Thirty Thousand Marbles
by Allen Duguay

I grew up in Timmins, Ontario, in a house with 22 bedrooms. There were ten boys and 12 girls in the family.

When I was ten years old I was the champion marble player in the town. I used to play kids my own age and older. The games were called Jack - in - the - bush, the hole, the pot, the wall, the tin can, and tick. Marbles were also called alleys or steels. The larger marbles were called plugs. Smaller, solid colour marbles were called pee wees. I won most of the time. So I had many marbles. I had a six gallon molasses can filled with marbles (or alleys).

In my room upstairs we had a hardwood floor. There was a knot in one of the boards. I took a knife and dug the knot out of the board. There was then a hole there and I started putting the alleys into the hole. Some of my brothers and sisters and I played a game of shooting the marbles into the hole. As I put more and more alleys into the hole the ceiling below the bedroom floor began to sag from the weight of all those alleys. There were thousands of marbles between the ceiling and the floor boards.

When my dad came home after being away for two weeks he noticed that the ceiling was bulging. He asked why the ceiling was bulging. "Has it been ' raining?" He said, "We've going to have to fix it." I said "O.K." "We'll have to build a scaffold." So we built a scaffold. My dad went up onto the scaffold and started tearing the ceiling down. Then he got rained on by a load of marbles. He asked me, "Whose alleys are those?" I said "Dad, they are not mine. I don't know who put them there." He repaired the ceiling.

My dad didn't say anything more about it at that time but a month or so later he found out about the hole in the floor board. He didn't say anything and went back to work in the bush.