UNDER SILVER SIMPLE MARBLER SKIES

In fifth grade, I won the coveted marble championship, a sport requiring the marbler to intuitively calculate distances, directions, angles and carom trajectories, a sport cerebral, yet boyish, if not overly strenuous, the crouching in the dirt in the 1950s outdoors at that distant time beneath cloud-scraping oaks playing bombsies under silver Sputnik skies. Away from my marbling pals, I was a book reader and secretly coveted winning the Spelling Bee; but at the beginning of character formation my self-concept of reader-marbler was still inchoate, developing now to my present life as an aggie taw, a grown boy of knuckle-down body-mind regimen playing potties, shooting with calculating, wrought words. When wistfully returning for a while to simpler times of dirt-crawling, sky-gazing, marbling boyhood innocence, I try hard to intuitively look around beyond the dirt ring with caroming agate-thoughts and upward tree-top gaze, noticing and remembering, marking and minding the winners-keepers games playing bombsies and keepsies out under the tall, dirt marbler, oak-scraped simple skies.