Entries Tagged 'being a kid' ↓

I was not what one would call a “star” ball player in high school. On the other hand, I never made up lame excuses to get out of gym class either. I did have a jump-shot that I could sink from pretty much any spot on the floor provided nobody was guarding me. Let’s put it this way, I was enough of an athlete to feel justified in refusing “pity time.”

For those of you who a) never played sports or b) went All-State four years in a row, pity time is given during the final seconds of a game when your team is either way ahead or way behind. The coach figures no matter how incompetent you are, there is no way your presence on the court could possibly affect the outcome of the game, so he points a finger your way and yells, “Get in there!” You drag your feet onto the court, wondering which looks less pathetic; putting up six seconds of meaningless effort, or standing completely still as the ball drives past you. Personally I was always an advocate of setting a new record for fouling out.

Pity time is about the cruelest thing a coach can do to an already insecure kid. At least if a kid sits the bench the entire game, everyone will just kind of forget he’s there. But sending him in for no other reason than to say, “Hey, at least you got to play,” is like hanging a big neon YOU SUCK sign over his head.

Our JV coach began every season with the idealistic declaration, “Everybody on my team will play.” He apparently forgot that at a school of three hundred kids, only about thirty guys tried out for the team. The top fifteen went varsity, meaning it was pretty much, what-you-see-is-what-you-get for the JV squad. The coach quickly realized that putting some of these kids in for longer than six consecutive seconds would mean certain team suicide. So, to avoid being a hypocrite, he’d wait for an inconsequential moment, then say, “Go be aggressive!”

We had a teammate, Donnie Hubbard who, I kid you not, was still coming to grips with the concept of dribbling. It took over half the season to convince him that he could not run the ball like a quarterback. Donnie was just happy that people were finally allowing him to handle blunt objects in a group setting. So whenever the coach sent Donnie in for his pity time, you better believe he jumped right up and sprinted onto the court just in time to turn around and sprint right back. A banner effort, even if it was only three seconds. “Hey, at least he got to play.”

But, as I said, I felt competent enough to refuse the pity. So when I first heard, “Hodges, get in there!” during a 70–15 game, I had the backbone to say, “Screw you and your pity time too!”

To be completely honest, my backbone was of a far more soft and squishy material than all that. The conversation probably went more like:

“Hodges, get in there!”

“Um… now?”

“Yeah, and make sure you box out number twelve on the rebounds.”

“Um… I’d really rather not… if that’s okay with you.”

I seem to remember running a lot of extra laps that next practice. And still my coach tried to pity me. By about my tenth pitiful call to arms (we got slaughtered a lot that year), all that running had weakened my will to resist and I finally shuffled onto the court, tail between my legs, determined to make the best of it. Unfortunately, the blind-as-a-bat referee was looking the other way when I fouled number twelve right through the parquet floor.

That next season, in the interest of anger management, I decided it was probably best to hang up my high-tops, join the school newspaper and write scathing articles about my former coach.

I haven’t done real library research since high school. Has anybody? Of course, even in high school, a pubescent boy’s idea of research was pulling out the “B” volume from the medical texts and ogling the pictures of naked ladies with your friends. I feel lost just walking into a library now. Did you know that they don’t use card catalogues anymore? There are a lot of books in there. How does anybody get anything done?

Two factors contributed to my loss of library skills. First, my graduation from high school coincided perfectly with the great internet explosion. Second, I was a Film/Television major at a college for “Communications and the Performing Arts.” My final exam was “go make a movie.” Typical homework consisted of, “Watch Independence Day and write a critique.” Any research I ever needed was found on countless web pages from the comfort of my dorm room. Some of them were even nice enough to list book references so I didn’t need to open them. I’d make up a bibliography, turn in my “Comparison of A Weekend at Bernie’s and Hamlet” then go watch X-Files.

I suppose I’m being a bit facetious. I used real books for research too. My roommate had like seven editions of Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader, a wellspring of information about everything from the Big Bang Theory to Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture. It was the perfect source for… well, another source.

Of course, I wasn’t studying law or medicine or anything like that. I look at these gigantic, lead-heavy medical texts that my poor wife had to lug around in grad school, and think, “Better her than me.” I mean you can’t even type search phrases in!

Even though I rarely use them for any practical purposes anymore, libraries still fascinate me in the way steam trains or ghost towns fascinate others. Especially older libraries like in New York or Boston where the architecture is just a little bit mystifying, with at least a dozen stairwells, all leading to different places. All over the building you find little nooks and hallways that don’t go anywhere, and rooms that, apparently, nobody has entered for several years.

