The Marble Club

Life is not like TV. There are very few of those dramatic moments that the people on the screen seem to have every 11 minutes or so. This is something we who were raised on the tube have to remind ourselves of on a regular basis. Anyway, none of this has any bearing on the story I wish to tell. I just like to remind myself occasionally that these mundane stories are the rule not the exception.

I was living in a small southern Ohio strip-mine town a few years ago (yes I did say mundane), when I got a call from the sister of an old friend. I don’t know to this day how she found me. I had long since severed all ties with my family and everyone else in the town where I grew up. She was calling to tell me her brother Walter had died. "My God!" I said." I didn’t know…was he sick…I’m, I don’t know what to say…what happened?" As she told me of his short bout with cancer, my head was filled with all the thoughts that come at a time like that. First that he was only a year older than me and then that we hadn’t been in touch for thirty years and now suddenly it was too late. I couldn’t concentrate. What was the question? "He left you something" she was saying, "It was packed up to mail. Do you want me to mail it to you or are you coming for the funeral?" I said I would come so she could hold onto it for me and we hung up.

I purposely got off the interstate when I got into the mountains of West Virginia because these were the roads Walt and I knew so well. We were different from the local boys even back then. They knew the local places to go to park, we knew them for forty miles around. That made us really popular with girls’ parents. It’s strange how a contradiction of terms like "going parking" can become a part of normal vernacular.

Driving down through those "kiss-your-ass" curves I started to think about a time when we were younger, before we drove cars, when bikes were the coolest things around. That was when we formed the Marble Club. The only qualification to join that I can remember was that you own some marbles which we were intent in taking from you. Having honed our skills previously, we were well on our way to cornering the market on marbles in the neighborhood. My Grandfather was an avid marble player in his youth as well and when he saw we were taking an interest in his boyhood pastime he brought me a marble he had had since he was a very young. It was a great peppermint swirl, the most beautiful marble I had ever seen, and I vowed I would not offer it up in any contest. Of course you know what comes next. One day as Walt and I were thoroughly fleecing a local victim I emptied my pocket into the ring and began to shoot when I saw it, shining like a multicolored sun right in the middle of the circle, my precious peppermint swirl. I had brought it to show Walt and forgot it was in my pocket. I was relieved when Walt dramatically shot it out of the circle on his first turn and quietly pocketed it without a word. I was saved! He knew the story and of course would return it when we divided up the spoils for the day. Oh, but I had forgotten that young boys, like raccoons, covet shiny things. That evening when we parted ways he refused to even discuss the marble, he had won it, and that was that. It was the first time he had pulled rank on me. He was a year older after all. That was the last match of the Marble Club. High School, girls, and cars took over from there and we graduated and lost touch, never to see each other again. Odd how a trivial thing like that would come to mind after all these years. I guess being on those mountain roads bring back a lot of things from my past.

Well this is getting a little long winded, much more than I had intended, but sometimes these things take longer than you think to work through. Anyway, after the services that afternoon, Walt’s sister Marie found me and pulled a small manila envelope out of her purse. She handed it to me and said it was addressed to me so they didn’t open it. The address was that of the first place I had lived after leaving school, where I had blown off the college classes I was supposed to go to in favor of a factory job, some quick money, and smoking weed with some of the local boys. I opened it with a sense of wonder because he had started to mail it almost thirty years before. There was a note inside that just said" Found this today thought you would want it back. Ha Ha Sorry about that. See ya this summer." I turned up the envelope and out rolled the still beautiful peppermint swirl.

Not a big moment, just a little thing between two friends, one gone, one still hanging on. This story leaves a lot unsaid, like the fact I never went back that summer. And that Walt finished college and moved away too. And the fact that you never again have the kind of friends you have during that period of your life. I would now like to move that we adjourn this final meeting of the Marble Club. I took the interstate on my way back home.

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