Interlude

Away from crises — baths, homework, haircuts, chores, eating whatever came to the table, sibling warfare, shopping trips, dentists, fights with our peers, schoolwork and quizzes, tests and exams — we found heroes who made life more bearable. Through them we could dream about rising out of our condition as puny little kids.

Alright! Being a puny little kid had advantages. They were the todays that we lived in. Baths and haircuts, fights and exams were tough moments but we had lots of time to play. Never enough! And when, in rarer moments, we had time to think of gods, we added up our idols, our heroes, the people we might want to be.

When we began to notice that there were other people in the world besides parents and siblings naturally some of them found our favor. Our generations preceded those whose infants were weaned on cathode tubes and theirs found morning companions to distract them. Our teddy-bears and stuffed giraffes were our guards at bedtime. Pinocchio and Donald Duck and Felix the Cat and Snow White, images from the world of animators, would be joined by legions of characters. Television sets would eventually use them to chain later generations of children to parlor floors on sunny days.

We didn't have chains and we escaped on afternoons and on Saturday mornings to explore. Leave us alone.

Parents with any sense will tell their children to avoid strangers who may come along and show interest in their play. That's wise advice. The outsider is competing with the parent for influence and many a child weighs what strangers say against the waning control at home. Heroes are likely to be somewhere else because their failings are hidden.

Our safer gods were those we knew little of or maybe not at all. The warriors of our day were uncles and neighbors who went to war. When they came home from battles they would tell us stories laced with exaggeration and bring us souvenirs: coins and spent bullets. Their leaders were the stuff of legends: blood and guts Patton, Bull Halsey and the new Caesar, MacArthur. We were too little to take up arms and be at their side so we played at war and killed imaginary Nazis and Japs in the afternoons of our boyhood. We collected tin and cooking fat and old newspapers and rags for the war effort and our cub-master seized a vacant property and we grew vegetables in little farms so our families could eat in that time of shortages. We took monies from our allowances and bought saving stamps and war bonds.

Some of our heroes were already established before war came. They were invented by writers and never breathed the air of the real world. Their adventures were played out in books and in comic strips and we sought out their company as if they were old friends: Red Ryder, the Katzenjammer Kids, Little Orphan Annie (a girl), Superman, the Phantom, Tarzan, Supersnipe, and Buck Rogers in the twenty-fifth century. We were well read.

Knives were indispensable to boyhood. They had three uses: to whittle wood, to pluck hot potatoes from the fire, to play mumbly peg and "land" on dirt plots with an opponent, who hopefully would be carved into a corner and forfeiture. Knives weren't weapons in our society.

Trouser pockets held the day's junk. We considered it treasure: washers, horsecorn, stones, chewing gum, small change on fortuous days, pennies squashed by trains, acorns, and bottle tops. If we didn't empty our own pockets at bedtime, moms would and they threw it all away. Today's poobahs convince men to carry purses.

And then, there were marbles. There's a guy in Upper Darby who has three hundred and fifty thousand marbles in his attic. Think of the weight. Imagine where his bed is. He's seventy. I read about him in a newspaper article. I'm waiting for the follow-up: an item predictably reporting him being crushed in his bed by three hundred and fifty thousand marbles.

I had a bag of them when I was ten: aggies, shooters, glassies, cats-eyes. Somebody always wanted to take them away from their owners. There are two ways to do that now. When I was a kid there was only one and that was to play for them. (It's gambling, but acceptable). Today it's easier to grab them and run. (That's robbery). The old guy in Upper Darby has arthritis, probably gotten from excessive marble playing. He won them all, I guess, and he probably has some of mine.

I lost my marbles a long time ago.