These rooms are always the places where people seem to discover original manuscripts and sketches from really famous historical people, then selling them on E-bay for a million dollars. I always imagine opening up some really old dusty book and having the second Mona Lisa fall into my lap.

That’s what I’m going to do. After I become a famous writer, I’m going to stick a bunch of short stories and humor columns inside an old book for somebody to find a hundred years later. A really boring book that nobody would ever pull off the shelf like, “The Economic and Social Effects of 16^th Century Prussian Rocking Chairs on the 17^th Century English Middle Class.” Anybody who’s forced to write a term paper about that, deserves a laugh and a million bucks.

I’m sure historians from NYU will hotly debate the stories’ authenticity. They’ll carefully examine each line, analyzing the subtle Hewlett Packard printer strokes, circa 2007. Noting the misuses of, commas, the lack of grammar, incomplete sentences. “Yes!” they will declare to the world, “We have found the lost Hodges anthology, including such inspired works as, Why Do I Get Hangnails; The Funny Thing About Spoons; and Making Friends with Boogersnot Johnson.”

One day, maybe students will avoid the library while researching me from the comfort of the internet.

It’s been awhile since our country’s last school shooting and I fear that the clock is ticking down to yet another Ritalin-saturated kid going berserk and blowing away his teacher or principal. Before that happens, I make this plea to every student in America. “Please stop blowing away your teachers or principals!” Honestly, what has society come to when a kid brings a gun to school and…

Okay, in the interest of journalistic integrity, I’m afraid I must step down from this particular soapbox. That little bout of self-righteousness was actually nothing more than thinly veiled jealousy. The fact is there were plenty of teachers at my high school who I wished somebody would shoot, but nobody ever did! It didn’t seem like such an impossible dream considering the fact that everybody in my town owned a gun. Of course, this was rural Maine and most of those guns were hunting rifles—which I suppose were harder to conceal under a varsity jacket.

Hindsight being 20/20 and all, I am glad that nobody ever busted the proverbial cap on some of our more detestable teachers. First of all, I was in a lot of those mean old codgers’ classes, and I mean, hello… ricochet. Second, it took our janitor months to clean up vomit. And third, in the midst of a generation fixated on instant gratification, I was taught a valuable lesson. In situations like these, prolonged torture was often far better revenge than instant death. Pushing a teacher to the edge of sanity by undermining their authority was more priceless than a canister full of bullets.

Subtlety was the key. Subtlety and teamwork (another good lesson). Spitballs and outbursts were fun and all, but all they gained you was detention—which only served to strengthen the teacher’s perceived dominance. No, if any subversiveness was to be accomplished, it had to be done a little at a time over the course of an entire year. And every kid in the class had to be in on it. Divided we fell. United, we said, “They can’t send us all to the principal’s office.”

In Mr. Guinness’s Life Science class, we started simply. Many of us wore those digital watches that beeped on the hour. Before class one day, we spent ten minutes synchronizing them exactly two seconds apart. At precisely ten o’clock, Mr. Guinness’s lesson was interrupted by a chain symphony of hourly reminders: beep-beep…boop-boop…tweet-tweet…chirp-chirp…honk-honk…yuk-yuk… When he turned sternly from the blackboard, we were all diligently taking notes, innocently unaware that anything unusual had occurred.

While discussing the reproductive system, we took sadistic pleasure in getting Mr. Guinness to say words like Sperm and Testes over and over again. “Uh, Mr. Bailey, what bone did you say this was…? Oh, the pubic bone!”

By the end of the year, Mr. Guinness’s hair had started to thin and turn gray. The confident air he’d projected on that first day of class was a faint shadow of the rattled fear that now emanated from deep within his tortured soul. His breaking point finally came during our study of the digestive system and a lesson on Peristalsis, which Mr. Guinness described as the process by which the intestines move food through the body using “wave motions.”

To illustrate the point, the whole class spontaneously broke into “the wave”, moving from left to right and back again. Our favorite game became to see how many times we could “peristalsize” while Mr. Guinness’s back was turned. I think the record was something like fifteen. When Mr. Guinness eventually caught us in the act, we erupted in laughter, telling him that we were just trying really really hard to study Peristalsis.

