Marbles looks like an inocuous kids game. The rules are simple. You put a bunch of marbles in the center of a ring, and tried to blast them all out. When I was a kid, I learned an important lesson about life that perhaps all of the grown-ups in the world could use.
Most marble games are for keepsies; The winner of the game keeps all the marbles. The stakes ran high. Desperate times called for desparate measures. My friend Stevie found some ball bearings in his dad’s shop, and painted them black to look like shooters. He ruled the ring for two days before we discovered his secret.
It was the steelie. It was much heavier than the other marbles, and could be shot much more forcibly. A steelie forcefully knuckled could scatter center marbles to the far reaches of the ring in a single blast.
Then he let us in on his secret. He invited us to the inner ring. He presented us all with our own steelies. We had the most massive weapons. We were the titans. We set up a tournament with the kids from the next street over. The kids from the next street over were a little older than us, and more experienced in marbles. They’d win a lot of our best marbles in inter-street keepsies competition.
We were relentless, and quickly recouped all of our losses for the past two months, with a little of theirs as tribute. At first we were overjoyed with our success. We eyed our new marbles with the same lust as a pirate surveying his booty.
We thought of challenging the other kids the next street over… the fifth graders. We were drunk with power.
Everything changed the when we played with our conquered marbles. We felt kind of bad for not having won the match fair and square. We feared that eventually, one of us would come up with an even more volatile marble menace, and the cycle would just regenerate.
What if the kids the next street over got a box full of steelies instead of our mere handful? We’d have to find more too. That would mean stealing them out of our dad’s shops or tool boxes. Or spending most of our precious allowances on trips to the hardware store.
That’s when we banned steelies. For a few weeks, we policed each other assiduously; each marble carefully weighed, and then, after several months, trusted each other completely once again.
Until the new kid came to town.