A Cause For Celebration
By Margery McCurdy Plummer

I’m not too well organized but usually manage to keep my books and papers more or less where they belong.

However, I kept noticing a newspaper that I just couldn’t seem to put away. Every time I looked at a picture of a green car, I was reminded of a cherished toy of my childhood and a game that we played in the neighborhood on hot, dusty summer days.

The game was called simply trucks and cars and wasn’t really a game. There were no rules, no winners, no losers. We just more or less crawled around the ground over imaginary roads with little gravel bits making it more realistic, driving up little hills and into protruding roots of huge oak trees on dusty, summer days. Unlike earlier plastic cars, these were made of metal. The one I liked was a seafoam green colored convertible, and my friend, Billy, traded it around and made it a permanent possession for me.

Another ground or table game we played was jacks. On my window sill is a clear plastic box containing several game jacks. I bought it, thinking that Skippy would be a ball chaser. He is not. He is a mole digger and has an interest in any type of vermin. So the box stands with its silver jacks catching the sunlight coming through the window.

The game of jacks can be played almost any time of the year but is usually played on low tables in an elementary school room when the weather is too cold or rainy to go outside to play.

I remember little about the game except that one threw the jacks and tossed the ball, catching as many jacks as possible in a certain order.

Still another ground game that is very popular in this area and often state wide is marbles. Marble players are very serious about this game and extremely competitive. There are marble tournaments held in many places. One, I think may be held in Livingston, TN.

I’ll have to confess that I was never a marble shooter. My fascination with the game lay in the beauty of the marbles, and I still have a jar of the glass spheres, some clear with ribbons of color winding through them or solid bright colors.

My thumb isn’t made for shooting marbles or exerting any control, and I don’t know much of the intricacies of the game. I remember terms like, “toy” and “aggie”, which I looked up in the dictionary and found it to be a marble made of agate.

Like trucks and cars, marbles was a trading game for me, allowing me to get the marbles I wanted.

For several years, my husband and I have planned to attend a marble tournament just for the heck of it. This year it’s very important that we may be able to. He’s recovering from the nearest brush with death one can have, and attending a marble tournament would be a cause for celebration.

Editor’s Note: We are so glad to have Mrs. Plummer’s stories back in the pages of the Connection. While she sometimes takes a self imposed hiatus from her writing, that has not been the case the past few months. At the end of June this year, Ty, Mrs. Plummer’s husband suffered a very severe heart attack. He spent several days in critical condition and all anyone could do was pray for the best outcome. Soon, Ty began to slowly improve and is now well on the road to recovery. I guess Mrs. Plummer was right when she said Ty was a fighter. We’ve missed Mrs. Plummer’s remembrances and sometimes quirky stories and we are so glad to know that life may be getting back to normal in the Plummer household. Now she can start making plans to find that marble tournament.