Something finally popped. He slammed his pointer on the desk so hard that everybody jumped. His head turning purple and his voice reaching an inhuman pitch, Mr. Guinness bellowed at us to “SHUUUUT UUUUUUP!!!” With pure satisfaction at his complete and total loss of control, the smug look on everyone’s face said the same thing; “You can’t send us all to the principal’s office.”

So kids, take it from me. Shooting your teachers, although tempting, is never the right decision. There is far more fun to be had, messing with their heads. So be creative. Work together. And when you get suspended, don’t you dare tell you parents this was my idea!

The next person who tells me to “Ignore the bee,” is getting punched in the mouth. “Just sit still. If you leave it alone, it’ll go away. Swatting only makes it angry. Running, shrieking and whimpering will only get you stung.” I don’t care what any of you say. When a bee comes within a reasonable distance (read: when I can see or hear it), I am going to do everything in my power to keep it as far away from me as possible. I don’t care how ridiculous I look. I’ve done the sitting still thing. Believe me, I’ve done the sitting still thing.

I was probably no more than four at the time. My parents had taken us out for ice cream. Riding home in the back, contentedly licking my bubble-gum scoop and picking out the little pieces of gum for later, my perfect enjoyment was suddenly put on hold when I noticed a bee on my arm. Whether it had been attracted by the sugary smell or it just wanted to look tough by picking on a small child, I’ll never know. I could already feel the tears of horror welling up inside as I squeaked out, “Mom, there’s a bee on me.” Mom assured me to just sit still and it would fly away. So I did. I trusted her as only a child can. I trusted her as I watched the bee crawl up my arm. I trusted her as I watched the bee crawl inside my shirt. I trusted her as I felt the bee crawl around on my chest. I trusted her right up until the instant when the bee got stuck, freaked out and then stung me.

The ice cream melted down my hand and into my lap because I was too busy crying. So no, I will not sit still.

My in-laws make fun of how I deal with bugs these days. We’ll be sitting around having a nice quiet conversation when I suddenly sense that a mosquito is biting my-WHAM! Poor little bugger never saw it coming. Neither did my in-laws who are now nursing mild heart attacks in response to the gunshot sound of flesh striking flesh.

You know that scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark when Indiana Jones realizes he has spiders all over his back, so he calmly brushes them off with his whip? Yeah, I don’t do that. The nanosecond the nerves in my back register anything smaller than a chair, my whole body contorts into a corkscrew, my hands raining down blows like shock and awe on the compromised area. WHAPWHAPWHAPWHAPWHAP… This tripwire response, while effective, does generate a lot of false alarms. I have leaned back from the kitchen table only to fight off perceived attacks from grocery bags on the counter. After receiving numerous bruises to her fingers, my wife makes sure to caress my neck with her left hand, forcing me to draw blood on her diamond.

“Why do you have to be so spastic?” she and her family ask every time I defend myself against shoelaces, cats tails and curtain cords. But I know I’m right. My instincts may prove wrong ninety percent of the time, but I’m convinced that when a black widow spider finally perches itself on my neck, I’m going to be ready for him. Before his second leg even touches down-BAM! The in-laws, who used to poke fun, will, I’m sure, deal with their poisonous spiders calmly, reaching back, saying, “Hey what’s-” but too late, they’re already dead. It’s Us versus Them and you’re either quick or you’re dead.

I’m not afraid of bugs. Really I’m not. I dutifully perform my husbandly role of killing small things in our house. And I don’t do the wussy thing with the can of Raid either. I take the crunch under my shoe or between my fingers like a man. As long as I can see them, and they’re behaving rationally or dead, I’m just fine with bugs. It’s when they want to land on a living being ten-thousand times their size that I start to get suspicious. So don’t bother me with old wives tales. Don’t tell me to sit still and ignore them. A bee betrayed my trust once before and I will not be fooled again. And if I want to run, swat and scream like a little girl, I will.

Every year, the second grade in my school did a month-long project involving pen pals. They’d get a list of names from a neighboring school and have the kids write letters back and forth—learning about letter structure, the postal service and the taste of stamps along the way. The project culminated on a day when the pen pals finally met. As a final act of pen pal unity, everybody wrote one more letter, tied the letter to a balloon and released it. The balloons floated into the afternoon sky with the excitement of new pen pals just over the horizon.

