WAY THINGS USED TO BE 2

Continued From Way Things Used to Be 1

Marble Season

Part 2

During Marble Season, kids flocked up to 88th street from 79th, down from 96th and across from halfway between Broadway and Amsterdam. No one came from Amsterdam or Columbus. We called the kids from Amsterdam and Columbus the 'tough kids;' they called us the 'rich kids.' We went to P.S. 166 and Joan of Arc with them, but we never played with them.

My friend, Blue Book, who kept mental stats on major league baseball and on everything that happened in our neighborhood, claimed that all kids who played marbles were divided into either the shopkeeper types, who put their marble up against the curb for the shooters to shoot at, and the shooters themselves. He said the shooters were more adventurous, but less serious and that they also had shorter attention spans. And he said that when shooters grew up, they turned into traveling salesmen and that the kids who put marbles up against the curb would end up owning drug stores, dress shops and liquor stores.

"What about the ones who cut the holes in the cigar boxes?" I asked him.

Blue Book thought that over."Banking," he said, and he nodded to himself . "Yup, banking!"

His predictions always interested me but later, after he started betting football games, I lost faith in the accuracy.

As spontaneously as it began, Marble Season ended the Saturday after Thanksgiving. Nobody set the day it ended, just as nobody had set the day it started but we all knew when it began, we all knew when it ended, and although they weren't written down, we all knew all the rules. Even though it was wartime, or maybe because it was wartime, that was the way things used to be back then.

They are not that way anymore. There's not that same sense of agreement on the rules–like rebounds didn't count. Nor that same sense of order, either—the way the rate of exchange was twenty for a nickel at Woolworth's, and the same when you bought four for a penny in a private transaction. The way twenty was the average number of shots it took to hit a marble from all the way across the street. The way the retail price of marbles, the width of the street 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 Street and West End Avenue.

(Continued in 'Way Things Used To Be 3)
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