I’m Fixing to Shoot Some Marbles

I’m fixing to shoot some marbles.

You don’t see much about marbles anymore. When I was a kid you hardly went anywhere, except to church, without a sack of marbles in your pocket. Now kids all have something electronic in their hands.

Marbles are just collectable old glass toys now, but they used to come in all colors and designs, and you would pick out one that caught your eye or had a special feel to it and reserve it as your shooter.

We used to play, or shoot, marbles as a game we played in the dirt. There are many different marble games, but the one that kids played was called Ringer.

It was a simple game without the need of technology or batteries or any other sort of power source except your own. It began by lagging to determine who got first shot. The way you lagged was to stand at a predetermined distance from a straight line drawn in the dirt and toss your marble at it, and whoever landed their marble closest to the lag line got the first shot. The second closest lag shot second, and so on.

After the first player to shoot was determined a circle was drawn in the dirt and each player, which could be from two to several, would place six marbles in the center of the circle in the shape of a plus sign and the game would begin.

The object of the game was to use your shooter to knock other marbles out of the circle. The way you shot was by dropping to one knee outside of the circle, resting your hand on the ground, lay the shooter in the crook of your forefinger, take aim, and use your thumb to flick your shooter out toward its target.

If you knocked one out of the circle it belonged to you, and as long as your shooter remained inside the circle you kept shooting with the purpose of knocking all the marbles out of the circle. If your shooter ended up outside the circle after a shot, then shooting passed on to the next player.

There were two ways to play Ringer—for fun or for keeps. When you shot for fun everybody got their marbles back at the conclusion of the game no matter what the results were. But when you played for keeps there was more of a thrill to the game and it would put a quickness to your pulse because you could end up winning all the marbles. On the other hand you could lose all your marbles.

My momma frowned on playing for keeps because she associated the results of it with gambling rather than with practice, hard work, dedication and skill.

As a result of this belief, periodically she would confiscate all the marbles and redistribute them.

But no matter how many times she redistributed the marbles they would always eventually be fixing to end up back in the sack of the best shooters.