I waited two long years to do the balloon thing. I was psyched to do the balloon thing. But when the day finally arrived, my second grade teacher Miss Lockjaw told us we were not doing the balloon thing this year. Something about fish choking to death. This was right around the time those tree-huggers at the EPA started making us feel guilty about all things rubber and plastic. They told us fish were mistaking grocery bags, six-pack fasteners and pen pal balloons for bait and trying to swallow them whole. They (the EPA, not the fish) had apparently never stopped to consider the theory of Natural Selection which states that, “Any animal who selects its food before verifying that it is in fact natural, does not deserve to reproduce.”

I blame them (the EPA and the fish) for my pen pal never writing back.

I was a very committed child. When I decided I wanted to do something, I didn’t let bleeding heart greenies stand in my way. If the second grade wasn’t going to help me send a balloon to a new pen pal, I was prepared to go it alone. Unfortunately, I had no idea how the whole process was supposed to work.

The letter part was easy.

Dear Pen Pal,
How are you? I am fine. Do you like to go sledding? I do. I have a cat and a dog. Do you have dogs? They are fun. Aren’t fish stupid? Write back soon.
Love,
Brian

Perfect letter structure. Thanks Miss Lockjaw. But with nobody around to teach me the mechanics of this particular mailing method, I had to learn by trial and error. The first important rule I learned is that you must tie the letter to the balloon and release it on the day the balloon is inflated. I got sidetracked after tying my letter to a leftover birthday balloon. It’s tough getting anything done when your bedtime is seven o’clock. So the balloon just floated in my room for a few days. I woke up one morning to discover it was no longer floating, but simply… hovering. When I finally released the balloon, it immediately sank to the ground under the weight of the letter.

But I learned my lesson, and when the next opportunity (and balloon) presented itself, I tied that letter on and let it fly right away. Up and up it went, off to find me a new pen pal. I watched until it cleared the horizon, excited but perplexed. How on earth was my pen pal ever going to write back to me? The odds of their balloon finding me by sheer chance seemed astronomical. But I figured, others have done it, it must just work out somehow. Had the fish and the EPA not discouraged Miss Lockjaw from doing the balloon thing, maybe somebody could have explained to me that I actually had to put my return address on the letter! How the heck could I have known that? How could I have known that after the initial balloon was sent, everything from that point on was supposed to take place via the Post Office?

I waited and waited for my balloon to come back. But it never did. Realization didn’t dawn on me until several years later and by then it was too late. So if anybody reading this column found a letter attached to a balloon in rural Maine around 1986 that mentioned something about sledding and dogs, please contact me through this website.

And to all the fish and employees of the EPA, I hope you choke on a plastic bag.

The cooks in our elementary school didn’t take kindly to criticism. They yelled and made us spend recess inside with our heads down whenever we complained about the burnt pizza, hairs in our yogurt or rubbery meat in the spaghetti sauce. It had gotten so bad that by Christmas of fifth grade, our teacher forced me and my trouble-maker friends to write the cooks a formal apology. We drew happy pictures of ourselves eating cafeteria food under inscriptions like, “I’m sorry I said your meatloaf tasted like Play-doh… From now on I’ll just pick around the brown lettuce… My mom told me it was just a stomach flu.”

We choked down our spongy carrots and freezer-burned fishsticks without a word for a while after that, but a constant sense of impending vomit can only be kept silent for so long. By May that year, the cooks and lunch monitors had resorted to all out ignoring us, saying, “Just go!” whenever we so much as asked for a shaker of salt. We took it begrudgingly. It was spring and none of us wanted to risk any more recesses inside.

Everything came to a head the day our gang got to the cafeteria late. Our teacher had undoubtedly held us back to yell about something trivial, and by the time we got to the cafeteria, everything was gone. Not the food of course. There were always sufficient economy-sized, re-thawed, re-heated food-like products on hand to survive the aftermath of a nuclear holocaust. No, on this particular day they had run out of silverware. Not a clean knife or spork to be found.

This time we felt perfectly justified in raising our concerns, but the lunch monitor cut us off, “Just go!” The cooks turned a reflexive deaf ear to us saying, “I don’t want to hear it boys!” And when that spatula slammed down on our tray, plopping the day’s nutrition into one of five pre-portioned slots, we knew they meant business.

On any other day, I think we would have continued pushing our point, even if it meant risking yet another recess inside. But the group of us, in a rare moment of psychic harmony, all decided to let it go when we saw what was on the menu: Sloppy Joes and blueberry cobbler. The latter was a relative term of course—pie filling and Cool Whip really—but it was certainly a meal that one would not want to eat with one’s hands… unless, of course one, was a smartass eleven-year-old with an axe to grind.

