W.E. Krill, Jr. M.S.P.C.

I have a tin of marbles in my office that I use to play with children who come and visit me. Many children these days do not know any marbles games, but I teach them. So far, every one has seemed to enjoy playing with marbles. I think it kind of surprises them at how much fun it is…not a battery or ‘controller’ in sight. Just your curled index finger and your thumb on top, ready to spring out the ‘shooter’.

I had what I imagine to be hundreds of marbles when I was a boy. Back then, every boy knew how to play marbles. There are even names for different types of marbles: cat’s eyes, aggies, mellons, steelies. We used to play in the neighborhood and at school. The nuns did not take kindly to our marble playing, because marbles are essentially a gambling game; you play for ‘keepsies’.

Some very old marbles these days have some real value to collectors.  A dozen years back, I found some clay marbles some child had made perhaps a hundred years ago in the yard of the farmhouse we lived in, while I was digging in the garden. Though they have little or no value compared to the antique glass ones that collectors look for, I prize those two small, perfectly round balls of clay. You can tell that the child who made them was a real marble player because they are smooth and very, very round. Which is quite hard to do. I sometimes wonder what that child looked like, and what their name was. And if they could make their shooter do the hop-shot.

I wish I still had all of my old marbles, not because of their possible monetary value, but for the sentiments of when I was a boy and the beauty of the marbles.  I think that I probably just lost them all, or gave them away, or simply forgot about them as the tides of interest changed when I grew into being a teen. Or maybe Mom tossed  out what was left of them once I moved on to girls.

What I have enjoyed about playing marbles as a fifty one year old with the children who I work with is the way the marbles light up their eyes (I suppose, just like they did mine when I was their age), and how the play action leads to interaction. I also enjoy how, after showing them a few different kinds of marble games, the always seem to spontaneously get inspired, and invent their own game. That is a thing of beauty to see. It is what children do (or, what they used to do before electronic games that do all the imagining for you).

Playing marbles lets children know that they can develop a set of skills, and they can indeed make changes for themselves, even if they are small changes, and they can use their creativity in ways that can make things better.

Once considered a very expensive toy maybe a hundred years ago, marbles are today quite cheap. I got the can full that I now have, about a hundred marbles, for maybe seven bucks.

Go get some marbles, and teach a child how to play. You might be surprised at the pleasure it brings, and how therapeutic it can be to roll marbles around.

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