Well I’m almost in bed and my list is incomplete (*gasp*). I shall have to e-mail Betty and listen to my Chinese dialogues another day.
Today when I was tidying my room (in order to get to the floor for the vacuuming) I went through all my normal stages: being distracted while cutting out the parts of magazines I want to keep (in this case, recipes) so I can throw the rest away; finding and trying on the collection of hats I’ve acquired at various stages and havn’t chucked out ‘cos I’m determined to one day be a hat person; playing with Julie when I found her old toy under one of the piles; listen to a song I’ve always wondered the words to and pause my cleaning efforts to find the lyrics and spend 20mins singing with them; and of course, as always, after a good solid hour’s cleaning, I get down to the level of the marble bag.
That’s right, I said marble bag. My marble bag is really special, I made it especially for my marble collection when I was about 8 or 9. More importantly it still holds the remnants of my marble collection. At some time in the last decade I decided I probably don’t need to have an entire marble collection, and gave away all but my most favourites. Since then I’ve continued moving the bag around every time I clean my room, to the back of my sock drawer, the corner of my wardrobe, under my bed. But today for some reason I opened the bag and took out a few of those precious glass orbs. I can’t believe how fast it all came back – a literal rush of marbular knowledge. I was lost to memories of my childhood, each marble I picked up I could remember how I got it, whether it was “valuable”, or what I called it. That’s right. There’s a large marble etymology, a complex labryinth of jargon and lingo. I realised how much the children of today are missing out on. And it made me sad.
It’s something not many people know about me, that I still keep some of my marbles from when I was a kid. Let me share some of my wee collection with you:
It was crazy picking up each of these little balls and remembering what they used to mean to me. Notice the coveted “parrots” on the left there, the red and yellow ones and also the blue and yellow, with the green and yellow “tom” (the larger size) behind them. The cloudy light green marble in the middle is a “shampoo”, with a clear “peewee” next to it on the right – a smaller size than all the rest. At the back on the left is one of the prides of my collection, a “misty jumbo”. I remember my family went on a trip to Tauranga in the holidays and at a shop there I bought two marbles in a black net bag for $8 (a small fortune), one was green and one was orange. When I got back word spread round the school. Man, everyone wanted my misty jumbos. I can’t remember just how I lost the other one, there was some sort of scandal about another girl stealing it or cheating or something. I bet she doesn’t still have hers, lol. I can’t remember how I won that big dark jumbo, it wasn’t “worth” much ‘cos it was kinda ugly and munted, but I always liked it for some reason.
After I found my marbles I (of course) started playing around and taking photos of them, and I took a close up of the big dark marble. Look at the surface, imagine when it was just smooth, clear, coloured glass. Think about how many kids have owned it, how many times it’s been flicked rolled and pushed across concrete to become that chipped and scarred. Marbles rock.
Isn’t it funny, anyone else looking at the picture above would just see a small pile of random cheap glass balls, but to me just to look at them is to remember so much. It’s like Phoebe on Charmed… only less wiccan. Lol.
My Nook 