The Marble

It was a quiet morning. My big brothers were away at the Solon Elementary School. I was at home because I was only three or four years old. My baby sister Alice was asleep. Mother was busy, as always, doing housework. I was sitting on the floor in the living room, trying to get good playing marbles.

When you play marbles you use your thumb to flip a marble out of your hand and hit another marble. If your marble knocks the other marble out of a ring you get to keep the marble you knocked out the ring. You keep playing until you or your opponent has all the marbles. You would then get your own marbles back unless you were playing "keepsies". We weren't allowed to play "keepsies" because that was gambling. My older brothers did in fact play "keepsies" and tried to keep my mother from finding out about it. If they played "keepsies" with me I would always lose and usually cry to my mother about it. She would make them give me back my marbles. Marbles came in a variety of colors, with about three different sizes, so you could identify your own marbles and supposedly get them back at the end of the game. However, at the end of the game the bigger kids always seemed to identify the better marbles as their marbles.

So there I was with the reject marbles: a small bluish-gray marble and a few chipped ones. It was frustrating trying to flip a marble out of my tiny hand and get it to go in the direction I wanted. Finally I knocked the small marble out of the ring I had made. I popped my favorite marble in my mouth to hold it for awhile. The marble was supposed to just stay in my mouth until I wanted to use it. But somehow it slid past my tongue and got stuck in my throat. I can still remember the feel of it. I couldn't breathe, my throat hurt, and my eyes started to water. I opened my mouth to cry, but my cries were stuck in my throat. I didn't know what to do.

Fortunately my mother was close by and saw that I was gagging and choking. Seeing the other marbles on the floor she instantly realized what had happened. She pounded me frantically on the back. Nothing happened. She was beginning to panic; I was bewildered. I had no idea that I would die in minutes unless she could get the marble unstuck. But I could see that she was afraid, and that made me afraid also.

My mother ran to the telephone and picked up the receiver. Someone else was on the party line. I could see my mother waving her arms and stamping her feet impatiently.

"Get off the phone! My son has a marble stuck in his throat and can't breathe! I've got to call the doctor!"

Immediately my mother was calling the operator. "Get me the doctor!"

"Doctor, my son has a marble caught in his throat and can't breathe! What should I do?" Pause. "I already did that, now what!" Pause. "Okay. I'll turn him upside down."

She ran over to me, grabbed me around the waist, turned me upside down, and began to beat on my back. Still nothing. She ran back to the telephone.

"It's still stuck! What am I going to do?"

The light in the room seemed to grow dimmer and I collapsed to the floor. Suddenly the pain in my throat moved lower. I found myself sucking in a lung full of air. I lay there gulping in more air. Mother rushed over and held me.

"Oh thank Goodness, Tink, you are breathing again!"

A little while later the lady on the party line called my mother to ask what had happened to me. She had been really worried ever since she had gotten off the phone.

The doctor told my mother to look for the marble when it came out, but my mother and I never found it. And it was my favorite, unchipped marble, too. For many years after that I could not tolerate a doctor or nurse touching the back of my throat. I violently gagged involuntarily. I couldn’t even floss my teeth in the very back. Perhaps the marble is still inside of me … if not in my stomach, then in my brain.