Oh the fun we had that day, devouring our government sanctioned Hot Lunch (again, a relative term) with bare hands and the ravenousness of starving children. We shoved Sloppy Joes into the general vicinity of our mouths. Some hit its mark. The rest slid down our faces. We closed our fists around handfuls of blueberries, squishing half of it into our mouths and letting the rest ooze down our forearms.

Did I mention that they had run out of napkins that day as well?

The lunch monitors yelled of course. But what else could we say through smiling mouthfuls of ground beef and fruit product as we wiped our hands on the fold-out tables? “They didn’t have silverware.” And then the most amazing thing happened. Not only didn’t they make us spend recess inside with our heads down, but the lunch monitor actually ran to get us the silverware we had been asking for.

We were baffled. Somehow, we had won. We had subverted the entire cafeteria system, and the teachers and cooks had been powerless to stop us. We’d acted like bratty inconsiderate snots and gotten away with it! We should have been relishing our victory and making plans for new and exciting ways to make mischief. If only we had realized the truth.

Fortunately for all our future teachers—and okay, for us too—our parents had instilled a healthy fear of adults as unshakeable bastions of authority. Had we pushed forward, the sixth grade academic and nutritional world could have been ours to manipulate and control. Instead, afraid that retribution was just over the horizon, we eased off on the cooks, giving them time to regroup. By the time we came back to school that next year, they were ready for us. Any further attempts at rebellion were dealt with swift and harshly. We had no choice but to deal with another year’s worth of bad food… and recesses spent inside with our heads down.

I have never actually decked any of my halls with bows of holly. Though, I did once Fun-Tak® the closet door with a poster of Cindy Crawford in a Santa bikini. Fa la la la la, la la la la.

Growing up in my house, there were three decorations that provided constant strife every Christmas. The first was our blinking star. Eight inches tall and studded with lights and silvery tinsel, it sat atop our tree, flashing and pulsating in no particular time or sequence, and casting the harshest, most searing white light that even the angels must have shielded their eyes. It’s a good thing none of us were prone to seizures.

Every year, my mother spoke of retiring the star, and every year, she was vetoed. Sure, the star was annoying, and sure it had a tendency to slip off its perch… And yes, okay, it was annoying—and more than a little ironic—that this particular ornament only came with an eighteen-inch power cord. But come on, it was Christmas! Plus, our only other option was one of those phallic aluminum ball-and-spike things—which to this day I have never been able to decipher the religious or historical significance of. So the star has remained in its exalted position, unmoved even to this day.

The second object of our frustration was a small, yet very lifelike dove ornament. It became an obsession because of the year our cat attacked the dove with vicious ferocity. I suspect that history has given way to legend with this particular story. What probably happened is that the cat merely walked by the dove and sniffed it just long enough for somebody to say, “Look, he thinks it’s a real bird.” Every Christmas after that—and I do mean every Christmas—we made sure to perch that dove on the lowest branch just to see if we could fool our cats once again. And every year, the cats have ceremoniously ignored it. They have not attacked. They have not sniffed. They have not engaged in so much as a double take to indicate they give one rat’s petutie about that bird… not even when we grabbed their little heads, forced them within an inch of the dove and said, “Look at the stupid bird, you moron!”

The third decoration of our discord was our Nativity set. Every year, my sister and I fought over who got to arrange the figurines. Being the oldest and wisest, I felt entitled to the privilege. Plus I always had new and innovative ideas on how to present the blessed event. Semi-circular arrangements of the wise men; strategic hanging of Christmas lights to give the scene a sexy red glow; even an upside-down flashlight on the slatted roof to bathe Jesus in a halo of light. I knew how to showcase a freakin’ virgin birth my Judeo-Christian friends.

All my sister ever did was make it look like Mary and Joseph were kissing. So I’d hold the manger over my head out of her reach. I’d hide the sheep and shepherds so she couldn’t find them. I’d wait until she’d set everything up, then go in and change it, holding her back with my arm while she screamed at me to stop. Our bickering got so bad one year that we ended up breaking Jesus’ right arm.

Silent Night? Yeah right.

