Visiting my brother, his wife and son this Christmas I chance upon my
grandfather's old brown leather bag holding all of his old marbles
from childhood. The grandfather I never knew, who, because of my
mother's historical memory editing, is far more perfect in death then
any of us are in life. Despite this, the old brown leather bag
inscribed with "The First National Bank, Bagley, Iowa" lures me in
with its promise of memory, the colored handmade jewels of childhood
spilling forth a sea of my own childhood memories in a rush of history
and longing for a never known grandfather murdered by the cigarette
corporations, longing for my father murdered in his own turn by the
same carnivorous bastards and so it goes.
So they spill upon the table for me to weigh in the palm of my beating
heart, listening to the whack of marbles, echoing. Suspended now in
time, those children's voices merge into our own.
I see the broken marbles, the ones who are whole, glass and ceramic.
Uneven in their magnificant beauty, they are the bearers of ancestral
memory and I hear the voices of who we were, are and will be. Cracked,
yet unbroken they were made for a time and country much less
interested in perfection then practicality. They betray themselves
with simplicity of purpose, in being rather than just appearences.
I long for family, family that never was, family that died too early
from corporate greed, and I long for the faint promise of what has
been and might be.
I roll the marbles.
David
