ah, childhood

On Omar's birthday he gave me a marble. It was a party favor; at the end of dinner, he pulled out some portion of his marble collection and let each of his guests pick one out. Gleefully he then told us what type we'd each taken. Mine he called a "robin's egg." It's an opaque navy blue with tiny pastel dots. It's the smaller size that marbles come in. It's delightfully unique. I rolled it around on the tips of my fingers, admiring it, amused to find that Omar and I might've been good friends even in childhood. He might've liked the way we played marbles at my house.

My brother and I would stretch out on our bellies in the living room. He'd take the end of the carpet near the sofa; I'd take the end by the fireplace. Propped up on elbows, we'd sort through our respective marbles, making sure they were all there, considering our best starting option. Then we'd get out our metaphorical bowling pins; we'd each arrange our Star Wars figures in a durable configuration, generally blocking Princess Leia with a Storm Trooper or Chewbacca. (We owned the whole collection, from both Star Wars and Empire Strikes Back, so we had multiple of each character and divvied them up fairly, balancing out my second Princess Leia with his favorite, some green monstrous fellow whose name I long ago forgot.) We'd get our figures in place and then we'd start—no doubt before anyone said go—maniacally shooting marbles across the oriental rug, trying to be the first to knock down all the opposing stars.

When we tired of that game, we'd collect our friends and throw them in some bag, tote them out back. We had a lot of space at that house—first a proper backyard, with a garden and a swing set, encircled by bamboo and roses and a stand of tiger lilies by the stone stairs. Down those few steps, we had a second yard, a wide opening of nothing but grass—a field to play in, though it mostly went ignored, for beyond it lay the best of all backyards, the third one: the swamp, with the long green board Dad had laid down to help you cross it; with the high pass covered in pussy willows around one side of it; with the pair of magnolia trees at the far end, just beside the creek. Some days my brother would climb one of those magnolias, then drop down its branch-free neighbor as though down a fireman's pole, but not shooting down it quite as fast. Other days we'd head straight for the creek, collecting magnolia leaves as we ran. If you don't know the southern magnolia, you don't know its leaves' waxy exterior, the slight curvature that makes each one like a boat. We'd collect handfuls of those rafts and then lay a Star Wars figures atop each one, kneeling in the moist dirt of the creekside to set them all free. We'd cheer as they raced down the slow rapids and then tumbled over a short falls; we'd argue and delight over the winner; we'd hurry back to the start line to send them off again.

We'd play like that for hours, my brother and I, not knowing we'd ever outgrow it, not thinking we'd ever love anything quite as much.