But when the smoke had cleared, and Christmas morning finally arrived, all was right with the world. The blinking light from the star never seemed too bright. The tree was never destroyed because of our pets’ hunting instincts. And Jesus was always in his place as the center of attention. And all of the bickering, the fighting and the petty annoyances of the season were pushed easily from our minds when we gathered around our tree as a family. And for one day, everything was perfect. It was Christmas.

Fall is here once again. Time for the brisk autumn air to move in and turn all the leaves a vibrant shade of orange before they fall to the ground. After which will begin yet another round of the ultimate suckers game for kids: raking leaves. Do parents even lump that chore on their kids anymore? They did in my day. But see, my parents were tricky. Actually, the adult community as a whole was pretty darn sneaky.

My dad told me that he used to love raking leaves. He and his brother would rake them into a big pile and then jump into it. Wow, that did sound like lots of fun. Jumping into a big leafy cushion and watching as the bright autumn colors poofed up around you. Just like the House of Balls at an amusement park. All over television, in commercials for banks and home insurance, heck even on Sesame Street there were similar images showcasing the joys of raking. You’d see a picture perfect back yard with a tall oak tree and a white picket fence, and two small children raking leaves into a pile. Dressed in their perfectly color-coordinated L.L. Bean jackets and scarves, they were joyously and whimsically throwing their brightly-colored leaves into the air like confetti. Innocent children, playing without a care in the world.

I bought into that big pile of crap.

Believe me, I’m all for the whole “spoonful of sugar with the medicine” thing. If you can make a chore seem like a game, fantastic. But let’s be honest here. When you’re nine years old, it takes a good five or six hours to rake a big enough pile to warrant jumping into. My sister and I spent the whole first day of our fall vacation raking a kind of big pile. It certainly seemed like it should have been bigger for as much as we were sweating in November. Exhausted, with blisters on our thumbs and cricks in our backs, we weren’t exactly in a joyous or whimsical mood. But still we drummed up the energy, got a big running start and flopped into our pile.

It was fun. For about a minute. We jumped in a few times. We even threw a couple handfuls into the air—though our dry brown leaves didn’t quite have that confetti look to them. And that’s about as much enjoyment as we were able to squeeze out of it. I mean there I was, lying in my pile-o-six-hours-of-work, already feeling the anticlimactic end to a hard day, already suspecting I’d been had. But then the insult went a step further. Ever lay in a pile of dry crumbly leaves before? Let me rephrase. Ever jumped into a pile of dry crumbly leaves so that they break into tiny pieces under your weight, then poof back into the air, getting into your eyes, nose, mouth and down the back of your shirt? Not that sneezing and itching aren’t fun and all, but you’re also sharing this particular pile with the many insects who make dry crumbly leaves their home.

The only thing you accomplish in this not-so-much-fun game is strewing your big pile of leaves all over the yard so that your parents don’t actually believe you did your chores.

Parents, your children look up to you. They trust you as only a child can. I beg you, please don’t betray that trust. Don’t tell them something that sucks is really going to be fun. Just be honest with them. Tell them it sucks, you know it sucks, but you’d rather be watching football. Let the harsh reality come from you. Don’t force them to learn it the hard way. If you want to cushion the blow or make this horrible chore seem fun, do what my parents did that following autumn: pay them two dollars an hour.

I love spring. There’s nothing quite like that first warm day in the city, when the sun liquefies all the frozen street garbage, sending that wonderfully urban fragrance into the air. As I sweat right through my shirt in the ninety-percent humidity, watching vibrant songbirds eating the remains of a thawed out squirrel, I thank God that winter is finally over. I didn’t always love spring though. For seven years of my life, spring had a seedy underbelly, because from Kindergarten through sixth grade, spring meant one thing: Marble Season.

The snow banks hadn’t even melted all the way before the kids in my elementary school started bringing sacks full (or socks full) of those alluring glass balls and engaging in their very first form of legalized gambling. The basic rules were simple. Two players, one marble each. Whoever hit their opponent’s marble with their own won both marbles. The loser drank himself under the table.

Just as in Poker, special rules, which always seemed to end in “-sies” were decided at the beginning of each game. First, you had to decide whether you were playing for Funsies or Keepsies. Numbered “-sies” (Onesies, Twosies, etc.) indicated how many shots you had per turn. In general, you were obligated to roll your marble into your opponent’s, but Picksies allowed you to pick your marble up and dead-eye your shot from above. We all generally agreed you had to make your opponent’s marble move at least an inch from the point of impact to score a win, therefore Nicksies and Ticksies didn’t count as Hitsies.

