marble loss

“lost his marbles”
is idiomatic
for his loss of either sense
or intelligence.

here are two true stories
about childhood loss of real marbles
and one developing story
about my shrinking brain.

the first story is about my brother harold
and his marbles in a popcorn box
and the racecourse known as turf paradise
and its corrugated patio-style roof.

briefly, harold took his box of marbles
to our family outing day at the races
and somehow the box got kicked over
and the marbles rattled down

the corrugated roof
onto the heads
of some of the spectators below.
whoops!

the second story is of my business enterprise
in middle school wherein
i filled a plastic toy gumball machine
with lots of cheap marbles and five good ones.

it was like a slot machine. a kid with a penny
could try his luck hoping to get a bumblebee
but most of the time getting a cateye or clearie.
one fine day i made nineteen cents

which in 1964 could buy you three candy bars
and three bazooka joe bubble gums
and at five percent there was but one cent tax.
a fortune!

and i found a loophole
in the school rule forbidding the stashing
of marbles in your desk
by keeping them ON my desk

in the gumball machine, brazenly showcasing
my wares. sweet, shy miss morse did not
say a thing. i suspect she knew
that my business would soon go bust,

and it did, spectacularly, due to the desktop
being slanted, and young gary being careless
and clumsy: my elbow toppled the gumball
machine, and it fell to the floor and the cheap

plastic shattered, and the marbles
fled like the scarabs
in that movie about a mummy
and miss morse had the marbles brought

to her desk, where they remained
until the end of the school year when she
most graciously gave them back to me
just in time for summer.

we now come to my brain
which has been revealed to be shrinking
(comparison of my 2019 mri to last month’s)
beyond the norm for an elderly patient.

i have lost neurons. the condition is known
as “brain atrophy.” i have what the doc calls
a “neuropsychological test” coming up soon.
i hope i do better than i did

on the cognitive test they’ve already given me.
meanwhile, my way of not going gentle
is by journaling and poetry.
this is both.