Dust and mud and the marbles

Dave Powell had recently published a post about his adventures with c-mount marble macros. I commented on that post saying he had inspired me to shoot my marbles which were recently recovered by my elder sister in my childhood home. He proposed to post an article covering the shots. Here is my little story and the photos of the recovered marbles.

If you are a child in the late 70s, the main playground was not the computers but the streets of your neighbourhood. Although the options and the opportunities may vary country by country or society by society, I believe the situation was similar all around the world. I remember the game shops started to appear, offering joy for the kids with the now very basic then state of the art arcade game machines. Those were nice but our joy was on the streets.

There were several games that we played, soccer, the belt (or oily belt, very cruel game, one kid may hit the rest with a belt, if he can catch, a boy only game), hide and seek. Apart from these games, there were 2 games which required some other talents. One of them was played with the marbles, where you could lose yours or win others. The other one was played with the big nails, on the mud version of the later introduced snake computer game.

The weekend mornings, right after the family breakfast, were the right time for these games. The weather conditions had little effect on us, slightly modifying our itinerary of the gaming adventure. If there were enough muddy areas around, the “real snake” game was on. Otherwise, the game like 9-marble was preferred. 9-marble as the name suggested, required 9 marbles to be bid in total on the game and lined on the ground. From a certain distance, the players had to throw one marble trying to shoot the lined-up marbles on the very left or on the very right side, depending on the deal brokered at the beginning of the game. If you could nudge out one marble from the line, either the left or right remaining marbles were yours.

On one sunny day, together with a friend, we decided to go for an adventure, meeting up with some other guys that we were acquainted but not close friends. The 9-marble game was setup, and we started to play. After several rounds, we were in good position, won many marbles. The other guys started to get stressed and a bit forcing us for the new rounds again and again. We were in their territory, and we started to feel threatened, gazing the others and signalling each other. After several more rounds, we lost some, but we were still in gain, and there was no reason for the opponents to be in pain. We wanted to end the game and go back to our neighbourhood. One of the guys, surely the bigger one, tried to grab my hands while the others tried to immobilize my friend who was a strong one. He kicked the guys, pushed the one who was trying to grab my hands, and we started to run like crazy. We were laughing when we got out the hostile territory.

These were childish gestures not long lasting or causing a grudge. We played with those guys several time, grew up together from secondary to high school, went to our separate paths.

Who knows, the marbles that you see today in the below photographs might be from that lot. The photographs have been taken with Nikon DF, AF-S 105mm f/2.8 G micro, reflecting lighting with SB-900 and some small decorative light bulbs.

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