In the high-rolling hierarchy of marbles, Cats-Eyes and Aggies (not to be confused with Aggots) were the most common and least prized. Their designs were unimpressive—a few colored flecks amongst clear or white glass. Crystals and Swirls were the most sought after. Their names were self-explanatory: the former, mystically colored crystal balls, while the latter had mystical colors swirling through their middles. Also highly coveted were the solid-colored Corns, and the engine-extracted Ball Bearings. All classes increased in value when they took the form of Poppers (big marbles), or Aggots (really big marbles), but decreased in value in the form of Pee-Wees. Yes, size mattered.

All through Kindergarten, I’d only owned hordes of stupid old Cats-Eyes. I was so happy the day I came to First Grade with my very first Crystal Poppers. Two of them. When Henry Morris asked if I wanted to play them, I was wary. “Well, okay, but only for Funsies.” Turns out, I played phenomenally, beating him two games in a row! I decided to play for Keepsies, making the mistake of agreeing to a game of Fivesies. In one five-shot turn, Henry nailed my first Crystal. Determined to win it back, I played him again, and within seconds both my Crystal Poppers were now in the hands of a notorious marble hustler. I went home and cried.

I became compulsive about trying to win back some of what I had lost. But, having only Cats-Eyes I was forced to give people odds. I had to win five games in a row to score a Swirl. Three games in a row for an Aggie Aggot. As I lost more and more of my Cats-Eyes and became increasingly desperate, people started whispering about my worsening insanity. “Poor guy,” they’d says. “He’s lost his… marbles!!!”

Oh come on, you couldn’t see that one coming from like a mile away?

But as silly a game as it was, it was important to me. Even my parents could see that. And one sunny April day, my dad brought home the greatest gift a father could ever give his son: a Ball Bearing from a tractor trailer truck. It was beautiful. As big as a softball and ten times as heavy. The Ultimate Marble. The other kids started foaming at the mouth. Suddenly, they were the ones giving me odds. Ten games to one. Twenty to one. I started winning everything. Crystals, Corns, Swirls, Poppers, Aggots.

It was fun for a season. But by the following spring, my über-Marble’s reputation had spread. Everybody knew they couldn’t beat it. So they stopped trying. They forced me to start playing even odds once again. By the end of that next marble season, I lost all that I had won. I was washed up, already at the age of eight. At least I was smart enough to just hang up the marble sack for good. I began wandering the springtime playground amidst a sea of glass racketeering, seeking out even one person who just wanted to play tag.

My family recently booked a flight on US Airways. A few days later I got an email from them encouraging me to sign up for their “Dividend Miles” club. The basic gist of the email was, “Hey, if you sign up right now you can still get these miles.” But they didn’t stop there. The email continues on to say, “If you don’t sign up right now, we’re going to give your miles to Marvin!” I’m sorry, but why should that be the detail that ultimately convinces me to sign up for this program? If you’re not inspired enough to earn frequent flier miles for yourself, why should losing them to “Marvin” (swear I’m not making that name up) in any way sway your decision?

Apparently US Airways is trying to appeal to the three-year-olds in all of us. I can’t tell you how many times my daughter and niece—who are three and four respectively—have broken down crying simply because one of them wanted to play with a toy that the other one already had. “Mommy, I want the Littlest Pet Shop Bulldog!” Mind you, the crying child wanted nothing to do with that stupid bulldog thirty seconds ago, but now that her cousin has decided to play with it, it’s suddenly the only thing on earth that could ever possibly make her happy. You can try distracting her with food, movies, other toys, but no. As long as her cousin continues to possess a bulldog that should have been hers, nothing else will make her happy. The three-year-old mantra seems to be: “I don’t want this. I don’t want that. I want what YOU HAVE!“

I guess we never really grow out of that. That’s where the whole “keeping up with the Joneses” mentality comes from. Your big screen standard def TV was just fine two years ago until everybody around you started buying plasma HD. Now, god forbid they have something you don’t. US Airways understands this mentality better than we do apparently. And the thing is, I’m almost certain that scare tactic works amazingly well on their customers: “Oh no! I can’t imagine that I’ll ever fly enough to make these Dividend Miles worth the effort of signing up, but I will not let that little jerk, Marvin (who might actually find some use for them) get his grubby little hands anywhere near my miles.”

Well hey Marvin, you can have our miles. I don’t think my inner three-year-old is going to notice.