—we kids would head out in small bands to the playground of our elementary school, whose large patches of dirt and sand we knew inside out. There, each hauling our marbles, we would find a few sharp sticks to draw lines in the dirt. One of the boys had dug a hole with his bare hands, and soon we were hovering close to the ground around it, this hole and the palpable suspense between us players becoming the gravitational center of our attention. We knelt in the dust with the concentration of astronomers, measuring possible and impossible distances with our thumbs or forefingers, and were convinced that the last brushing aside of a few larger sand grains between marble and the bull’s eye of the hole might decide one’s victory or defeat.

How often have I actually felt closer to earth and its dirt than during those games?

We played for keeps, of course, us girls no less than the boys.³ For younger readers unfamiliar with playing marbles for keeps, at least in our version of the game, the child who got their allotted marbles into the hole first won the entire lot that had accumulated there. In my memory, with some reasonable level of fidelity, there was sometimes a bounty of twenty to forty marbles at stake.

One boy kept his large collection of marbles in a tub instead of a bag. Funny enough, I don’t remember this boy’s name or even what he looked like. He lived across the street of our house in a modest apartment with his mother. I had heard that he occasionally misbehaved at school, which made me a little afraid of him. But how rich he was! He must have had at least five or six hundred marbles. I can still see him lift the white lid off his tub—an old round cardboard Ajax detergent container—as a few of us stood around him, transfixed by the fortune inside.

During those few summers and outside of school, marbles were our currency. Every child who was anyone among us played marbles, especially when the boy with the tub was around. My memories have become fuzzy here. I can no longer distinguish with confidence what is true and what I have fictionalized. But standing in my kitchen now, decades later, I sensed a faint remembrance returning to me: I think I once won a large game against the boy with the tub. I remember walking home slowly the day of this victory, my cloth bag of marbles heavier than earlier. The sun was already setting behind the church, the neighboring houses, and our own house nearby. I remember feeling so happy and rich. Rich in marbles, certainly, but also in the sunlight, warmth and beauty of another long and special summer day.

The nine or ten marbles I found in my kitchen are a treasure I decide to keep for as long as I can.

Perhaps beneath it all, almost invisibly, I have been guided by questions of what is worth keeping, what remains, what is enough, and what value and wealth really consist of.

A special thank you for input and editing help goes to Michelle Varghese, Jan Schlösser, Ph.D., Manju Aishwarya, Kathy Ayers, and Rachel Parker, as well as Elisa Gabbert for her stellar quote at the beginning of this piece.

1. Well, finding is perhaps not quite the right word to use here. I always knew there were somewhere; I had followed their silent migration over the years from one drawer to another, not knowing if and where they belonged but keeping them nevertheless.

2. As I am editing this piece, I am reminded of yet another childhood treasure: my Panini sticker albums! At kiosks, we would buy small packets of stickers that featured, for example, World Cup soccer players. We’d either stick them into our albums or trade them with friends before or after school.

3. Did the boys rather admire my older sister, so I was accepted into their games by virtue of being her younger sister? I vaguely recall it mattering more at the time, but this memory now feels faint and oddly endearing.