Marbles and Saturdays

The older I get, the more I enjoy Saturday mornings. Perhaps it's the cartoons.

A few weeks ago about a decade or two back, depending on when this chain originated, I was shuffling toward the garage with a steaming cup of coffee in one hand and the morning paper in the other. What began as a typical Saturday morning turned into something worse than a bad hair day.

I went to turn the dial up into the phone portion of the band on my ham radio in order to listen to a Saturday morning swap net.
The trouble was, I forgot about the newspaper I was holding. It fell to the floor and scattered pages all over the garage.

Neglecting the problem for now, I continued with the radio. Along the way, I came across an older sounding chap, with a tremendous signal and a golden voice. You know the kind; he sounded like he should be in the broadcasting business. He was telling whom-ever he was talking with something about "a
thousand marbles." I was intrigued and stopped to listen to what he had to say.

"Well, Tom, it sure sounds like you're busy with your job. I'm sure they pay you well but it's a shame you have to be away from home and your family so much. Hard to believe a young fellow should have to work sixty or seventy hours a week to make ends meet. It's too bad you missed your daughter's dance recital," he continued. "Let me tell you something that has helped me keep my own priorities." And that's when he began to explain his theory of a "thousand marbles."

"You see, I sat down one day and did a little arithmetic. The average person lives about seventy-five years. I know, some live more and some live less, but on average, folks live about seventy-five years.

-man, you need to get with the present time. Most people live to their 80s and 90s now barring health and terminal conditions that shorten their life.

"Now then, I multiplied 75 times 52 and I came up with 3900, which is the number of Saturdays that the average person has in their entire lifetime."

-Man don't you have enough to occupy your time that you're busy trying to count all the days in a person's life? "

-You see, know-it-alls like this, golden-voiced or not, tend to bug me.

"Now, stick with me, Tom, I'm getting to the important part."

-I just couldn't wait.

It took me until I was fifty-five years old to think about all this in any detail", he went on, "and by that time I had lived through over twenty-eight hundred Saturdays." "I got to thinking that if I lived to be seventy-five, I only had about a thousand of them left to enjoy."

-Dude, you are a sad nut. Most people live life, they don't count off the days they've decided they have left, and especially not based on some popularly believed stat that's ages old.

So I went to a toy store and bought every single marble they had. I ended up having to visit three toy stores to round up 1000 marbles. I took them home and put them inside a large, clear plastic container right here in the shack next to my gear."

-By this time I was ready to shout at the radio. And what the heck are the kiddies supposed to do when they want to buy marbles and can't because you depleted the toy stores of their stock? You have just deprived goodness knows how many kids of the chance to enjoy new marbles to add to their own collections or to even get just one. If you bought them for some sort of project or as gifts for other people, I'd understand, but all for yourself as some representation of the Saturdays you've arbitrarily decided to tick off in your life, I'm not impressed with this greedy, self-righteous and morbid maneuver!

"Every Saturday since then, I have taken one marble out and thrown it away. I found that by watching the marbles diminish, I focused more on the really important things in life. There is nothing like watching your time here on this earth run out to help get your priorities straight."

--I screamed. -You spent all that money on these marbles, and threw them away!? You really have lost your marbles, man!

-I went to turn the infernal guy off, but the stupid radio remained stubbornly on, stuck in this poor excuse of a ramble.

"Now let me tell you one last thing before I sign-off with you and take my lovely wife out for breakfast. This morning, I took the very last marble out of the container. I figure that if I make it until next Saturday then I have been given a little extra time. And the one thing we can all use is a little more time."

-Dude, assuming you're well enough to take your "lovely wife" out for breakfast, barring some sort of bizarre accident or suddenly fatal affliction, you will likely be around to start another collection of "borrowed marbles" for your "borrowed time" jag.

"It was nice to meet you Tom, I hope you spend more time with your family, and I hope to meet you again here on the band. This is a 75 Year old Man, K9NZQ, clear and going QRT, good morning!"

-Dude, I don't care how old you are, and as for Tom, let him live however he does. So he can't help it if he can't spend every waking moment with his family, unfortunately, that's the way things are for him right now. Maybe they'll change, maybe not, but if you were looking for shouts of "Happy Birthday!" and congratulations just for turning 75, you sure went about it the wrong way.

You could have heard a pin drop on the band when this fellow signed off. I don't know if this was a result of people falling asleep out of boredom, turning their radios off, or they actually bought this nutty sack of marbles, but I should've stuck to cartoons this Saturday.

-At last, I managed to turn the thing off, but in my perturbed state, turned around too quickly and tripped on some of the fallen newspaper.

-My coffee cup went flying, and there was coffee spilled everywhere, including on me. The bump on my head hurt like blue blazes.

I had planned to work on the antenna that morning, and then I was going to meet up with a few hams to work on the next club newsletter..

So my plans were put on hold while I took care of the bump on my head, cleaned up, changed into some clean clothes, threw the coffeed ones in the laundry, and cleaned up the garage.

When I finally got through with these chores, I learned that the meeting of the ham radio club had been canceled because they were too much under the marble-man's spell to be bothered with club meetings or any kind of work. It was, after all, a Saturday!

That evening, after the whole day had presumably been spent with their respective families, the ham radio club finally had their meeting, but it was not to discuss a newsletter. One poor sap recounted what he had done immediately after hearing these "most important" words.

"This morning, I went upstairs and woke my wife up with a kiss. "C'mon honey,I'm taking you and the kids to breakfast." " What brought this on?" she asked with a smile. "Oh, nothing special, it's just been a long time since we spent a Saturday together with the kids. And hey, can we stop at a toy store while we're out? I need to buy some marbles... "

-I bowed out of the meeting and screamed.

---

An all too easily manipulatable friend sent this to me, but I will not make the same mistake.

And so, as one smart bear never said..."If you live to be a hundred, I want to live to be a hundred minus one day, so I never have to live without you." - Falsely attributed to Pooh Bear. He never said anything so selfish and his stories never go near the subject of mortality.

-Amazing, a chain that glorifies pure selfishness.

-Don't Pass this on to all of your FRIENDS, and never ever send it to the person that sent it to you.
Because no one wants a thousand copies of this corny chain email!

And if you receive this e-mail many times from many different people, it only means this chain letter is currently circulating wildly, hitting many inboxes like an internet worm, and that people lose their marbles whenever they get a chain email fwd and they probably don't think much of you as a friend but believe they are passing along something that's original and impressive. It's neither.

And if you get it but once, you have the right to be discouraged for you will know that you have at least one newbie at best, fool or jerk at worst among your email contacts.

And that would not be ME

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